Let me respond to your comments in order. You are right and it stands to reason, that doubling the effective size of the workforce will result in greater prosperity. It is not only "logical" but it is supported with many studies.
However, there are also many studies that show within society, individual happiness correlates with income for lower-level income people, but not with higher income people.
If prosperity were the driver of happiness, then we would expect "national happiness" to correlate with national prosperity, but while there is some predictability of national happiness based on prosperity, the correlation suggests that other variables are influencing "happiness".
Personal freedom appears to be another variable to predict happiness. A study showed that after adjusting for income, gender, education, race, religion, politics, and family status, people who felt they enjoyed personal freedom were happier than those who did not.
Bottom line: two things appear to be true. More women working to produce goods and services and makes a society more prosperous. And there is some correlation between income and happiness at lower income levels. But other variables including a sense of personal freedom also play a role in personal happiness (explaining perhaps why many Americans reject government mandates for "the greater good").
Your second point that demolishing traditional gender roles is part of capitalism's need for growth may be a stretch. Instead, it may be that society's reduced need for women to have children had created an underutilized societal resource. Redesigning the social system including reframing gender roles may well be nothing more than society creating the framework to redirect the valuable resource that previously was devoted to raising families towards producing goods and services. Capitalism would argue one way to redirect that behavior is with "rewards" (higher family income).
The idea that men "created" capitalism is sheer nonsense. There are only two ways to distribute goods and services. Capitalism uses the marketplace; socialism uses the government.
Capitalism has the advantage of rewarding people to produce what other people want. That accomplished two additional things, it helps the economy to determine what to produce (what people want) and it encourages people to produce more, so they can consume more. No economic system is perfect and that is why most people believe regulated capitalism is better than unregulated capitalism.
Socialism is inherently flawed. One can argue that it results in a fairer mechanism to distribute goods and services among members of a society, but the inherent tools that encourage people to produce and determines what is needed. Instead, it relies on a centralized bureaucracy to create detail plans to direct unmotivated workers to produce goods and services which people may or may not want.
Your next point is largely centered on the concept that humans are "greedy" or as Adam Smith might have said it, "selfish". One of the core tenets of economics is that humans have unlimited wants, but the world has limited resources. I think that is largely true with one proviso, the most limited resource in the world is your own personal time.
No one will live forever. Early in your career, you view your time as pretty limitless and there is a tendency to "sell it" cheaply, but at my age, you view time as very limited and you are more interested consuming your own time doing things you like, than doing things people are willing to pay you for. This truth hit me, when I discovered I was born with a heart defect. Suddenly, I began saving rather than consuming, my goal was to "buy as much of my time for myself". Rather than trade it by making something to trade with someone else for their time.
I am not a fan of zero growth or de-growth, I am more a fan of humans discovering what makes them happy collectively and individually and creating a society where those two goals have the best chance of being optimized. If I were to be "clinical", I would say, the goal is to be able to deal with the lower levels of "need", so we can focus more on "self-actualization". On a secondary level, I would argue, that for most humans, we are biologically wired to find happiness in a "functional extended family" (on the other hand, in my experience a "dysfunctional extended family" leaves you looking for an "escape".
Regarding the future, it is not clear to me how our society will transition to what the new societal model will be in the future, but I do predict an "urbanized" version of the extended family.
In this model the grandparents will return to being the primary people that raise children, and they will provide the "equity" to buy the "family home". Parents will be the income generators. How much and who does what will depend on what works for that family. With grandparents to help with the child rearing and two incomes, both men and women will have more personal freedom to choose jobs they like (rather than jobs that pay the most).
I have a friend, who married a schoolteacher and changed careers and became a schoolteacher. He spent money to go back to college to earn less when he got out, because together he and his wife earned enough, and both got the whole summer off to pursue happiness including spending time with their child.
His wife's parents provided them the equity for their home and live next door and so help with their child during the school year.
I think my friend is living "in the future". With respect to "sustainability", I think the human population is beginning to collapse. If 50 years, the focus may well be how to sustain mankind.
I trust in the adaptability of mankind to work these things out. For me the less certain thing is will "the solution" work at the individual level allowing people to "be happy" or will it work at the societal level, where people operate more as "inputs" in a giant machine. Said in simple language, will government and society see its goal as helping individuals in their "pursuit of happiness" or will government "manage" us for the "greater good".
