Summer Love

BY DONNA STEWART FOR WOMENSKILLS

".. .and then they lived happily ever after," ends the fairy tale of Cinderella, the fairy godmother, and the handsome prince.

But fairy godmothers are in short supply and handsome princes have a way of turning into fathers whose incomes won't quite match the family bills; so most young mothers find themselves back in the workforce before their first child is a year old.

Unfortunately, a woman who bought the Cinderella myth probably didn't train for a life in the paid workforce, and is often stuck with an underpaid, insecure, uninteresting job. Then if the handsome prince takes off, as so many of them seem to do these days, she is left to support the family on a wage barely adequate for a single person.

Since women are about 42% of the workforce now, and since they work for the same reasons men do, it's startling to find that teenaged women are still thinking in Cinderella terms. But the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women confirmed in a 1985 report that the fairy tale was still alive in young women's minds.

The danger is that young women who expect to be taken care of are under trained for today's workforce.

That's partly why women and their children form the majority of the poor. So Women Skills decided to do something to help young women face reality.

WomenSkills is primarily known for TOOLS FOR CHANGE, a manual on women and work.

The comic book represents a new departure. It's a romantic soap opera called SUMMER LOVE, and the plot carries the message, the economic fact of life in the eighties.