In nuclear families, especially those of men who work for big companies,
it has become common for a woman to stay at home, keep house and attend
to the small children, and she is usually entrusted with the family finances as
well. Some women take this role so seriously that they are called ‘professional housewives’, a role very often involving considerable input to the
children’s education as well as research into household products, the
nutritional value of food for the family, and so on. In many parts of
Japan housewives have set up cooperatives for buying food directly from
producers, partly to cut out the expensive middlemen and partly to
have some control over the production process. One of these groups in 1989
was awarded an international prize for creating an alternative economy
based on ‘cooperation, human contact and ecological sustainability’