Ladies, I remember my youngest daughter, about fourteen at the time, and a trip we took, shopping for clothes. We were both shopping in the Junior section of a department store. I had been trying on jeans,and had tried on a pair that showed my figure to best advantage, with a fitted blouse. Another shopper made the comment to me that I looked great. As I went back into the changing room, my daughter, who had seen me in my new outfit, wandered off among the racks, to shop elsewhere. A few minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder, as I was going through another rack of clothes, and turned to find my daughter standing there, holding up a pair of hot pink, polyester, elastic waist pants. She gave me this smile and said, 'Isn't this what you should be wearing, at your age?' I was thirty-seven at the time.

Of course, this was a joke, and all in fun, and even I had a good laugh at the time. But, later, when I thought about it, I wondered if maybe there wasn't some small grain of real feeling, on my daughter's part, in the little performance. A young teenage girl, coming face to face with her mom's, heaven forbid! womanliness, her sexuality!

A good deal of this age bias against we mature women, may indeed, have been felt at first, right in our own homes. A foreshadowing of what we would face, in years to come, in society at large.

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