50 Is the New Fifty: Ten Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood
224
50 Is the New Fifty: Ten Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood
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Overview
An inspiring guide to maximizing creativity and happiness in the second half of life
Suzanne Braun Levine follows her groundbreaking Inventing the Rest of Our Lives with fresh insights, research, and practical advice on the challenges and unexpected rewards for women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Rich with anecdotes, this book captures the voices of women who are confronting change, renegotiating their relationships, and discovering who they are now that they are finally grown up. Levine's own warm, wise, and humorous voice make this guide encouraging, enriching, and empowering.
50 Is the New Fifty is about survival, joy, and camaraderie, and it proves that fifty is its own wonderful stage of possibilities and promise.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780452296053 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2010 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Lesson One - Fifty Is the New Fifty
Lesson Two - Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes
Lesson Three - No Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Lesson Four - A “Circle of Trust” Is a Must
Lesson Five - Every Crisis Creates a “New Normal”
Lesson Six - Do Unto Yourself as You Have Been Doing Unto Others
Lesson Seven - Age Is Not a Disease
Lesson Eight - Your Marriage Can Make It
Lesson Nine - You Do Know What You Want to Do with the Rest of Your Life
Lesson Ten - Both Is the New Either/Or
Bibliography
Web Sites and Organizations
Index
Also by Suzanne Braun Levine
Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood
Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First
Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow
and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights
of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet,
and Shook Up Politics Along the Way, an oral history (with Mary
Thom)
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Suzanne Braun Levine, 2009
All rights reserved
Excerpt from “The New Old Woman” by Robin Morgan (from the forthcoming collection Dark
Matter: New Poems by Robin Morgan). Copyright © 2007 by Robin Morgan. .
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING In PUBLICATION DATA
Levine, Suzanne.
Fifty is the new fifty : ten life lessons for women in second adulthood / Suzanne Braun Levine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-01665-7
1. Middle age—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
HQ1059.4.L48 2009
155.6’6—dc22 2008027445
.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Bob
Acknowledgments
With tremendous gratitude to my at-home editor and husband, Bob Levine, and my truly masterful in-house editor, Wendy Wolf, I also want to thank the editors of More magazine for helping me shape my ideas about Second Adulthood. Thanks also to my agent, Janis Donnaud. I am grateful for the invaluable tech support I got from Reed Berkowitz, Karen Grenke, Rose Heredia, and my beloved son, Josh, “Mr. Fix-it.” Then there is the other and very precious kind of support: the love and encouragement of my indispensable “circle of trust.” And with this book there is a new source of information and goodwill: the 350 women who have signed up to be online “friends of Second Adulthood” and share their own experiences with me, and now with you, the readers. My mother, Esther Bernson Braun, remains an inspiration, and my dear daughter, Joanna, already embodies the energy, independence, and effectiveness that I still aspire to. Thank you all!
Lesson One
Fifty Is the New Fifty
We could not act our age if we did not know our age. . . . We live in the biochemistry of our bodies, and not in years; we live in the interaction between that biochemistry and its greatest product—the human mind—and not in a series of decades marked by periodic lurches of change.
—Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-being
Fifty is the new fifty. Sixty, I hasten to add, is also the new sixty, and seventy the new seventy. And the women who are the new fifty, sixty, and seventy wouldn’t want to be anything else. Some people think they get the reinvention process we are going through when they extrapolate down a decade or two—“I see,” they say encouragingly, “Fifty is the new thirty!” as if the reward of what is clearly a major shift in outlook is a new lease on youth. That is not it at all. I have discovered that most women in Second Adulthood are very happy being where they are—they don’t want to go back to any of their earlier stages or decades. And while we would all like to be stronger and fresher—and more admired (or at least respected) by the world we live in—few of us would like to be literally younger. “The great thing about getting older,” magical writer Madeleine L’Engle, who lived well into her nineties, said, “is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” We are at a point where our lives are finally beginning to add up.
The assumption is that youth—or at least younger—is the ideal state and that given a choice, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true. Many of us are delighting in rejecting that backward-looking mind-set and focusing on (to paraphrase the song from The King and I) “the beautiful and new things I am learning about me day by day.” The range of things to learn about ourselves is now as wide as it hasn’t been since we were adolescents. So much about our bodies, our thinking, our relationships, our approach to the world is under review—by us, for a change. And the more we revise, the more we uncover new aspects of ourselves in the process, and the more we discover that we are not who we were when we were younger.
