The Pittsburgh Press (October 16, 1940)
WHAT WE’VE COME TO
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
What are you girls coming to?
Grandma’s conversational sessions with me usually ended on the question.
There was the time when Dad decided to send me to a co-educational school and when, trumping his ace so to speak, I thought it might be fun to take a course in pharmacy since the family assets included a drug store.
Then there was the day when the best beau and I packed a lunch basket for picnic in the park un-chaperoned.
Later, too, when I was safely married – much to ancestral belief – I found myself keeping books and writing copy in our tiny newspaper office. By that time Grandma was impervious to shock and had given us all up as a bad job.
In her opinion, the young were out of hand and she only prayed disaster might not strike down her own. She no longer protested – she just wondered, expecting the worst, and flinging her unanswerable questions to the heavens:
What are you girls coming to?
How surprised she would have been to see the words my eyes look at now, words printed as casual news in all the papers:
National Business Woman’s Week, October 5 to 12. National Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Inc.
And underneath the 1940 slogan:
Businesswomen in a democracy – Vote!
For that’s what we’ve come to, all those rebellious girls who once struck out against the conventions which held their elders in economic, political and mental bondage. My heart aches a little, too, when I realize that Grandmother with her twinkly eyes and her capacity for laughing at herself will never see the power and the glory of the sex which in her time she so splendidly graced.
Consciously or unconsciously, too, most of these women are aware of their great good luck in being Americans. Dimly within them grows a sense of power. And this year, the Business and Professional group has a new awareness of what such power can mean. Hence their slogan. It is inspirational for women and for democracy.