It's hardly a large, scientific survey but reader responses to CityBeat's 1999 Women's Issue Survey echo daily conversations on "women's issues" that we hear every day and everywhere.
Whether at the office, mingling at children's play groups or trying to plan weekly schedules at the dinner table, everyone seems to want to believe they're right as society heads into the year 2000.
Some think stockpiling food and supplies will be the only way to cope with impending Y2K problems. Some believe the new millennium will bring global unity, though opinions are mixed on whether it begins in 2000 or 2001. And some think the end of the world is near.
Many women think Ohio's conservative attitudes are to blame for the fact that women still don't get equal pay for equal work. And many infer that women who work outside the home -- a trend that has been continuing since World War II -- are responsible for the downfall of the next generation.
When it comes to work, successful women are hesitant to "boldly mentor or advocate on behalf of women's issues," a survey respondent who also is a career development expert tells us.
Yet, while the majority seems to want to get ahead in a future that's more enlightened than the past, a single unified voice is not emerging.
Few think it's fair to earn 69 cents for a man's dollar, but experts interviewed for this issue say few have a clue on how to take action.
Many think children are being harmed in a society where households need or want two incomes, but few mention the need for higher standards and wages in the day-care industry.
Some who would ridicule the notion that women in 1999 still base their self-worth on their husbands' or partners' occupations also blame mothers -- who have developed strong identities based on their own accomplishments -- for "choosing to work" outside the home, where the roots of those identities have been nurtured.
One good note has emerged on the issue of women's health. It seems that after years of "feminism," grass-roots lobbying and lobbying by physicians themselves, the medical field is aware that women and men experience disease differently and is mending its ways accordingly.
But is anyone paying attention to how women have gotten anywhere on any of the issues that concern them? The united, albeit by some definitions radical or isolated, voice that opened doors for women in the past seems to be waning.
Is it being drowned out by the blaming, contradicting interpretations of fact and self-righteousness? Or are we living in a time when unity and activism no longer are needed to move women's or families' agendas forward?
An absent need is hard to imagine. Moving toward the new millennium, women clearly have not achieved full equality. And contradicting messages about where they truly fit in society threaten their progress every day.
Could it be, as one respondent put it, that "(Women) are our own worst enemies?"
