Defer to men? Never, ever. I am the eldest of three girls with a mother who believed a good education and a profession was a woman's best preservative from want (to misquote Jane Austen). My parents had a marriage of total equality and for most of my childhood my mother worked.
I went to an all girls school and from there to a very male technically orientated northern university - and held my own - and continued to hold my own through a career, mainly, in the engineering industry.
DH comes from a home where his mother was the main wage earner, she was a teacher. His father worked in car manufacturing, which in the 1940s and 1950s was a seasonal job, so he was used to working women, and a house where the woman's work was economically important.
