For Some, Women’s Forum Is Mother-Daughter Affair : China: Visitors at U.N. conference want offspring to inherit a better world.

After a six-year separation from her husband, Nila Gouldin decided to hock her wedding ring so she could bring her 9-year-old daughter, Colette, to China for the world’s largest gathering of women.

“I decided this was important,” said Gouldin, 36. The marriage was history, but the ring could help her daughter’s future.

“I got to thinking about what it would mean for her in the long term,” she said with a smile. “So I hocked that sucker.”

Ring gone but money in hand, Nila and Colette joined nearly 30,000 others who have come here for the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women that began last week and for an overlapping grass-roots forum outside the city.

The gatherings constitute both a celebration of women and a fight to improve the future for the girls who will become women. A handful of mothers brought their daughters to meet others from around the world, they say, and to learn how they can work to shape their lives.

Colette brought to China a peace quilt created by her third-grade class in Minnesota, and she patiently waited three hours in cold, driving rain to present it to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was speaking at the non-governmental forum in suburban Huairou. Large crowds and rigid security made it impossible for her to enter the tiny hall where the First Lady was talking, but Colette was philosophical. “Well,” she said, wiping rain from her face, “I already met the President once.”

So far in her week in China, Colette has learned how to walk up to new people and say hi and how to bargain in Chinese. She’s also collecting pen pals. What she doesn’t realize yet is that, all around her, adults are doing their versions of the same thing: angling to meet politicians, networking and negotiating.

“I think she’s absorbing it, but these are things that will become part of her personality,” Gouldin said. “I think it will only be later that we can look back and maybe see China as a turning point.”

Although Gouldin said that one reason for traveling together to a new country was to bring them closer, she said one of the best things she has done since arriving here is leave her daughter with a friend while she attends workshops alone.

“It was good to focus on the conference, and not just on our relationship, because sometimes being mothers and daughters can get in the way of your vision,” she said with a parental eye following Colette as the girl scampered off in the rain, yelling over her shoulder that she would be back in five minutes.

“Our relationship is still new and developing. My relationship with my mother is almost set in stone.”

Gouldin had planned to bring her mother as well, but in the end the older woman had to stay home because of health problems.

“I hoped that my mother would have the opportunity to rediscover herself as a woman--not as a mother, not as a wife,” Gouldin said. “It would be my gift to her in the last years of her life, to reclaim herself.”

Karen Kelly, a “fortyish” psychologist from New Hampshire, brought her daughter--and son--to the conference, along with the latest of a series of murals they have painted for U.N. conferences in a dozen different countries. For Kelly and her daughter, though, the women’s conference is particularly special.

“It’s really neat to see her participate,” she said of daughter Shakna, 16. “She’s just at the point when she’s becoming conscious of issues.”

Shakna said she has grown up without feeling that being a girl limited her and that she has been surprised to learn about young women’s situations in other nations. “A lot of things I’ve taken for granted in the United States, as simple as sports programs for girls, don’t even exist in other countries,” she said.

Ryan, her 13-year-old brother, has had a few eye-opening experiences at the conference too. Like being mistaken for a girl. “It’s ‘cause of my long hair, and that people don’t expect men to be here,” he said, pushing a blond lock behind his ear. “I understand, but I kinda wish it would stop.”

Lani Parker, 13, cruised down a willow-lined street in her wheelchair as her mother, Heather, walked alongside. “I never thought I would come here--it’s so big and far away and important,” said the elder Parker, 34, a photographer and Labor Party organizer from Coventry, England.

Lani’s Chinese army cap, festooned with pins from different women’s groups, is evidence of a world made smaller through new friends.

“It’s been an incredible thing,” Lani said as two Chinese women stopped to shake her hand. “I’ve enjoyed meeting people from all over the world.” The only drawback, she noted, has been maneuvering up hills and through the mud of rural Huairou in the nonstop rain.

Parker and her daughter, one of whose legs is congenitally deformed, said they’ve always been close, but coming to China has given them a chance to learn more about each other.

“Lani stood up and made a speech to other girls in the youth tent, and it was very strong,” said Parker, expressing surprise that her daughter got up out of her wheelchair to make the speech. “I didn’t know she could do that.”

Lani said that, in turn, she discovered something about her mother. “I’ve learned how much she thinks about my disability,” she said. “It’s not as apparent at home, where everything is all set up.”

Thandisizwe Jackson, 4, is the non-governmental forum’s youngest registered delegate. China is still only a vague notion to her, as are most of the issues that people around her are talking about. But asked where she’s from, she showed how the trip has made a difference.

“The United States,” she said with a look that asked, Have you heard of it?

“She used to say Minneapolis,” her mother, Jewelean, said with a laugh. “Her world has gotten bigger.”

A tired Thandisizwe crawled into her mother’s arms for a hug and perhaps a quick nap. Jackson plans next to lobby governmental delegates in Beijing who are drafting a document to protect women’s rights and improve their economic status.

“I’m doing this for her,” she said, stroking her daughter’s rain-soaked braids. “It’s the children who will reap the benefits of our work.”