The challenge of this stage of life is not to “get over getting older,” as some suggest, but to get to know ourselves in this new context. Who is this person who hears herself say “I don’t care what other people think anymore” and loves the sound of it? Who is giving up high heels or belts simply because they are uncomfortable? Who is questioning the nature of her relationships and the meaning of her work? Who is ready to try some new and totally out-of-character experiences on for size? Who knows that life and death is no metaphor, but forges on?
Older is almost irrelevant to these questions—except for the last one. Yet to listen to the society we live in, you would think that you have to stay young—and look young—to be happy. And we buy (literally) into that message, spending millions on age-defying cosmetics, surgery, drugs, and making a book that promises to teach us How Not to Look Old a best seller. Even Gloria Steinem, who made such a point of acknowledging her age (“This is what forty looks like!” and fifty, sixty, and now seventy), admitted that she had some trouble dealing with aging. “Though I would have decried all the actresses, athletes, and other worshipers of youth who were unable to imagine a changed future—a few of whom have even chosen death over aging”—she wrote in Revolution from Within, “I had been falling into the same trap.” An encounter with breast cancer—and her mortality—helped her confront her “denial and defiance” and begin to listen to and adapt her life to her body as it was changing. One unexpected reward for this revised worldview was that she, who had always been considered a great beauty, began to feel liberated from the “epithet of ‘the pretty one.’ ” “If that sounds odd,” she explains, “think about working as hard as you can and then discovering that whatever you accomplish is attributed to your looks.”
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments v
Lesson 1 Fifty Is the New Fifty 1
Lesson 2 Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes 22
Lesson 3 No Is Not a Four-Letter Word 42
Lesson 4 A "Circle of Trust" Is a Must 63
Lesson 5 Every Crisis Creates a "New Normal" 85
Lesson 6 Do Unto Yourself as You Have Been Doing Unto Others 104
Lesson 7 Age Is Not a Disease 125
Lesson 8 Your Marriage Can Make It 145
Lesson 9 You Do Know What You Want to Do with the Rest of Your Life 160
Lesson 10 Both Is the New Either/Or 180
Bibliography 191
Web Sites and Organizations 195
Index 207
What People are Saying About This
"No more pretended youth! Suzanne Braun Levine shows us the wisdom and joys of living in our own personal present. For women who have been pressured into living the past over and over again, Fifty is the New Fifty is the first true age liberation."
-Gloria Steinem
"Suzanne Braun Levine's honest and empowering book is the antidote to all those anti-aging creams and glum pronouncements about life after fifty. It explains why for me and for so many other women, this has turned out to be the most free, creative, and rewarding time of life."
-Isabella Rossellini
"Fifty is the New Fifty is just what I expected from Suzanne Braun Levine-useful, comforting and smart."
-Jane Fonda
"Finally, fifty comes of age! Levine's concept of Second Adulthood confirms what women have been telling one another in private-this is a wonderful stage and we can each claim it in our own way."
-Marlo Thomas
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
“A Circle of Trust is a Must for Women”
Like the “Circle of Trust” Suzanne describes in Fifty is the New Fifty, book clubs give women the opportunity to be together - to read and share stories, to find community and support and laughter (plus scrumptious food and lots of wine!). That is how we help each other invent the rest of our lives.
In her first book, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, Suzanne identified Second Adulthood as “a new stage of life that women are defining as they live it.” With Fifty is the New Fifty, she expands on earlier themes and captures the exuberance, personal breakthroughs, life changing moments, and stories of friends, family members, and countless women she has met on this journey.
Rich with expert voices, up-to-date scientific research, and Suzanne’s personal insights, this book inspires an important conversation about a life experience women describe as reinvention - and mainstream media often dismisses as “aging” (read “invisible”).
Fifty is the New Fifty: Ten Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood is a distillation of insights, anecdotes and wisdom from women like those in your reading group. Sharing personal anecdotes is the way we empower each other, so review the ten lessons and decide which ones resonate with you. Like each of our lives, every conversation about our lives is different.
ABOUT SUZANNE BRAUN LEVINE
Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor, and nationally recognized authority on women, media matters, and family issues. She received her B.A. with honors from Harvard University. She was formerly editor of Ms.magazine, editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, and is currently a contributing editor of Moremagazine. She lectures widely and lives in New York.
