Where Are the Stories of Dreams Redefined?

Early 1980s, bustling downtown Denver, young women in three-piece business suits in fern bars, sending a message that they’d crash through the doors of male-dominated corporate America.

Fine by me. The male bosses I’d had drove me nuts.

Then, something happened. The buzz died down, replaced by hair-pulling over whether women could “have it all” at work and at home. Many women either concluded they couldn’t or believed others when they told them they couldn’t. The ‘90s spawned both a famous book about the perceived backlash against professional women and, later, concern about the “glass ceiling” that kept women from executive boardrooms.

It was a pretty powerful double whammy.

Now, women are back. They never really went away, of course, but the Oct. 24 issue of Newsweek trumpets “How Women Lead” on its cover and details inside how 20 of “America’s most powerful women” got where they are.

I could live without gender or race corporate trailblazers -- that would tell me the country has fulfilled its promise of equal opportunity. We’re not there yet, but I take it as a good sign that I’m less surprised to read stories on “How Women Lead” than I would have been 20 years ago.

The Newsweek cover reminded me that the Orange County chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners recently praised its own at a luncheon. One of the honorees was Mona Lisa Faris of San Clemente, president and publisher of Professional Woman’s Magazine that debuted in 1999.

At 36, Faris is too young to have been part of the feminist guard of 20 years ago, but she started dabbling in the magazine business with her older sister while still in graduate school. All three of their magazines focus on workplace diversity.

“It’s always been a challenge,” Faris says about women making it to the top. She laments the phony rap that women are too emotional for the boardroom, or that they either won’t or can’t put in the hours necessary to run the show.

She disses that stereotype, but soon suggests that women are more intuitive than men and bring that virtue to the job. I chide her for stereotyping men, and she graciously concedes my point.

I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy. It’s just that, when it comes to the male-female conversation, many of us come with assumptions. The problem for women has been that because men ruled, their assumptions carried the day.

That will change, Faris says. She talks every week with people who hire for American companies and is convinced the current Newsweek story isn’t faddish. “Every year, every decade, women are advancing further and further,” Faris says. “One day, we will have a woman president. The wave of the future is diversity.”

True, but it’s an open question whether that will translate to women challenging men for corporate leadership.

Faris and her husband don’t have children, but she plans to continue working if and when they do. And it’s at that point that her story will intersect fully with millions of other working women of the last generation.

Because of the extra layer of decision-making that having children brings, stories of women executives will always be worth telling. In ways that men don’t have to, women must make peace with balancing work and family.

For Mona Faris, it seems doable.

But I know (intuitively) that many of those Denver women from 20 years ago eventually ran into social and personal pressures they hadn’t foreseen. Their dreams of conquering the professional world either were dashed by others or morphed into a newly defined dream to conquer motherhood instead.

So while stories of corporate lionesses still have an audience, I can’t help but wonder if equally rich and poignant memoirs aren’t there to be told by the women who once wanted to have it all but decided they couldn’t.*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.