The New York Times hit the click-bait jackpot this past weekend with Wednesday Martin’s “Poor Little Rich Women,” a piece that detailed the gilded yet impotent lives of expensively educated wives who abandon careers to devote themselves to domesticity on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The story was an excerpt of a forthcoming book, Primates of Park Avenue, by Martin, a self-described “social researcher” with an undergraduate degree in anthropology and a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Its central revelation—that some spouses draw a yearly “wife bonus,” awarded for, among other things, successfully ensuring their kids' berths at the city’s best schools—had the ring of only marginal plausibility. But Martin’s larger depiction of the practices of ultra-elite marrieds landed with a satisfyingly retro thump.

Here was a look at the conjugal dynamics of the “opt-out revolution”—which has been documented and decried by Lisa Belkin, Linda Hirshman, and others—this time set in the most privileged of spheres. In the world Martin describes, marriage is the tool that protects and reproduces power and resources at the same time that it keeps them in male hands. Women who might otherwise compete with Masters of the Universe are taken out of the public sphere by marriage, and then are put to work ensuring the continued transmission of wealth and status to offspring, who, having seen the male-breadwinner, female-domestic pattern modeled for them, become more likely to repeat it themselves as adults. Yuck!

But the shocking frisson of the story was evidence of how ultimately anachronistic and remote this version of marriage has become. Horrifying (and diverting), it was a story about a tiny group of people: While a few of them surely exist all over our economically stratified country, this was a tale of one sliver of one neighborhood in one borough of one single city.

A far more resonant and familiar picture of contemporary marital and familial practice—also in the Times—looked at a new report on 50,000 adults in 25 countries. Researchers found that the daughters of working mothers are more likely to get advanced educations, earn better salaries, and climb higher professionally than daughters of stay-at-home mothers, while sons of those working mothers become more likely to participate in their own families’ lives as fathers and domestic partners. These findings should apply pretty broadly, since more than 70 percent of mothers with children at home now work outside that home; about half of all families with children are headed by dual-earning partners, and around a quarter are run by a single parent.