Married women today are not banned from working, as they were 100 years ago. Moreover, their husbands don't feel demeaned by it!
Back then, what a woman did at home simply didn't count as work, however what was essential was the family but to the man's job.
So what does count? Not just tasks you get paid for – voluntary workers, or gymnasts learning to tie themselves in knots in mid-air, work tirelessly.
Recently reprinted 19th-century guide for the girls who went out to India as wives of the pukka sahibs is a revelation: it reads like a management manual. Such a young woman might have to run a staff of 40 which included the grooms – all male except for one ayah – and make such decisions as whether to get butter in tins from Britain or invest in cows.
A man doing all of those tasks would have had a salary and a title – yet no one regarded such a wife as working. Would it be unduly feminist to suggest that half the time women's efforts are only seen as work when defined in the same way as work done by men?