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. In so many ways, growing old contradicts the stereotype of the woman hunched over. 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–)1
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, including things I once thought too small for concern; 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, who always got to me, 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, to express without also having to persuade.
Some of this journey’s content 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, for instance, 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 power is also internal? or voice thoughts as contrary to everything I read in the newspapers as: The only lasting arms control is how we raise our children?
On the other hand, I know my journey’s form 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 but 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, their internal lives, or both—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 who we are or 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 growing 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.”2
From this new vantage point, I see that my notion of age bringing detachment was probably just one more bias designed to move some groups out of the way. If so, 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. Yet 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 average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and dependency. This incomplete social map makes the last third of life an unknown country and leaves men stranded after their work lives are over, but it 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 menopause as a rite of passage into 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 perennial flowers who “re-pot” ourselves and bloom in many times.3
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 the central years of life are 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 that parallels many others—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.4 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, which predicted a decade ago of this country’s future: “The increase of about thirty-five years in life expectancy in this century is so large that we have almost become a different species.”5
We may not yet have maps of this new country, but parallels with 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; inventing new words to describe previously unnamed experiences (for instance, “ageism” itself); bringing this new view from the margins into the center by means ranging from new laws and language to building a political power base that’s like an internal nation; and maintaining a movement as an imaginative stronghold for what a future and inclusive world could look like—as well as a collective source of self-esteem, shared knowledge, and community.
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, but 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 can testify to some of this undermining temptation because I fell for it 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.6 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 and believed a woman would have to be 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 say miserable, because 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 exposé 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 painful.
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 than they really were; who had grown children whom they deceived; or who had mothers whose ages were not known until their deaths—with all the years of pretense each of those must have meant. I’ve listened to women who were working without health or pension plans because they feared they would have no jobs at all if their real ages were known; several who concealed academic degrees because their dates would have 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 wanted to be paid as a consultant rather than be on the payroll––“for tax reasons.” As I write this, newscasters are telling the 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—and 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 that phrase as a paradigm of honesty, only people who freely choose to “come out” can diminish the fear others feel.
Those are only the beginning of the parallels with other social justice movements. There is also the political impotence that comes from invisibility as a constituency, one we increase when we deny our generational peers. We lose their power and comfort, they lose the added talents we could bring, and everyone is diminished. Conversely, once we identify, we both get and give strength. After a conference on women and aging in Boston, for instance, I asked participants what in its program had been useful. More helpful than all the information, they said, had been 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 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 we decided to take that action. Yet feminist groups, too, judge older women by age instead of individuality, and 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 feminist press conferences 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 about contraception and pregnancy, and all of us 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 of the myth 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 or 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 recent best-sellers of books by Germaine Greer, Gail Sheehy, and Betty Friedan. It’s in everyone’s best interest that women past fifty or sixty or even ninety continue health and body discussions. Not only does the group in question gain the community no one should be without, but they help younger women to fill in the blank screen of imagined futures.
But 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; that jobs and skills are rarely competing. 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?”—has lost its second sentence when quoted. Instead of the plural that implied we are 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. So is a telephone call I just got from Redbook. For an article on aging, the reporter was asking, “How do you stay young?”
There is no such thing as being individually free in the face of a collective bias, just as with racism, or anti-Semitism, or prejudice against all but the able-bodied. Instead of treating my age as just another attribute, which was the goal, I found myself announcing it in any speech or public setting, whether age was relevant or not. It is one of the many ways we honor restrictions by striving to do their opposite.
In the past, I also put energy into trying to live up to society’s expectations and trying to resist them. From my teenage years into my mid-thirties, the goal was to conform (or at least to appear to). I felt an uncertainty, a lack of self-authority, that came from a big dose of the “feminine” role, textbooks from which the female half of the human race was almost totally missing, and a conviction that living a conventional life would be better than my mother’s fate of being poor, depressed, and alone with a child to rear. (Having not yet sorted out myth from reality, I didn’t realize that her fate was conventional.) After feminism arrived in my thirties to show me that women had a right to every human choice, I began conscious resistance to all that. I found such usefulness and pleasure, such relief and companionship, in taking a different path that I assumed I was becoming as radical and rebellious as I could get.
