The Evolving Reality of Women

My parents each grew up in realities unfathomable to many Americans today, lives where children held jobs instead of iPhones. Through vision, hard work and perseverence, they went on to create a very different reality for my sister and me, far from the places they grew up, but fortunately we had the distinct privilege of returning every summer to our mother's childhood home.

The pre-Antebellum house where Mom was literally born had no indoor plumbing beyond a hand pump at the kitchen sink and only rudimentary electricity that allowed maybe four lightbulbs to be attached to an exposed strand of wire that ran down the middle of the ceiling to illuminate the house at night.

After supper and reading the Bible as a family, they would turn in early, because morning tasks like feeding chickens and milking cows would beckon long before dawn.  Grandmother had to start the woodburning stove in the kitchen by 4 AM to not only boil coffee and cook breakfast but to warm the house on cold winter days.

In that environment, Mom said she always felt rich, and because they had plenty to eat due to their farm's crops supplemented by Graddaddy's other jobs as school bus driver, mailman and cow trader, they were, relatively speaking during the Depression.

That happy little girl happened to be a straight-A student, but in those days the ideal path for girls was to marry a good man straight out of high school and support his dreams rather than go to college, and that is exactly what she did.



She made our home very happy indeed.  The perfect mother and hostess for family gatherings, Mom was deeply loved by all who knew her.

Dad always loved her too, but despite his many admirable qualities, being a lifelong mate was not for him.  When he divorced Mom, she re-enterred a work force that was unfair to all women, and especially unjust to women over forty who had been housewives rather than working in the "real world."

While she became a beloved team member at two jobs, excelling to top level performance as a "rate breaker" at her day job and top sales person at her weekend job at the Broadway, she was denied promotions which she certainly had the intelligence and personality to master.

Despite this unfairness, she always found great happiness in life, and she often told me she would never have changed those days as a housewife at home with her children for anything.

Make no mistake, I find women or men who choose to devote themselves to raising their families while their spouse acts as the "bread winner" as admirable as any life path.  Actually, I was Mr. Mom myself to a great extent while my children grew up and only wish I had been better at it, like my mother always was.



Mom took great joy in seeing my wife rise through corporate hierarchies at successive companies, earning several times the annual income Mom's combined earnings at her two jobs.

Not that Julie initially dreamt of being a powerhouse in the human resources field, where she became an expert at going nose-to-nose with Harvard-educated attorneys and hard-boiled union negotiators as well as overseeing huge acquisitions and mergers.  In fact, she threatened to walk away several times, being lured back only by lucrative financial incentives.

Now our daughters have succeeded dramatically in two fields of their own choosing, scientific research and journalism.  They don't simply earn incomes that prior social constructs would have not made available to our mothers or grandmothers, they do so by mining veins of their personal interests and goals.

The future for the next generation of women seems virtually unlimited.  Maybe our granddaughter Emma will become an astronaut, lead our country's new Space Force or be elected President of the United States.  And she's not the only female for whom the sky's the limit.

More women now attend college and graduate with degrees than men.

Whereas our mothers wanted popcorn ceilings in a comfortable suburban home, now all glass ceilings seem destined to be shattered.



On our recent Tour of China, there were about as many women traveling with friends or mother-daughter combos as there were couples, but at least on this trip, no men traveled without women.

In many households including my own, it is wives who predominently decide how money is spent, not husbands, and that is particularly true with regard to travel.

Unlike Virginia Slims ads that long ago absurdly pronounced that women had arrived because there was now a cigarette exclusively for them, most travel is purchased by women.

And women want to not only see the world, but to do so in style.

The only question is, "Where next?"

"Better service leads to better trips!"