Standing Up for ‘Real’ Working Women : Lifestyle: Syndicated columnist Niki Scott writes about what she knows best--women who have regular jobs, not glamorous careers.

This is the image columnist Niki Scott says the glossy women’s magazines promote about working women:

“They almost all live in New York, they all earn more than $45,000 a year, they have nannies at home for their kids, and they have adoring husbands who do everything but breast-feed.”

This is the image Niki Scott has of the women she writes about: “They’re like me, people who usually have jobs, not glamorous careers, not rewarding life work. They have jobs like most people have jobs. They get a paycheck every week and they stretch it out, and they are good mothers, good wives, good sisters and good workers, and they’re just good folks.”

Actually, Niki Scott used to be a lot more like some of her readers--with her struggles as a divorced mother of two trying to meet the rent--but more and more she’s become the success her readers may dream about. Scott, 46, married for the second time, writes her Working Woman column--reaching millions of readers in 120 newspapers--from her Mount Desert Island, Maine, home, and travels around the country reaching thousands more.

The challenge for all working parents, especially working women, she says, “is that we not get complacent” about gains in the workplace “because it isn’t over. We can’t let any semblance of a backlash happen.”

The top five concerns among working parents, she says, are: pay, recognition at work, child care, time and stress.

“The working woman in particular,” she says, “is concerned with having it all, for lack of a better term. I think we’re still pretty confused about what that means. Do we want it all? Can we do it all? I don’t think anybody should underestimate the stress that’s involved when we’re trying to work at the office and waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if our children are being properly taken care of.”

In her childhood, one of privilege in New York, Scott had two working parents. Her father was a top advertising executive; her mother, Martha Dean, was the host of a radio talk show that Scott recalls as being ahead of its time. “My mother was supposed to be interviewing people about fashion and gardening, but she interviewed authors and playwrights and politicians.

“My mother was a terrific role model, and I feel in some way she was a feminist before there was the word for it.” But Scott says the guilt her mother felt “about whether or not she was doing the right thing with her children” was very much like the guilt she felt.

Scott had dropped out of Washington College to marry her sweetheart, who worked in advertising. She worked part time over the years at odd jobs, but after 10 years of marriage and two children, she became a full-time reporter with the Charlotte (N.C.) News.

While working in the “women’s section” in the early 1970s--”where they were still telling readers how to fix elegant Beef Bourguignon”--she decided she wanted to write a column about women like herself at work. After a year, she says, “I decided to follow my own advice and set my goals higher, to take a risk that scared me to death.” She was newly divorced when she set up a career as a free-lance writer. Much to her amazement, Universal Press Syndicate bought the column in 1976, signing her to a 10-year contract.

That allowed her to move to Maine--a place where she had always wanted to live and raise her children--but contrary to popular misconceptions, she insists she’s not rich, merely comfortable enough to live where she pleases.

Four months of the year, she and her second husband, Joseph Valliant Jr., the former editor of the Waterman’s Gazette, live near Easton, Md. on the Eastern Shore.

She may live on an island in Maine, but she insists she’s not isolated from the real world. The mail from readers--almost a third of whom she estimates are men--keep her in touch:

“In some ways, things are more difficult and in some ways easier than they were 14 years ago. When I started this column, women were agonizing about whether they could go to work. Now that question is resolved for most of them. They have to work. What hasn’t changed is that we’re still doing full-time jobs at work and full-time jobs at home, and at the end of the week we’re wondering why we’re so exhausted.”

But while she believes “some men are taking great strides forward in seeing the women in their lives as equal partners,” others are coming up short in sharing the role at home, which leads to resentment among many working women.

But would women go home again? “I don’t know a single working mother who wouldn’t go home for a year if she could, but I don’t think many would want to stay home longer than that,” she says, noting that surveys indicate women derive as much satisfaction from work as men do. But the reality of women at work is that one in three is working in a clerical job and nine out of 10 earn less than $25,000 a year.

The most common conflicts, she says, are generational. “Women my age have heard young women say ‘I don’t understand what the problem is. No one’s discriminating against me.’ The answer is if you don’t think there are any problems left, you aren’t looking. If there are fewer problems, the women ahead of you made the way.” Lowering her voice, she adds, “We cleared the path, darling.”