By the time I got married and my kids came along, it was that generation with the first so called house husbands. My wife was a nurse, and I stayed home with the baby and did all that stuff. ((Salary Of Both)) It was a huge adventure in my life, I mean partly because it was a matter of choice. It wasn’t imposed upon me. But it was part of that new kind of social experiment where people were letting each other — even in my little provincial part of the world, were letting each other try this stuff out, and it was great, and it changed all of us. ((Maternity Leave)) And while I don’t think the world has been turned completely upside down as a result, it has enlarged lots of people’s lives and given them more opportunities to live a different way.

But we are a peculiar lot in the West. We tend to valorize people who live these very overdetermined dumb lives if it seems traditional, in appropriately exotic way. But we — their kind of a bit suspect of their our own traditions.