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Overview
One day I woke up and there was a seventy-year-old woman in my bed . . .
Gloria Steinem has been an eloquent and outspoken voice for women’s rights and equality for more than four decades. In Doing Sixty & Seventy she addresses an essential concern of people everywhere—and especially of women: the issue of aging. Whereas turning fifty, in her experience, is “leaving a much-loved and familiar country,” turning sixty means “arriving at the border of a new one.” With insight, intelligence, wit, and heartfelt honesty, she explores the landscapes of this new country and celebrates what she has called “the greatest adventure of our lives.”
While appreciating everybody’s experiences as different, Steinem sees these years as charged with possibilities. Dealing with stereotypes and the “invisibility” that often accompany a woman’s senior years can be as liberating as it is frustrating. It frees women as well as men to embrace that “full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now.”
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gloria Steinem including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480472136 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 72 |
| Sales rank: | 299,769 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Doing Sixty & Seventy
By Gloria Steinem
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2006 Gloria SteinemAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7213-6
CHAPTER 1
Doing Sixty
I belong to a generation of women who have never existed. Never in history ... women who are outside of family, and whom society would like to silence ... It is a time for raising your head and looking at the view from the top of the hill, a view of the whole scene never before perceived.
Barbara Macdonald (1913–2000)
Age is supposed to create more serenity, calm and detachment from the world, right? Well, I'm finding just the reverse. The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me; the more connected I feel to nature, though I used to prefer human invention; the more poignancy I find not only in very old people, but also in children; the more likely I am to feel rage when people are rendered invisible, and also to claim my own place; the more I can risk saying "no" even if "yes" means approval; and most of all, the more able I am to use my own voice, to know what I feel and say what I think. In short, I can finally express without also having to persuade.
Some of this journey is uniquely mine and I find excitement in its solitary, edge-of-the-world sensation of entering new territory with the wind whistling past my ears. Who would have imagined, that I, once among the most externalized of people, would now think of meditation as a tool of revolution (without self-authority, how can we keep standing up to external authority)? or consider inner space more important to explore than outer space? or dismay even some feminists by saying that our barriers are also internal? or voice thoughts as contrary as: The only lasting arms control is how we raise our children?
On the other hand, I know this stage is a common one. I'm exploring the other half of the circle—something that is especially hard in this either/or culture that tries to make us into one thing for life, and treats change as if it were a rejection of the past. Nonetheless, I see more and more people going on to a future that builds on the past yet is very different from it. I see many women who spent the central years of their lives in solitary creative work or nurturing husbands and children—and some men whose work or temperament turned them inward too—who are discovering the external world of activism, politics, and tangible causes with all the same excitement that I find in understanding less tangible ones. I see many men who spent most of their lives working for external rewards, often missing their own growth as well as their children's, who are now nurturing second families and their internal lives—and a few women who are following this pattern too, because they needed to do the unexpected before they could feel less than trapped by the expected.
I'm also finding a new perspective that comes from leaving the central plateau of life, and seeing more clearly the tyrannies of social expectation I've left behind. For women especially—and for men too, if they've been limited by stereotypes—we've traveled past the point when society cares very much about what we do. Most of our social value ended at fifty or so when our youth-related powers of sexuality, childbearing, and hard work came to an end—at least, by the standards of a culture that assigns such roles—and the few powerful positions reserved for the old and wise are rarely ours anyway. Though this neglect and invisibility may shock and grieve us greatly at first, and feel like "a period of free fall," to use Germaine Greer's phrase, it also creates a new freedom to be ourselves—without explanation. As Greer concludes in The Change, her book about women and aging: "The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once and for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge."
From this new vantage point, I see that my notion of age bringing detachment was probably just one more bias designed to move older groups out of the way. It's even more self-defeating than most biases—and on a much grander scale—for sooner or later, this one will catch up with all of us. We've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the human life span if we escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project disease and dependency. This incomplete social map makes the last third of life an unknown country. It leaves men stranded after their work lives are over, but ends so much earlier for women that only a wave of noisy feminists has made us aware of its limits by going public with experiences that were once beyond its edge, from what Margaret Mead called "postmenopausal zest," to the news that raised life expectancies and lowered birth rates are making older people, especially older women, a bigger share of many nations, from Europe to Japan, than ever before in history. I hope to live to the year 2030, and see what this country will be like when one in four women is sixty-five or over—as is one in five of the whole population. Perhaps we will be become hardy perennials who "re-pot" ourselves and bloom in many times.
