Non-working wife can mean work in the sense of employed, or it can mean worked as in did unpaid work in the house.

This varied from what we'd now call "housework" to "productive" labor on farms etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-hours-dedicated-to... shows how females use to work full time in the home (and as Hans Roslings' famous talk about the impact of the washing machine shows - this was hard, physical labor).