The one thought I wish to express is how little my friend and I could accomplish alone … I never expected to know any joy in this world equal to that of going up and down, getting good editorials written, engaging halls and advertising Mrs. Stanton’s speeches. After that is through with, I don’t expect any more joy … I never could have done the work I have if I had not had that woman at my right hand.
—Susan B. Anthony, describing fellow suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton
WE KNOW THAT HAVING GIRLFRIENDS is good for our overall health and that working together is a catalyst for building strength and reducing stress for every woman in the group. But it gets even better. On a larger scale, our collaborative power can have a healing impact on society. I learned both of those lessons when I worked at Ms. magazine—an experience that changed my life while our efforts helped change the world.
Workplace friendships are unlike others in that they exist in a context where we, and others, are able to see ourselves independently from how we are at home. It is also a place where we find routine, rewards, and teamwork—qualities we didn’t necessarily find in the rest of our lives, especially during those hectic balancing-act years. Those collaborative rewards are hard to replace.
When I made the change from editing in a bustling magazine office to writing in a solitary cubicle, I found that the most difficult adjustment was the absence of the ongoing-chatter, information-sharing, problem-solving, life-changing (I quit smoking with a group of colleagues), morale-boosting atmosphere of the Ms. operation. Not to mention the pride we took in the impact of our work.
Now that we are at the point in our lives when so many women are moving the pieces of their lives around, we have to consider how we are going to enhance, replicate, or replace the collaborative experience—an important source of oxytocin, that uplifting hormone.
There isn’t always a choice about working or the work itself. But even if the circumstances stay the same, there will be changes. Many women keep working at the same pace at the same job, but the team may turn over. Others change or cut back on work, which means establishing or revising relationships in a culture where ageism may be a source of new tensions. The same is true of those reentering the job market for the first time in years. Not only does a woman joining the workforce again have to develop new skills, but she has to gird herself for the difficult task of selling herself to a prospective employer and then to new colleagues. Others retire and need to look in new directions for community and collaboration.
Still another group is looking to refocus their skills on the bigger societal picture. “Millions are looking for productive engagement that is not only meaningful but also means something beyond themselves,” writes Marc Freedman, founder of Encore.org (“second acts for the greater good”). His organization has generated a movement promoting work options for people over fifty, and celebrating the expertise and commitment to social justice that we have to offer. “People over fifty,” Freedman adds, “are our most underused civic resource.”
Thinking big is one of the healthiest and most rewarding characteristics that emerge in later life. According to psychiatrist Erik Erikson, who pioneered the study of society and the life cycle, successful aging involves “generativity”—making connections between your life and future generations—because, as he put it, “I am what survives of me.” Some find generativity in work, or volunteering, or engagement with grandchildren or other young people. But for women, whatever work we do, we feel most productive when doing it together.
When Ellyn was downsized out of her marketing job, she was at a loss. Then she read a book she found particularly helpful in her situation, and she thought how much she would like to meet the author. She decided to take the plunge and invite the author to speak at her local community center. The evening was a great success and became the first in an ongoing series. “I stopped waiting for someone to walk into my kitchen to offer me great projects. Instead I created one,” she says proudly. That impulsive venture also revealed a change in her attitude toward work: It “made a light bulb go off in my head—that I could work in projects without making a commitment for the rest of my life.” But, she adds, she couldn’t have done it alone. The joy for her was the “terrific group of bright, creative women” she has assembled. “We are so happy to have found each other. The project provided us with new friends and a new focus.”
A retired English teacher who volunteers once a week at a medical library has replaced the water-cooler bond she had with her former colleagues with a strong connection to her fellow volunteers. “Every Wednesday we work together, and we have become amazingly attached to one another. We share books and we’ve had a couple of outings, and we keep saying to each other, ‘Isn’t it amazing how we all just found each other?’ There are volunteers there every day, but the day we are there we just clicked as a group.”
It isn’t only co-workers that we miss when we leave a familiar workplace. Any woman who has had professional success becomes invested in that identity. When she pulls back, the challenge is to replace “what I do” with “who I am.” The Transition Network (TTN), a ten-year-old organization whose motto is “Embracing Change After 50,” brings women together who are making their way from their previous work lives on to “what’s next?”
