Young Women

The women in the pink shirts were inmates, some serving time for murder. The girls in the street clothes were middle school students, on track to join the women wearing pink. They gathered Thursday in a gym at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup to make sure that doesn't happen. Cops haven't yet slapped handcuffs on the 32 young teens in mentoring programs sponsored by the Baltimore mayor's office and identified because of their falling grades, poor attention and bad attitudes.

There is one in every neighborhood: The cool mom. Not the mom who lets the kids drink in her game room. That mom is working too hard to make the kids like her. Laura Sessions Stepp is the mom the kids think is cool, in spite of themselves. She is the mom the kids talk to. Her son, Jeff, doesn't have to be home for you to seek her out. As a matter of fact, you might be glad he isn't. You'd like to have Jeff's mom to yourself for a while; to sit in her kitchen and talk. Because she listens.

After days of mounting pressure from civil rights advocates, advertisers and the public, CBS Radio fired Don Imus from his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday. Imus' ouster came a day after his dismissal from MSNBC, which had simulcast three hours of Imus' 4 1/2 -hour show. It originated from CBS' flagship WFAN in New York and was beamed to some 70 radio stations via the network's Westwood One arm. The rapidly unfolding developments in the Imus saga were driven by increasing outrage over his April 4 reference to the Rutgers University women's basketball players as "nappy-headed hos," a term embedded with pejorative racial and sexual undertones.

BOSTON -- At least no one accused the Rutgers women of being too sensitive or too thin-skinned to take a bit of verbal roughing. At least the corporate honchos at CBS and MSNBC didn't defend their star's rap rhetoric as a rich artistic expression of the raw reality of urban street life. This time, the pampered star didn't rant against the PC Police. Don Imus apologized with something akin to authenticity. And this time there is a price being paid, in public humiliation and unemployment.

Victoria's Secret advertises seven "must-have" bras, which is already four more than I have. I own three bras. The beige one. The black one. And the one that is in the wash. For my 21-year-old daughter and her tribe, seven bras would only amount to a starter set. They have more bras in their dresser drawers -- or on their bedroom floors -- than they have dollars in their wallets. Among these young women, bras are the new shoes. Something different for every outfit. And you can't have too many.

Seven women between the ages of 95 and 106 are interviewed in "100 Years of Women" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., Lifetime), and while the gist of what they see is fairly predictable -- how far women have come this century is the dominant topic -- the specifics are fascinating.Looking and sounding quite spry, they offer first-hand insights into what life was like in a society that, for better or worse, has all but vanished.Particularly noteworthy are Rose Freedman, at 106 the only living survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that in 1911 left more than 140 sweatshop workers, mostly young women, dead; and Baltimore native Enolia McMillan, who rose from being the daughter of a former slave to becoming the first female president of the NAACP.

If you're planning a career in competitive tennis, you have to start early -- by age 8 or 9. I suspected this was the case, and had it confirmed yesterday while playing in the open qualifying round of the U.S. Tennis Association Women's Satellite Tour of Baltimore at Druid Hill Park Tennis Center.Thirty-six young women -- some as young as 14 -- entered the competition. The average age was 19 or 20.As a 41-year-old recreational player who has only been playing tennis for nine months, I wouldn't normally have considered entering.

Lena York Roth, a devout, soft-spoken activist from New York who became a key official for the Young Women's Christian Association in Baltimore during the 1960s, died Wednesday at Wilson Health Care Center in Gaithersburg. She was 93.Mrs. Roth directed the International Center of the YWCA in East Baltimore -- which provided social activities and immigration services for thousands of women -- from 1959 until her retirement in 1970. She lived the past 29 years at Asbury Methodist Village in Montgomery County.

Women have closed the gender gap in college enrollment, but another gap has widened: College women are working harder and feeling more stress while their male counterparts are having a good time.In a nationwide survey of college freshmen to be released today, women are five times as likely to be anxious as men, reporting they frequently felt "overwhelmed by all I have to do."These young women are smoking more than men. More of them say they frequently felt depressed in the last year, more are worried about paying for college and feel insecure about their physical and emotional health.

WASHINGTON -- The canny young women of National Cathedral School's Class of 1999 invited a columnist to deliver their commencement address, knowing that no matter what columnists say, they say it briefly. However, you can no more embarrass a columnist than you can a sofa, and this one recalled that 18 years earlier, in a column alerting the world to the birth of a member of the Class of 1999, Victoria, he had prophesied:"For many years young Victoria, wearing blue velvet dresses, will sit demurely reading Louisa May Alcott.

