1: Stepping Out with Take Our Daughters to Work Day

A phone call woke me up the morning after the very first Take Our Daughters to Work Day in April 1993. It was Wyatt Andrews, an old-school, serious, senior correspondent for CBS Evening News, calling from one of those phones that was embedded in the backs of airplane seats before they had tiny TVs with forty-seven channels. He was on the "power plane," the shuttle between Washington, D.C., and New York, with all the businesspeople in power suits drinking power coffee and reading their morning newspapers.

Wyatt told me he was calling because while he was walking down the aisle of that plane, he had seen Take Our Daughters to Work Day stories and photos on the front page of everyone's papers: USA Today, the New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and others. There were photos of girls in every conceivable profession, dressed in uniforms ranging from hard hats to chef's toques to surgical masks to dainty pearls. There were girls in goggles soldering circuit boards. Girls reading fetal heart monitor graphs. Girls flying flight simulators. Girls walking through the halls of Congress. Girls computing. Girls lunching. Girls meeting. Girls everywhere.

"You did it," he said over and over. "You did it! You did it!"

Weeks earlier, Wyatt had interviewed me in New York for a national story. He had asked me tough questions, like whether the need for Take Our Daughters to Work Day was an indictment of the women's movement, if it was an indication of the failure of people like Gloria Steinem and others to change the world for women. I had said no, it was absolutely not an indication o...