When I was 10, I wanted to be a truck driver.  At various other points of my childhood and adolescence the answer to the age-old question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” was met with a bizarre range of careers, from hairdresser to investigative journalist to the first female Red Sox player.  But never, not once, was the answer ‘housewife’.

I grew up in the 70s and the 80s.  I am a Title IX girl, beneficiary of the feminist movement of the 70s and the glass ceiling shattering 80s.  Sally Ride, Gloria Steinem, Martina Navratilova, Sandra Day O’Connor.  They were paraded before us as pioneers, proof positive that girls could do anything that boys could do.  A lot of money was poured into the education system, making sure that girls were not left behind in the maths and sciences, that young girls were…