Different days, different attitudes.
They were, and I don't think it's sensible to compare them as though they are directly comparable.
I wasn't a 'latchkey child'. My mum didn't work, as my father didn't think it was the 'done thing'. There were no nurseries or childminders, and my grandmother wouldn't have helped her, so it would have been really difficult. Also, my grandad wouldn't let my mum go to university - she had to leave school and go to secretarial college, so she wouldn't have earned a lot anyway in the days when women were paid less than men.
It meant that we grew up without a lot of money, which would have been ok if my mum hadn't resented it so much. She would have liked to have a profession, felt trapped in a life of cooking and cleaning, and was probably bored with looking after children. She was clearly unhappy, and my sister and I had pretty miserable childhoods. I would much rather have had a key to let myself in than be resented so much, and guess that if we'd had more independence as children (and if my mum had had a life outside of the house) she would have been less controlling when we were teens and young adults. We were her 'job' in her eyes, and she didn't want to give it up.
We were sent out to play for hours though, and when my brother was born and I was 7, I would often have to push him up and down the street in his pram. I took my 5 year old sister to school, too, when my brother was a baby and it was too much for my mum. It was obviously the need for 'respectability' that meant she didn't work, rather than a burning desire to be around her children.