In a family where the roles of men and women are not sharply separated and where many household tasks are shared to a greater or lesser extent, notions of male superiority are hard to maintain.The pattern of sharing in tasks and in decisions makes for equality, and this in turn leads to further sharing.In such a home, the growing boy and girl learn to accept that equality more easily than did their parents and to prepare more fully for participation in a world characterized by co-operation, rather than by the “battle of the sexes”.

　　Man’s role is sometimes regarded as less important.It’s time to reassess the role of the man in the American family.What we need, rather, is the recognition that bringing up children involves a partnership of equals.Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and specialists on the family are becoming more aware of the part men play and that they have decided that women should not receive all the credit—nor all the blame.We have almost given up saying that a woman’s place is in the home.We are beginning, however, to analyze man’s place in the home and to insist that he does have a place in it.Nor is that place irrelevant to the healthy development of the child.

　　The family is a cooperative enterprise for which it is difficult to lay down rules, because each family needs to work out its own ways for solving its own problems.Excessive authoritarianism has unhappy consequences, whether it wears skirt or trousers, and the ideal of equal rights and equal responsibilities is pertinent not only to a healthy democracy, but also to a healthy family.According to the passage, notions of male superiority are _____.

A.not maintained by most American women

B.difficult to maintain in a home where the woman does most of the work

C.completely alien to American mothers and fathers

D.difficult to maintain in a home where household tasks are shared by the mother and father