I'm taking my mother to work

This Thursday is the fourth annual Take Our Daughters to Work Day. My daughter is staying home.

It's not because of the naysayers, who criticize the idea of pulling girls out of school, or of not pulling out boys. It's because my daughter often goes with me to work, scribbles in a reporter's notebook, knows her way around the newsroom.

I'm taking my mom instead.

My friends smile when I tell them this, but I mean it in earnest. If there is a group of females left out of what we boomer women do, it is our mothers, not our daughters. And many of us wish our moms understood us a little better.

We wonder whether they know how hard we work, what stress we're under, what we've achieved.

And our mothers, whose young adult years were in the 1940s and 1950s, wonder whether we know how hard they worked, what different kinds of stress they were under, and whether we appreciate their successes at all, because they were so different from our own.

We're supposed to take our daughters to introduce them to careers and to show there are no walls to their advancement. But we should also take our mothers to show them the many careers they were denied as young women, and to talk frankly about the walls that prevented their advancement.

Make no mistake. They faced big, thick walls of discouragement and discrimination, and not so very long ago.

Certainly, there were women who established businesses and entered the professions in the 1940s and 1950s. Some will even say doors opened easily for them, and deny they ever felt discriminated against or excluded.

There are many more, however, who were steered away from college and to secretarial school, or channeled into traditionally female careers like teaching or nursing. For many women my mother's age - early 70s - the notion of a career in engineering or law or journalism would have been met with amused smiles.

Why invest that much money in a girl's education when she was going to quit as soon as she married?

At least, she'd better quit as soon as she married.

This is not to say that secretarial school or teaching or nursing were not the very best place to be. For some women, they surely were and still are.

But what of the women who dreamed of careers in banking, aviation or agriculture? What of the women who wanted their own medical practice or art studio or manufacturing company?

There were no networks for those women. No scholarships. No mentors.

Even as a high school student in the 1970s, I saw many female classmates still being steered into traditionally female careers, still being told math was ''hard'' and science was ''optional.''

Today we lament the lack of support for women in the workplace, the inflexible hours, glass ceilings, ''Mommy tracks,'' discriminatory pay differences.

In the 1940s and 1950s - except for war-time needs - women were not expected to be in the workplace at all.

So those are the things I will talk about when I take my mother to work. But there is another set of questions I plan to ask.

I will ask how she created a home so secure and stable, how she made the world a place of wonders unfolding before our eyes.

I will ask how she found the energy to be such a good friend, and how she accomplished so much - nutritious meals, pretty gardens, a comfortable environment - and yet our home never seemed hurried.

And I will ask how she taught us to love and respect people of different backgrounds before the days of diversity training and multiculturalism.

My mother succeeded in areas in which I have fallen short. She had a serenity, satisfaction and unselfishness I sometimes see lacking in women my age.

So I will take her to work not to show her what she missed and I found, but to see what we both have missed, and what we both have accomplished.

I will take her so she knows more about what I do, but also more of who I am.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

Originally published April 20, 1996.