Doubling the workforce would surely put downward pressure on wages due to supply and demand.

While there was feminism involved there, I think one should question how independent the political movement was from economic pulls at the same time. You can't for example, take large amounts of single women into factories as workers in the industrial age, without some form of practical feminist changes in how women were treated.

You see similar modern pulls today in nations like China and India. It's really difficult to separate which came first - the economic pull or feminism. I lean to the economics of factory owners wanting low cost labor being a leading phenomenon of the cycle, and that induces the question of the rights of women who now have income, and practical freedoms going to work and working, and that independence inducing a desire for wider rights.

Once industry gets access to that labor though, they'll pay the minimum amount possible, and that practical acceptable minimum lowers if there are multiple people in the household making income.

I agree, economics, politics and philosophy are all intertwined. I think now that we have a surplus of labor, automation and globalization that we’re due for another shift in all of the above. The loneliness discussed in the OP seems like a symptom of larger societal and technological change.

My theory is that we have a labor surplus because the rules of capitalism were formed when we had a shortage of capital, now that we have basically enough capital, we’re still constraint managing capital, causing underuse of human labor.