A CONVERSATION WITH SUZANNE BRAUN LEVINE
Q. How do you gather the life stories that you use throughout the book?
Writing books about my life and yours, gives me an excuse to butt in to people’s lives. I eavesdrop on conversations; I ask impertinent questions of women I meet; I ask very personal questions of my friends. And I use my network and the internet to find women with experiences to share. I am amazed and touched by how forthright, funny, and smart we all are.
Q. What changes have you found the way age and gender are treated in our culture? What hasn’t changed enough?
Having grown up with the Women’s Movement I am stunned as how dramatically things have changed between my first adulthood and my daughter’s. Two things haven’t changed anywhere near enough, though. One is the burden of care-giving that falls upon women of all ages without any support from the society we live in. The other is ageism. It is very hard to convince yourself that you are as happy and fulfilled as you feel when the world around you is blowing you off. We have to make sure that we don’t make things worse by buying into the youth obsession.
Q. How has your life changed since you began writing about women in Second Adulthood?
Can you imagine how exciting it is to be gaining insight into my own life from hundreds of other women, dozens of experts, and some of the smartest writers and researchers around? In figuring out what is going on for our generation of women, I have figured out a lot about the confusion, fear, and expectations that hit me as I entered this new stage of life. By writing about it I have found my own voice for the first time in my life.
Q. Are you writing another book on Second Adulthood? What will you be exploring next?
My next book is about - are your ready for this? - LOVE. The more I learn about how we are getting to know ourselves and how we are redefining women’s experience, the more I am aware of changes we are making in the way we love, whom we love, and how we define intimacy, devotion, passion, and commitment. I am encountering wonderful stories that I am sure will surprise and enlighten you.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
On the opening page of Fifty is the New Fifty, Suzanne says, “Some people think the reinvention process means, ‘Fifty is the new thirty!’ as if the reward for what is a major shift in outlook is a new lease on youth.” Not so; in fact, she continues, women fifty, sixty and seventy are happy where they are and wouldn’t want to turn the clock back.
Have the members of your book club talked about your ages with each other? Have you celebrated milestone birthdays together? What has moving on from fifty been like for each of you?
Most women find themselves liberated by the feistiness that comes with the new territory. Can you remember the first time you spoke up in a situation in which you would have kept quiet before? How did it make you feel? Discuss the way other peoples’ opinions influence our behavior.
Suzanne says that most women have grown up being encouraged to say “yes” (except, of course, to sex). But, by fifty many of us are finding the courage to say, “NO!” It is scary but very exhilarating moment to hear yourself say: “No! I don’t want to do that!” “No! I don’t like you.” Can you think of a situation(s) that made you feel empowered when you said: “No?”
Most women in Second Adulthood grew up when girls were expected to play by very restrictive rules. Can you remember occasions when you felt held back? Not taken seriously? Discouraged from trying to do something dangerous or different? How do you feel about taking on a big challenge today?
Sports, professions, language, fashion, life styles have all changed for women in the last forty years. Many of the changes have been controversial. Which have most impacted you? How are the prospects for your daughters (and sons) different from yours at their age?
For women, our bodies are the front line in the confrontation with the “age is a disease” notion. How we care for our bodies is one of our major responsibilities. But, sometimes when a showdown with our body happens, Suzanne reminds us, the best response is laughter. What are some of the body issues you have resolved? And haven’t resolved? What is the most hilarious revelation about your aging body?
How many times have you postponed something as simple as washing your hair or reading a book because family needs come up that push you off your own agenda? Have you made any adjustments to reclaim time for you? Have you begun to think about doing unto yourself as you have for others?
Work is very important to many women’s lives, and as Suzanne points out, the notion of “retirement” is put on the table just as many women are hitting their stride professionally and many others are reentering the workforce. Plus, the general economy is a major factor. What is your experience in the workplace? What are your expectations for work in the future? Would things look different if you went from being a partner to being alone--or vice versa?
As women are recalibrating all of their relationships, a long-term marriage can, for the first time in years perhaps, move to the front burner. The emotional pot is simmering. How has your marriage changed over time? Have you grown closer or further apart? Is there ongoing struggle in your marriage? If so, is it about power and decision-making? Money? Sex? Would you say that your definition of love has changed?