When women reach “a certain age” — and what a wonderfully vague and helpful
term that is — they fondly hope that they will have achieved wisdom and
serenity. I certainly expected this, on turning 50. But then the years roll
on and doubts and uncertainties remain. So although I already have a whole
shelf of handbooks for crones (Germaine Greer’s The Change;
Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions etc)
which tell you to enjoy becoming an angry old bat, I seized on the latest
example: The Woman’s Guide to Second Adulthood: Inventing the Rest of Our
Lives.
It sounds like another upbeat American self-help manual by an ageing feminist.
But the author Suzanne Braun Levine does not reassure us in a breezy
hey-girls tone that we can all be as sexy as Joan Collins into our dotage.
In fact, she tells me that she resisted writing this book.
Levine is a former editor of the excellent 1970s magazine Ms, where
Steinem coined the term “bibliotherapy” for books like this. And Levine
deals, as she ought, with what she calls the “big-ticket stress items”:
ill-health; divorce; workplace ageism; children in trouble; loss of a loved
one; and rejection of all kinds. She does not shy away from the hard truth
that a woman who has always been on top of things may discover that “taking
charge isn’t about control at all, it’s about coping with the unexpected”.
Her most important chapter is on confronting adversity. And she concludes
that attitude (how we interpret what happens to us) is a choice: “Not
thinking like a victim is a crucial inner resource.”
Her own mid-life crisis was losing her job at Ms in an office-politics
struggle. “I can’t tell you how deeply immersed I was in the magazine,” she
tells me. “I just didn’t look up.”
Earlier, the “trauma” of turning 40 brought a longing for a baby. She went
through hellish infertility treatments, settled for adoption and then, at
44, astonished herself by getting pregnant. So now at 62, and married for 38
years to a Manhattan lawyer, she has an adopted son of 21 and a daughter of
18. She was in her fifties when they reached adolescence and she had to cope
with their acne, her own hot flushes; their puberty, her menopause; and she
felt her libido waning just when their’s was “going bonkers”.
Now, her contemporaries are doting grannies, typecast as “the
available-any-time babysitter in orthopaedic shoes”. Mothers and
grandmothers, wives, divorcées, widows and retired singletons, all have to
ask: what will I do with the rest of my life? Most ageing women, as in Jenny
Josephs’s madly popular poem Warning, which is about an old
woman choosing to wear purple, get the impulse to act out of character.
Levine took an Outward Bound course in her fifties; she had to descend a
90ft (27m) cliff and, having achieved that, was asked to scale the cliff
again. She said no way. Saying no is the bonus of ageing, she says. “No, I
don’t want to listen to that music. No, I don’t want to spend an evening
with that bore. No, I don’t want to look like that.” She keeps a list of
“things I don’t do any more”.
“I don’t do ladylike. I don’t wear clothes that I can’t wait to get out of
when I get home.” She has lost all pretence to chic: “My feet have grown
hooves at the heels from wearing nothing but clogs.”
On the one hand, she takes a robust “you can do it, get on with it, get over
it, be outspoken, seize the moment” line. (“The example I like best,” Levine
told me, “is your Calendar Girls. I loved that story.”) On the
other, she approves of high achievers deciding that they want to leave the
rat race, to stay at home quietly and paint. “In our first adulthood we gave
work a mystical quality. In our second we still work, for our self-esteem,
but we’re less driven and ambitious. Let younger women go full-steam ahead.”
We discover new passions: music, politics, dancing, tennis. We make small but
significant decisions — “throwing out that pillowcase full of mismatched
socks once and for all” — or large ones: leaving an executive job in the
city, joining the Peace Corps and going off to build latrines in an Ivory
Coast village.
She quotes an old saying: “From 14 to 40 a woman needs good looks; from 40 to
60 she needs personality; and after 60 she needs cash.”
Life-maintenance is expensive. Levine admits that she’s fazed by finance
“because we never bothered our pretty little heads”, but that money, and the
ability to handle it, is liberating. “Without money, a room of one’s own is
only another prison.” Bag lady syndrome is our lurking fear. No matter how
much suc- cess or money we have, we imagine waking up penniless and, as
Diana Vreeland once said, “ending on the sidewalk, rattling a tin cup”.
“Every woman thinks it’s her secret,” Levine writes in her book. “And it
paralyses us. It keeps us in crappy jobs, crappy marriages. Doing stuff we
hate.” But then, just a generation ago, most women were “only a man away
from welfare”.
Then there’s the aged parents. Our mothers, who got their children off and
away by their mid-forties, live to give us decades of irritation. “What I
can’t stand,” writes Levine of her mother, “is that she still babies me. I
am 60 years old! I explode in adolescent-sounding exasperation.” And we have
to parent the errant adult children, too. It’s tough.
Levine’s prose leaps to life when she writes from heartfelt experience — for
example, about office life today, working among “people who aren’t sure
which Kennedy was which”.
But she also admits, as an ageing hippie, to falling for “energising”
therapies recommended by her “chiropractor/kinesthesiologist and a
homoeopathic healer”.
A British reader may wince to be told: “You, the reader, are on this adventure
with me. By sharing information and telling the truth, we will figure things
out together.” But I am grateful for her nuggets of wisdom (and for her
favourite car bumper sticker: “My karma ran over my dogma”) although I
regret having to wade through case histories — often larded with American
sentimentality — to find them, in this somewhat shambolically organised
book.
One woman, cited as triumphing over adversity, says: “I hired myself a writing
coach that I work with over the phone. I write a lot of stuff for kids.
Right now I’m working on a story about plaid weasels.”
Levine believes that ageing women are gaining influence: “Every politician has
an eye on us.” I don’t think that’s true here yet, but it ought to be. We
exercise our vote. Babyboomers are the first middle-aged generation of women
in history to make their own money, so at last we have some economic clout.
And women get more radical with age. Levine quotes the Earthsea
novelist Ursula le Guin: “Old women are different from everyone else. They
tell the truth.”
The Woman’s Guide to Second Adulthood, published by Bloomsbury (£12.99),
is available from Times Books First at £10.39 plus p&p. Call 0870
1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
