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It's even more difficult for men. They get the cold shoulder at the playground and the PTA. They must deal with their own demons as they knock around an empty house. They are always suspect. Everyone wants to know what's wrong with them. Were they fired? Are they losers? If they have nannies-a few of the men we interviewed did; most did not- they are presumed to be freeloaders, members of the leisure class, even when the nanny is enabling them to sneak in some part-time work. All those annoying but familiar two-career tensions-who stays late at the office, whose turn it is to travel-are supplanted by a strange new set of conversations. Is the kitchen your domain or mine? How much TV is too much for the kids? How much mold in the fridge before it's okay to complain? "I feel like we are in uncharted waters almost every day," says one executive who wanted to speak for the record but whose husband did not. "There is a [lot of money] for a therapist in some of these relationships."

That's why even Sheila Wellington, the president of Catalyst, believes there will never be a large number of households with go-to-work wives and stay-at-home husbands. "Values have changed, and all kinds of options have opened up," she says. "Will there ever be a revolution in this area? I doubt it. Some things are hard-wired into a society." We also won't see more men at home for the same reason we see fewer women there: Many families need two incomes.