🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6267gu$gkh@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>,
leftylu@ix.netcom.com(Carol Ann Hemingway) wrote:
> 
> In <623fk9$gf1@nnrp3.farm.idt.net> "John Dyson" <jrdyson@pipeline.com>
> writes: 
>
> >Women today have LOTS of opportunities, and choices.  There's no more
> reason>for the 'women are a victim' sydrome.  This is the 90's
> now--trying to>pretend that the women of today and the women of 60
> years ago are the same>is ridiculous.
> 
>             Trying to pretend that in the few short years since after
>             WWII (when many women joined the workforce en masse) that
>             women can somehow magically catch up to male business own-
>             ership is what's ludicrous.

The idea of "catching up" is what's ludicrous.  On the one hand, women
never will "catch up" to men in business ownership, because there will
always be larger numbers of men who prefer to take the risks and put in
the energy and dedication necessary to running a business, while larger
numbers of women prefer to contribute to society in other ways.  On the
other hand, the notion that women started from zero and had lots of
"catching up" to do is just as silly.  Numbers of women have always
supported themselves in business, dating back hundreds of years to the
time when women (especially widows with children) necessarily made an
independent living in numerous ways, whether as laundresses, midwives,
seamstresses, or by trading in a huge variety of goods.  Both Elizabeth
Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett, the first women to qualify as
physicians in the U.S. and the U.K. respectively, ended up founding
their own hospitals a hundred and thirty years ago, in spite of a
social climate that was generally opposed to women going into the
professions.  Women have run businesses all through this century.
Take a look at Margaret Carlson whatshername, who runs one of the
biggest travel agencies in the world today.  Changes over the last
generation have increased the number of women running businesses.  But
they don't change the underlying pattern all that much, with its two
basic features: that there have always been successful women in business
-- but never as many as men.

         Gordon S. Little
     (Gordon.Little@bull.com)