Terri remembers learning cooking, gardening and planting flowers from her mother. Her mother also taught her how to wallpaper and paint. These skills, and the learning associated with them, are not recognized as accomplishments. Terri's standards, attitudes and values are set according to a male activity and male expectation. Perhaps this accounts for why mother's teaching, wisdom and ability are not seen to be as important as father's.

Florance is a nurse. She speaks of technical skills as secondary to her ability to communicate with her co-workers, the physicians and the patients. When asked where she learned her communication skills, Florence attributed them to her nature. "I think we are born with the skill but you have to work to develop it" (p. 121.14).

Florance places an extremely high value on her ability to be "cheerful" at work despite her personal feelings. She feels that she makes an important contribution to the work environment that is essentially unrecognized as a skill by her employer.

There are few formal, job-related categories that recognize the nontechnical job skills. Women are often employed because they possess distinct abilities. Tara, as a police officer, noted that females bring special (additional) skills to the police department.

They bring skills of talking to women, talking to children and not being that authoritarian; figure in at least size; they don't have that fear that comes with-I know a lot of times we will be called in on sexual assault cases, on any cases involving children, on situations involving women certainly are an asset...you bring that motherly figure...and it has helped in a lot of situations. (p. 22 1.32)

She continues:

...police work is changing in the respect that we are not the punching, dragging down, fighting type police officer any more. ...twenty-five years ago people were hired for their brawn-they really were and I think now they are hired for their brain.

Just what contribution women have made to changing police work can not be documented here but the movement from "brawn to brain" as characteristic of a new style, may speak about women. Here "mother-like" qualities require brain work and are valued on the job market. Should that not equally refer to mothering skills when applied to child-rearing?

For Tara, her job involves applying all the skills of her male counterparts. She respects and obeys her superiors. She tries to learn where things are unfamiliar. We often see women struggling to obtain traditional male skills; however, we do not see men commonly struggling to accomplish what Tara calls "motherly" assets. In fact, very,. little praise can be heard for the teachers of mother's wisdom or as Marilyn Bell writes, "mother-wit".

Mother-wit is a survival-type wisdom (1986: 18). Contrasting mother-wit to the western sense of knowledge as accumulated fact, Marilyn Bell says mother-wit is "often subtle, not just likely to be, transmitted in spoken language but also in song or in deed". She warns that we are in danger of losing the past. Mothers' critical role may well be to insure that the messages of the past are transmitted in the many forms necessary to assure their survival. Mother-wit "clarifies, for those of us who are sure or who are in danger of loss, that wisdom and femaleness and human hood are irrevocably linked, and present especially in older women whose very conditions make the politics of their survival a lesson for us all" (1986: 23).

Marilyn Bell's term "mother-wit" helps us to name our mothers' lessons. Like Sandra's idea of a recipe, handed down from mother to daughter, I am sure the women questioned in this research know much more about and from their mothers than they can voice; it is knowledge that has helped them survive. When we are not aware of the truth about our mothers, a mythology takes over. We believe the myths about mothers and internalize them. This is how propaganda is born and how misunderstanding is perpetuated. I believe that the women interviewed were speaking myths and not about their mothers. I think they are losing their link to "mother-wit"; I think that women's common language is being threatened.