The Road To Equality: The Dreams of Youth

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If there is a theme among those coming of age today -- and a theme for this issue -- it is that gender differences are often better celebrated than suppressed. Young women do not want to slip unnoticed into a man's world; they want that world to change and benefit from what women bring to it. The changes are spreading. Eager to achieve their goals without sacrificing their natures, women in business are junking the boxy suits and one-of-the-boys manner that always seemed less a style than a disguise. In psychology the old view that autonomy is the hallmark of mental health is being revamped. A sense of "connectedness" to others is now being viewed as a healthy trait rather than a symptom of "dependent personality disorder." In politics women candidates are finding that issues they emphasize may carry more weight than ever with voters tired of the guns-not-butter budgets of the 1980s.

In many ways the 16 million or so women between the ages of 16 and 22 are the generation that social scientists have been waiting for. They were born between 1968 and 1974, a tiny but explosive glimpse of history in which the women's movement took hold. Studies of women's changing expectations have found that during those years the proportion of young women who planned to be housewives plunged from two-thirds to less than a quarter -- an astounding shift in attitude in the flick of an apron. Child rearing became less a preoccupation than an improvisation, housework less an obsession than a chore. Young daughters watched as their mothers learned new roles, while their fathers all too often clung to old ones. They were the first generation to see almost half of all marriages end in divorce.

Disheartened by their mothers' guilt during the '70s and their older sisters' exhaustion hauling baby and briefcase through the career traffic of the '80s, today's young women have their own ideas about redefining the feminine mystique. When asked to sketch their futures, college students say they want good careers, good marriages and two or three kids, and they don't want their children to be raised by strangers. Young people don't want to lie, as their mothers did, when a baby's illness keeps them from work: they expect the boss to understand. Mommy tracks, daddy tracks, dropping out, slowing down, starting over, going private -- all are options entertained by a generation that views its yuppie predecessors with alarm. The next generation of parents may be less likely to argue over who has to leave work early to pick up the kids and more likely to clash over who gets to take parental leave.

Wild optimism is youth's prerogative, but older women shudder slightly at the giddy expectations of today's high school and college students. At times their hope borders on hubris, with its assumption that the secrets that eluded their predecessors will be revealed to them. "In the 1950s women were family oriented," says Sheryl Hatch, 20, a broadcasting major at the American University in Washington. "In the '70s they were career oriented. In the '90s we want balance. I think I can do both."