More and more, I'm beginning to see that life after fifty or sixty is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence—and just as adventurous. At least it would be, if it weren't also a place of poverty for many, especially women over sixty-five, and of disregard for even more. If it's to become a place of dignity and power, it will require a movement as big as any other—something pioneers have been telling us for a long time. In 1970 when Maggie Kuhn was sixty-four, she founded the Gray Panthers, and also understood that young people were more likely to be allies of the very old than were the middle-aged, who assume a right to decide for both their children and their parents. Activist and writer Barbara Macdonald used her view as a lesbian living off the patriarchal map to warn us that feminism had failed to recognize women beyond family age as a center of activism and feminist theory. Generations of what Alice Walker called "the Big Mama tradition" in the black community have provided us with role models of energized, effective, political older women. A few pioneering studies have told us to confront fears of aging and look at a new stage of life. For instance, Carnegie Corporation's Aging Society Project, predicted twenty years ago: "The increase of about thirty-five years in life expectancy in the 20th century is so large that we have almost become a different species."
We may not yet have maps for this new country, but other movements can give us a compass. Progress seems to have similar stages: first, rising up from invisibility by declaring the existence of a group with shared experiences; then taking the power to name and define the group; then a long process of "coming out" by individuals who identify with it; then inventing new words to describe previously unnamed experiences (for instance, "ageism" itself); then bringing this new view from the margins into the center by means ranging from new laws to building a political power base that's like an internal nation; and finally maintaining a movement as stronghold of hope for what a future and inclusive world could look like—as well as a collective source of self-esteem, shared knowledge, and support.
Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's age, for instance; that familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth or identity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment. Pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self. I fell for this undermining temptation in my pre-feminist thirties, after I had made myself younger to get a job and write an exposé of what was then presented as the glamorous job of Playboy bunny—and was in reality an underpaid waitressing job in a torturing costume. In the resulting confusion about my age, the man I was living with continued the fiction with all good will (he had been married to an actress who taught him that a woman was crazy to tell her real age), as did some of my sister's children, who thought she and I were two years younger. I perpetuated this difference myself for a couple of miserable years. I learned that falsifying this one fact about my life made me feel phony, ridiculous, complicit, and, worst of all, undermined by my own hand. It all had to do with motive, of course, because lying to get the job and write the expose had been the same kind of unashamed adventure I undertook as a teenager when I made myself much older to get work selling clothes after school or dancing in operettas. Falsifying oneself out of insecurity and a need to conform is very different from defeating society's age bias. It's letting the age bias defeat you.
That was why, when I turned forty, I did so publicly—with enormous relief. When a reporter kindly said I didn't look forty (a well-meaning comment but ageist when you think about it), I said the first thing that came into my head: "This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?" That one remark got so many relieved responses from women that I began to sense the depth and dimension of age oppression, and how strong the double standard of aging remains. Since then, I've learned that for many women, passing and worrying about being found out is as constantly debilitating as an aching tooth—since one has to conceal the pain, perhaps more damaging.
I've met women who broke the law by forging their passports; who limited their lives by refusing to travel so they wouldn't have to get a passport; who told the men they married or lived with that they were as much as a decade younger; who had grown children whom they deceived; or who had mothers whose ages were not known until their deaths. I've listened to women who were working without health or pension plans because they feared having no jobs at all if their real ages were known; several who concealed academic degrees because their dates would put them over a mandatory retirement age; and one amazing seventy-three-year-old who had successfully convinced her employer that she was fifty and needed to be paid as a consultant rather than on the payroll—"for tax reasons." I remember the news story of a nameless woman in Israel who convinced her doctor that she was forty-eight in order to become eligible for the implantation in her womb of a fertilized egg, and so gave birth—at sixty. Her doctor said he never would have provided this service if he had known her real age. Meanwhile, France has just passed a law against "medically assisted procreation" for post-menopausal women—on the grounds that this possibility might cause women to further delay having children, and the government is already concerned about France's falling birthrate. It makes you understand why women lie.
