Day at work perpetuates feminist ideal - Ms. Foundation 'Take Our Daughter to Work Day' lacks reality - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 7, 1993 | by Suzanne Fields

Pity the sons. On April 28, daughters went to work with Mommy or Daddy while sons marched off to school. Little girls today, like blondes of yesterday, have more fun.

The national "Take Our Daughters to Work Day," sponsored by the Ms. Foundation, is reported to have been a big success, with as many as 500,000 girls ages 9 to 15 accompanying their mothers and fathers to the workplace.

Daughters of reporters met editors and worked on computer terminals. They weren't required to meet a deadline, ask tough questions or struggle over a third rewrite.

Daughters of doctors visited labs and examining rooms. Some even got to wrap the blood pressure cuff around the arm of a bemused and willing patient. No daughter, 9 or 15, was called in the middle of the night to deliver a baby, stick a needle into a crying child's arm or talk about the progress of a disease with a terminally ill patient. None was seen on the assembly line at Ford, crawling under a house to clean out a sewer line or replacing the transmission on a 1982 Pontiac.

Most daughters heard about glamorous jobs without physical stress, high-status jobs without ruthless overt competitiveness, fulfilling jobs without pettiness.

And therein lies the rub.

Mommy the professor may encourage her daughter to understand the works of Plato, Shakespeare or Colette, but would she invite her daughter to sit in on the vicious conversations of colleagues who want to disqualify a jealous rival from tenure? If a daughter considers college teaching, she also needs to know about academic resentments, turf wars and the politically correct prejudices that come with the territory.

Imagine what a daughter would learn about work if she could watch a nervous Mommy or fainthearted Daddy ask a boss for a raise, a special assignment or a transfer? That would teach more about the value of self-esteem in the workplace than dozens of "Take Our Daughters to Work" campaigns.

Everybody's work has a downside. But in seeing the negative as well as the positive, a daughter learns about the realities of work and how things actually are, rather than a feminist fantasy of how we would like things to be.

One of the mistakes certain feminists make, it seems to me, is to mythologize work and create false expectations. Even the most stimulating, creative, challenging kind of work is draining, irritating and frustrating much of the time. It also requires great discipline, energy, intellect and sacrifice.

Most of us who work don't have a choice. The choice lies in what we decide to do, and that's a very complicated decision. Children shouldn't be teased into learning about careers by celebrating a single visit to the workplace when everything can be sanitized for a day. Big boss isn't Big Bird. (Do we not include boys because we know they instinctively recognize the well-meaning fraudulence of the exercise?)

Instead, parents should spend time with their children talking about what they actually do, and then take them to work occasionally to see business as usual.

Women who have come of age in the past two decades often have been deceived into misreading the reality of particular careers. Law, for example, was pushed as one of the more rewarding professions for women. In 1967, women made up 4.5 percent of the students entering law school; today they make up 43 percent. Women also are leaving the legal trade in growing numbers, according to several surveys reported in Working Woman magazine.

These women voice numberless complaints, including the excessive need to be combative, confrontational, competitive, cold, ruthless, nasty, mean, dull and detached. Typical is the ex-litigator, a feminist, who complains that the profession "runs too much on testosterone." (Stop the presses!)

Chelsea Clinton, whose Mom and Dad are both lawyers, understands such realities. She decided to join the boys at school rather than go to her parents' offices for a day.

"You know it's easier for me," she told her father. "You work where you live. I know what it's like."

Sometimes even school can be more fun.