In yet another example of powerful men behaving badly with women underlings, ESPN baseball announcer Steve Phillips admitted last week to having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant at the network. Unlike the even more powerful David Letterman, who admitted having affairs with women in his employ, Mr. Phillips was fired Monday by ESPN and has been served with divorce papers by his wife. It looks as if both CBS and Mr. Letterman's wife are sticking by the late-night host for the moment.

An overweight woman who has weight-loss surgery before becoming pregnant might help break the cycle of obesity in her family, according to a new study. Researchers found that children born to women who had weight-loss surgery before pregnancy have improved heart health and a lower risk of obesity compared with siblings who were born before the mother had surgery. The study was published recently in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Previous research shows a woman's weight and tendency to develop diabetes and heart disease can influence the long-term health of her fetus, predisposing the child to metabolic problems related to obesity.

At a moment in political history when feminists have a friend in the White House (and her husband might be a friend as well), the National Organization for Women begins the task of trying to reclaim ground lost during the long, dark night of the administration of George W. Bush. At a convention last week in Indianapolis, NOW elected Maryland's Terry O'Neill - white, a lawyer, a divorced mother and 56 years old - as its new president. The chief of staff to Montgomery County Councilwoman Duchy Trachtenberg defeated Latifa Lyles, 33, an African-American from the District, on campaign pledges to return to the grass-roots organizing fundamentals of NOW. In contrast, Ms. Lyles had talked of youth and diversity and the need to work the Internet and the halls of Congress for change.

The women in the pink shirts were inmates, some serving time for murder. The girls in the street clothes were middle school students, on track to join the women wearing pink. They gathered Thursday in a gym at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup to make sure that doesn't happen. Cops haven't yet slapped handcuffs on the 32 young teens in mentoring programs sponsored by the Baltimore mayor's office and identified because of their falling grades, poor attention and bad attitudes.

Fourteen young women, elegantly dressed in full-length white gowns, high-heel shoes and long gloves, will walk into Richlin Ballroom tonight on the arms of their tuxedo-clad fathers, grandfathers or family friends. After presenting their mothers with a red rose, they will dance one waltz with their escort and another with a young man of their choosing. After more than six months of workshops on issues that included money management, communication, charm and poise, and many hours of community service projects, these high school students are presenting themselves to society in the 30th annual Debutante Ball, organized by the Black Youth in Action.

Women are still wary of negative consequences associated with taking a break from their careers to have children, raise a family or help take care of their elderly parents. I'm reminded of this attitude with the release yesterday of a new survey at the Society of Women Engineers conference in Baltimore. The survey, commissioned by manufacturer Honeywell International Inc. in partnership with the industry group, polled 512 female engineers with up to 20 years' experience in the workplace.

For the young women who dance in bars and clubs on The Block, Baltimore's adult entertainment district, life is a few days or weeks of cheap thrills, then years of drug addiction, abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, emotional torment and early death. Few newcomers realize the future that awaits them. As The Sun's Jonathan Bor reported last week in an article about the health risks faced by prostitutes, their odds of escaping it are vanishingly small. Mr. Bor's story focused on city public health workers' efforts to help dancers on The Block avoid HIV infection by giving them free condoms and clean needles.

In 1942, 20-year-old Elsie Arnold heard surprising news: The Glenn L. Martin Co. in Middle River was hiring women to help build airplanes for World War II. At the time, industrial work was largely the territory of men, but as the war continued, women across the country were increasingly filling positions left by men shipped off to fight. Seeing an opportunity to make money and help in the war effort, Arnold moved to the area from Garrett County and joined a growing number of women drilling, riveting and soldering bombers and other planes at the Martin aircraft company.

The last time I witnessed a woman becoming a mother, it wasn't anything like the frilly sentiments of Mother's Day. She lay on her back, perspiring heavily and yelling, "Oh my God, why did you do this to me? I'll never forgive you in a hundred years. I hope you hurt like this someday. Give me another epidural, you sadists. And get this thing out of me!" and looking up at me as if she were burning at the stake and I had lit the fire. And when the Infant appeared and was placed on the Madonna's chest, she said, "What in the world am I supposed to do with that?"

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Week in, week out, I hear the same refrain from former students, many of them bright, young women: They are searching for something else. Not that there is anything especially wrong with their lives, their jobs, their grad programs. It's just that things haven't turned out the way they expected. I sense the same low-grade dissatisfaction among my own kids, their friends and my friends' kids: The grass is always greener. Except when it is not. The niece of a friend once confided that she sometimes wished she'd been born into a world where everything, from spouse to career, was chosen for her. She echoes what I see: a generation of young people overwhelmed by the unintended consequences of choice overload.