Education brings the luxury of choice.(The Last Laugh)

Our mothers and grandmothers had few career choices beyond those of teacher, nurse or homemaker. But we and our daughters have a virtually unlimited array of careers available, due in part to the widespread availability of public education.

The recent surge in college enrollment is due mostly to an increase in older women going back to school to improve their range of choices, which weren't available to them as younger women.

Patsy Mink, the late Congresswoman from Hawaii, was rejected for medical school in 1948 because she was female. In fact, she believed she got into law school the next year only because her name was androgynous in the Irish community of Chicago.

Mother of Title IX

Mink's exclusion sparked a fire in her that eventually led to the passage of Title IX, an amendment to the Educational Act of 1972 requiring gender equity in federally funded education programs.

One of the its goals was to guarantee women the right to choose an educational discipline, rather than being restricted by a quota system that schools used in Mink's era to limit the number of females accepted into a program. After her death, Congress renamed Title IX the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

* At first Title IX was applied mainly to professional schools such as medicine and law, to eliminate the quota systems. Today these schools have a virtually even number of female and male students.