Robyn Yale, a social worker in San Francisco, joined the Bay Area chapter of TTN several years ago as she prepared to retire. “I didn’t want to wake up one day with no activities,” she recalls, and she figured that the TTN members were looking for the same thing, “new activities, new ways of doing things, new attitudes.” She explored her emerging interests and needs in the discussion groups, get-togethers, outings, volunteer projects, and lectures that TTN offers. She found a circle of compatible and supportive “colleagues” and ultimately a new friend. She went to a networking meeting determined to take a risk. “I decided I would be the initiator. I picked this one person who looked interesting and approached her,” she says. The two talked for a while and decided to have lunch to learn more about each other. That was four years ago. Since then they have become fixtures in one another’s lives—and in the group effort that brought them together (which recently involved, for Robyn, participating in a panel discussion of women’s friendships).
Mentoring is one of the most effective strategies we have developed to navigate a world that isn’t always welcoming. It is also a satisfying, collaborative undertaking within a group as small as two. But from the start, the version created by women has been different from the established man-to-man formula that initiates new generations in the mysteries of climbing up the hierarchy. Women’s objective is not so much to transfer power to a protégée as it is to create a power center within the system that would pave the way for future female employees, either by sharing information and political know-how with up-and-coming young women or by violating “class” barriers to mobilize a force for change. Interestingly, these diverging approaches reflect a wider pattern. Pollster Ethel Klein found that when asked why they go into politics, men say it is to gain power and influence, while women say they do so to make change. As Margaret discovered, the best way to confront the powerful hierarchy in her accounting firm was to reach beyond her solitary rank to all the women in the organization. Needless to say, those alliances have opened up avenues of shared intimacy among the courageous pioneers.
Nowadays, the mentoring connection is not limited to work or the workplace. I have met many women who are engaged in long-running relationships they found through volunteering at social service agencies, or simply pursuing compatibility with a young relative or daughter of a friend. For those mentors, many of whom do not have children of their own, the relationship is a unique collaboration.
Betsy made a major career shift—from the corporate world to the not-for-profit world—but has not shifted her commitment to mentoring young immigrant women. It’s been twenty years, and some of her first mentees are still in her life. As she sees it, the set-up is different from other friendships right from the start; both women make a conscious commitment to build something between them. Over time, Betsy finds that she has entered the younger woman’s life—consulting on family and romantic problems—and, to her amazement, the younger woman plays a supportive role in hers. “I can vent to her more freely than with anyone else,” she says of one longtime friend. Getting to know her mentees’ families, as she does, offers a personal pleasure as well; she has, she says, “always been curious about people and places” she doesn’t know. As Betsy sees it, the real bond has nothing to do with age. It is the shared understanding that “I’m going to be me, and you are going to be you.”
Earlier in my life, I lived in a generational no-woman’s-land for a time, where a kind of mutual mentoring was lifesaving. When my daughter was born, I was forty-four, old enough to be her grandmother. When she went to school, I was old enough to be her teachers’ mother. My contemporaries had long since forgotten about coping with babies and young children—they were on to the joys of grandchildren. My most meaningful cohort, outside of work, was other women with children my children’s age. I needed the expertise and empathy—the mentoring—only they could offer. And I think they benefited from my more laid-back approach to organizing our children’s lives. (I had lived long enough to have experienced John Lennon’s words of wisdom: “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”)
As I move ahead, I look for that kind of common ground with women in their forties who are involved with the political community I found so exhilarating at Ms. and are approaching the stage of life I am chronicling. My friend Courtney and I can’t be pals; I will never be as hip as she is, and she isn’t going to be as world-weary as I am. But we can compare our lives. Our conversational pattern is mostly inquisitive. I want to know how activism works in a technological age. She wants to know what it was like back when you had to spend hours on the phone mobilizing a write-to-your-congressman action. I want her to know she can trust me. She wants me to know she is vulnerable. She even uses the term “mentoring” to describe the wisdom she is looking for. “There is the sense out there,” she explains, “that we’re so sophisticated, that we know it all; we might pretend we know it all, but in fact we are very hungry for mentoring, someone to tell me ‘OK, here’s the big picture, hang in there.’” I leave those conversations delighted to affirm that we can make each other laugh over the vagaries of family life and feminist politics in our different decades.
