It was a strange place to find inspiration for a Mother’s Day blog: the Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington competition.

I’ve written blogs about my mother and my children’s mother, both of whom have been very important to me. I’ve written about my grandchildren’s mother, who’s important to them and to me. But this year I was at a loss.

Until I watched part of the Essentially Ellington competition.

For those who missed it, this is an annual competition of high school jazz bands playing the works of Duke Ellington. They are amazing. Any one of them is better than any of the swing bands I’ve played in, and they’re still improving.

But the thing that struck me is the women (girls, females, whatever your favorite term is) in those bands. Several of the bass players were female, including one whose bass was probably a foot taller than she was, even in heels. In one band three of the four trumpets were female. In another there was a person of the female persuasion on bari sax. One of the really swinging piano players was a girl. There were several female trombone players. They were scattered throughout all of the sections, just as if they were real jazz musicians. And they were.

At this point, you may be wondering what I’m prattling about and why. And what does any of this have to do with Mother’s Day.

First, I was in my sixties before I ever played alongside a female musician in a swing band. We usually had what was called a “girl singer,” but the horns and the rhythm section was considered male territory.

This led me to wonder how much better some of those bands might have been if we hadn’t thought (against four or five generations of available evidence) that only males could play swing and jazz. What had gender stereotypes cost us?

Probably a lot.

And it goes a lot wider than just big bands. When Linda told me she was going to work, I pronounced that no wife of mine would work outside the home. Like most of my pronouncements it was not only wrong but ignored. She went to work, still did what she was supposed to do as a mother, and became a nurse.

It wasn’t an either/or situation. It was the ability to do both well. My mother did the same thing. She worked in, as we used to say in Benson, a public job from the time I was six. She still did all of her motherly and wifely duties. Now my daughter is using the degree she worked so hard for in a job that seems to give her a good deal of satisfaction. And she’s still doing her motherly and wifely duties.

I was raised in an era when the received wisdom was that a woman’s place was in the home. It was more talk than fact even them. Farm wives were at the barn at sun up, had dinner on the table at noon, and kept the house clean. Women worked in offices and stores. They even voted.

Yet society still operated on what appears to be a male view of the female life. We were, are, and always have been sexist. Else there would be no need for feminism.

The received wisdom as that the man was the breadwinner, the woman the homemaker, and to try to be anything else was—at least—sinful.

It’s not that I don’t think motherhood is an important job. It may be, in fact, the most important job. But fatherhood is important, too, and nobody suggests that men should only be fathers, and not salespeople, lawyers, writers, doctors, etc.

Today I want to celebrate the mothers who have been important to me. My mother. My children’s mother. My grandchildren’s mother. My mother-in-law (who almost always took my side if Linda and I had an argument). And all the other mothers who try to raise their children to upstanding, decent, people, sometimes in the face of stiff societal resistance. I want to thank them for doing their motherly and wifely duties and still contributing outside the home.

And I wish them the fullest life they can have, unrestrained by what men thought that women should be.

It seems that we’ve been very wrong before.