Young Women

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.

In a first-ever analysis, 25 percent of all teenage girls in the U.S. and nearly half of African-American girls ages 14 to 19 were found to have a sexually transmitted disease. Those alarming rates suggest that admonitions to teenagers about safe sex are falling on deaf ears and that when it comes to infectious diseases, a lot more effort must be put into education, screening and prevention. Some experts familiar with high levels of sexual activity among teenagers as well as young women's greater vulnerability to STDs weren't surprised by the results.

As chairwoman of the Harford County Commission for Women, Lisa Tittle is brimming with ideas on how to improve the lives of women. Why not start a halfway house with training programs for women leaving prison, she asked. How about opening a school for young mothers, who want to return to class but cannot overcome hurdles like child care and transportation? Maybe the commission should lend its support to the Homecoming Project, an association that helps women recovering from substance abuse.

Brace yourself. I'm going to use a word that offends folks. I'm talking the F-word. Feminist. This woman sent me an e-mail Monday and it got me thinking. See, in describing herself, she assured me she was not a "women's libber" - the late 1960s equivalent of feminist. She also said she was retired from the Navy. There was, it seemed to me, a disconnect there: She doesn't believe in women's liberation, yet she is retired from a position that liberation made possible. Intrigued, I asked my 17-year-old daughter if she considers herself a feminist.

If you know a young woman who is about to graduate from college or who has just started working, you ought to buy her a copy of Skirt! Rules for the Workplace: An Irreverent Guide to Advancing Your Career, by Kelly Love Johnson. It is advice on how to work smarter, faster, tougher and better than any guy - or any other woman - and get ahead. Johnson is the managing editor of the unfortunately titled Skirt magazine (Why not call it Dame or Doll magazine?) and she uses her own up-from-the-freelance-pool story to illustrate her tips.