If all the women now pressured to lie were to tell their ages, our ideas of what fifty-five or sixty or seventy-five looks like would change overnight. Even doctors might learn a thing or two. More important, women telling the truth without fear would be a joyous "coming out." Yet, as with lesbian women and gay men who have given the culture this paradigm of honesty, only people who freely choose to "come out" can diminish the fear that others feel.
Those are only the beginning of the parallels with other social justice movements. There is also the political impotence that comes from being invisible as a constituency and denying our generational peers. We lose their power and comfort, they lose our added talents and everyone is diminished. Conversely, once we identify, we both get and give strength. After a long conference on women and aging in Boston, I asked participants what in its program had been useful. More helpful than all the information, they said, was the act of walking past a sign in the hotel lobby that clearly announced a meeting of women over fifty. "For the first time since I was thirty-five," said one woman, "I felt proud of my age. I saw all those other terrific women walking in—as if it were the most natural thing in the world." Which, of course, it was.
On the other hand, segregation by age is just as unfair as that by race, sex, or anything else. We may decide to be with age peers, but it has to be free choice. The ability to do the job, pay for the apartment, or pass the entrance exam is the point—and it's no one's business why or how. Yet feminist groups, too, judge women by age instead of individuality. Right now, they are more concerned about attracting the young than including the old—to put it mildly. I myself have written many feminist statements that touch on different constituencies in order to be inclusive, but in retrospect, I think almost every racial, ethnic, or occupational group has got more mentions than women over, say, sixty-five. Moreover, in nearly twenty-five years of press conferences about the women's movement and questions from reporters, I can't now think of one that focused on women over sixty.
The results of feeling alone, isolated, and no longer viable in society's eyes stretch from the largest and most obviously political to the deepest and most supposedly personal. As Barbara Macdonald has pointed out, major parts of our conversation at any age are about our bodies. Adolescent girls compare notes about breast development and menstrual periods, young women talk about contraception and pregnancy, and all of us run on about sexuality and general health. Yet older women are made to feel that their version of such discussions is somehow embarrassing, not worthy of younger listeners, or proof that older people talk constantly about aches and pains—though personally, I know of no evidence that an older woman who breaks her hip talks about it more than a young woman with a leg in a cast from a ski accident or a middle-aged man with a tennis elbow. Until a feminist generation began to talk about menopause and life after fifty, neither was an open topic of conversation; yet the interest must have been there. It has made a perennial best-seller of Ourselves, Growing Older, by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and also best-sellers of books by Germaine Greer, Gail Sheehy, and Betty Friedan.
It's in everyone's interest that women past fifty or sixty or even ninety continue health and body discussions. Not only do the women in question gain a community no one should be without, but they help younger women to fill in the blank screen of imagined futures.
The resistance to this movement is familiar too. Older employees are stereotyped as out of touch or less able to work, though the former is an individual question at any age and statistics on the latter show that, to the contrary, older employees are less likely to be absentee and more likely to be responsible. The usual tactic of divide and conquer is going full steam too, with younger people being told that older ones who resist retirement are taking their jobs away, just as women of every race were said to be taking away the jobs of men of color, or immigrants were said to be causing unemployment among the native born. Looking at each situation shows the facts to be quite different. With age especially, this tactic is usually employed by companies trying to fire experienced employees who earn more, and replace them with younger employees who earn less.
In recent years, I've noticed that even my accidental statement—"This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?"—is quoted without its second sentence. Instead of the plural that said we're all fine as we are—which was the point—only the singular was left, as if there were only one way to look. Small as this may be, it's a symbol of the will to divide and individualize. So is a telephone call I just got from Redbook. For an article on aging, the reporter was asking, "How do you stay young?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Doing Sixty & Seventy by Gloria Steinem. Copyright © 2006 Gloria Steinem. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Preface: Into the seventies
- Doing Sixty
- Notes
- A Biography of Gloria Steinem
- Copyright Page
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