The concluding chapter describes the equal sharers as nonconformists, resisters of gendered norms, and recounts the social criticism that their lifestyle can evoke. The chapter identifies factors across diverse cultures that enable this resistance. They include couples’ conscious adoption of egalitarian principles and insistence that they be put into practice, which often entails women’s sense of entitlement to equality, and their ongoing communication with their partners. In addition, anti-essentialist beliefs, familism, and anti-materialism underwrite their equality. Lessons from their families of origin, whose lives they either imitate or reject also encourage their resistance to gendered norms. Finally, the chapter enumerates the rewards equal sharing provides for men, women, marriage/partnership, and children.

This chapter reconstructs the philosophy of history on which the Christian Democratic ideology is predicated through a discussion of the role this ideological tradition has assigned to the critique of materialism and other related concepts such as naturalism, immanentism, gnosticism and atheism. Reference to these concepts is pervasive in Christian Democratic discourse. In the opening speech he gave as Secretary of the Italian PPI, at its first national congress in 1919, for instance, Luigi Sturzo asserted that the newly founded organization’s purpose was to “participate in the public life of the nation … in order to contrast the materialism and laicism in which contemporary society has become soaked, and of which it has already experienced the consequences in the catastrophic war that just ended” (Sturzo 1919b, 83).