There is one difference, though: My generation is confronting a new form of exclusion. Historically, older women were involuntarily retired from the action at menopause and expected to compliantly erase themselves from the picture. We can’t even imagine doing that. We are most definitely in the picture, even holding the paintbrush; we are as engaged in the workplace, the community, and the world as younger women. But the pressure to get lost is still there. As Alice Barden put it when describing the genesis of Alice and Elizabeth’s One Woman Show, a play she wrote about her “thrilling and rocky” lifelong friendship, “by the time we were circling our 40s we were getting along famously, when suddenly we weren’t happy about the way society was treating us.” They were, she went on, “two single career women who had never compromised our dreams in work or relationships; we were suddenly hearing a chorus of ‘game over’ from every area of our lives.” They had no intention of retreating.
And neither do the rest of us. Our well-being is at stake. The forces of “game over” are not good for our health. It would be literally sickening to suppress all of those ambitions we nurture in each other, all of those risks we are prepared to take, all we are poised to contribute to society. Now that we are at the height of our powers—no more bullshit; no more acting a part; no more sweating the small stuff when there are so many more important things to get on with—we are ready to take on this challenge to our self-respect. And we’ll do it the way we do best: together.
When the chips are down, we are formidable. In collective outrage, we become Thelma and Louise defiantly meeting their fate; or the First Wives Club, singing “You Don’t Own Me” as they gleefully stick it to their feckless husbands. Or we become the women of 9 to 5, in which—contrary to stereotype—the Sexy One, the Smart One, and the Loyal Secretary join forces, bring their overlords to justice, and transform the workplace. Anthropologists call this kind of strength “mastery,” a gut feeling that comes with age, a sense that you know what you are doing and you can do it. When we mobilize our numbers, we are fierce and effective.
An anonymous and hilarious post surfaced on the Internet soon after the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, arguing that older women should be enlisted to fight terrorism because, among other reasons:
We’ve spent years tracking down husbands or lovers in bars, hardware stores, or sporting events … finding bin Laden in some cave will be no problem.
Between us, we’ve divorced enough husbands to know every trick there is for how they hide, launder, or cover up bank accounts and money sources. We know how to find that money and we know how to seize it … with or without government help.
“Let us go and fight,” it concluded. “The Taliban hates women. Imagine their terror as we crawl like ants with hot-flashes over their godforsaken terrain.”
The Taliban is not the only culture that “hates women.” As our recent presidential election campaign has revealed, there are forces in our country crusading to roll back the achievements and the hard-won freedoms we have won over the past forty years. To their dismay, as the gender gap in that election proved, women are continuing to change the course of history.
But legislation isn’t the only front on which we are being besieged. The more we flex our muscles, the more threatened cultural throwbacks feel; our accruing power is a challenge to the world as they know it. Their panic drives a creeping backlash effort to diminish our lives, to push us back “where we belong.” For example, we are seeing the reemergence of a defense mechanism we used to call “the D and C,” divide and conquer. This tactic emerged when, for example, groups that opposed both women’s rights and civil rights, and feared the combined power of the two social justice movements, tried to turn them against each other. By promoting the notion that only one could prevail, the anti forces hoped the groups would fight among themselves and neither would succeed.
In its current form, the D and C effort tries to undermine our collective power by persuading us to mistrust each other, the way we did back in the Good Old Days. It is no accident that as counterforces make themselves heard, we see the emergence of cultural phenomena like the Housewives series, the so-called reality shows that reinforce their subversive narrative: Watch out for your so-called friends, girls. They can’t be trusted farther than you can throw them. The housewives turn on each other like scorpions in a bottle out of fear—fear of aging, fear of losing their social success, and fear of the deviousness in each of them. They don’t build each other up; they tear their “friends” down. Those relationships don’t look very real to any woman who knows how a circle of trust works. Sex and the City, despite its Manolo Blahnik obsession, was a more recognizable reflection of the loyalty, laughter, and concern for each other’s well-being that we know we can count on from our girlfriends. To the extent that it is humanly possible, we know that they will keep us healthy and sane.
Every friend is different. Every friendship is different and evolves over time. Especially as the effects of time accumulate and our physical and emotional needs intensify. At the same time, as our physical limitations increase, we emerge from a lifetime of traditional and psychological limitations into an exciting new world of possibilities and exhilarating freedom. For better and for worse, the friends we commit to now are signing up for the long haul. In sickness and in health, we will help each other become stronger, more vital, braver than we could ever be alone. We will defend our friendships fiercely against scourges large and small, natural and cultural, because our own lives depend on it. Individually and collectively, we are defining and promoting a totally new stage of life and wellness by living it to the fullest.