1 .		I was reminded the other day of a statement from Margaret Mead's book Male and Female: "Every home is different from every other home. (76)" As I think back over my childhood, I realize how right she was. In our home, we answered not only to my mother and father, but to my grandmother and Pop-Pop as well. My best friend "Cindy," however, found our large family strange: Why are there so many people in your house--and so many bosses? she would ask. I, on the other hand, could not understand the rigid "sex roles" in her family. I could never visit her house without thinking of the children's story Dick and Jane Play Grownup. The story had always seemed so strange to me, with its clear distinctions between men's work and women's work. And again, as I think back on that time, I remember Margaret Mead's words. I once heard her tell a story about what she called the greatest threat to sex roles in the American family: taking out the garbage. Mead was talking about the fact that traditional sex roles call for males to be responsible only for outside work and females for inside work. Since garbage originates inside the home, she explained, smiling benignly, but ends up outside, whose job is it to take out the garbage? I appreciate that story now as my husband and I take turns with the garbage and I think of how different the family we have built is from either his family or mine. I find it "totally awesome" that what Mead wrote and talked about years ago remains true today.   To create paragraphs in your essay response, type <p> at the beginning of the paragraph, and </p> at the end.