After all, not only were I and other feminists treated as crazies—which we were, in the sense of wanting something that had never been—but unlike most feminists and women in general, I had skipped the years of raising a family and had created a chosen family of friends, lovers, and colleagues instead. Furthermore, I’d begun to work full time in this longest of all revolutions, and I felt lucky to be spending my days on what I cared about most, work so infinitely interesting, worthwhile, and close to the bone of my own and other women’s hopes and survival that it rarely seemed like work at all. Because I was traveling around the country as an organizer and as part of a speaking team, I was seeing women flower and change in a miraculous way that continues on a far larger scale now, but was then a surprise every day, from the first sanity-saving realization “I am not alone” to the talent-freeing discovery “I am unique.” Whether I was with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneer of community child care, or lawyer and feminist activist Florynce Kennedy, or organizer and writer Margaret Sloan, the most important thing we did was to make a space for women to come together—in groups that might be anything from a few dozen in a church basement to a few thousand in a lecture hall—and hear experiences confirmed by each other’s lives. That our team was a black woman and a white woman together made audiences much more diverse and seemed to spread an implicit faith in crossing boundaries. In discussions that lasted longer than our speeches, women answered one another’s questions, and men in the audience heard women telling the truth.
What I remember most about those years was being flooded with the frequent feeling: If I’d done only this in my life and nothing more, it would have been enough. Each day, I thought the next couldn’t possibly be more intense and satisfying—and then it was.
After the first year or so of organizing had proved this changing consciousness was a contagion, Ms. magazine became one of the many local and national groups to be born from the energy. Though I had stoutly maintained I was entering into this group effort for only two years, and then going back to my life as a freelance writer, working on Ms. magazine, helping to start other feminist groups, and traveling as an organizer became my life.
After almost two decades of no week without traveling, speaking, fund-raising, brainstorming, deadlining, begging, arguing, and the incredible intensity of hope that any good movement is built on, I couldn’t imagine a future that could be more rebellious or satisfying or stretched further from the rules. But I was also fragmented and burned out, realizing at the margins of my consciousness that the world was fading from color to shades of gray. Though not downtrodden, I felt downpressed—by pressures I myself had chosen. Even my cast-iron constitution was beginning to give way, and I felt more sharply than ever the unfairness of the pinched resources on which women at Ms. and other parts of the movement were required to perform daily miracles, while testosterone-fueled corporations lavished millions on, say, one magazine prototype that failed, or a corporate takeover that lost jobs. Of course, there was always the joy of working with the people and possibilities I loved, but the very intensity of my feelings made me more conscious of what they deserved—and weren’t receiving. Nevertheless, as many women do, I went right on responding, explaining, responding again, reexplaining, and re-reexplaining as required, even if I was sometimes doing it on automatic pilot.
At about the same time—perhaps because I was so drained, something in my unconscious knew I needed to look at this—I began thinking about the need to link self-esteem to revolution. In almost two decades of traveling, plus the years of reading letters to Ms. of such intensity and diversity that the Schlesinger Library has since cataloged them as a populist record of the movement,7 I’d come to know the stories of brave and talented women of all classes, ages, races, sexualities, and abilities, too many of whom assumed they were somehow “not good enough,” even though they were performing miraculous feats under hard circumstances. I’d read and heard too many valuable sentences prefaced with phrases like: “It’s probably only me, but … ,” suitable words, I sometimes thought, for almost any woman’s epitaph. Sure enough, when I finally had a little quiet in which to think and write (thanks to the fact that two Australian feminists had come along with investment money to keep Ms. going when our shoestring had worn to a thread), I discovered I’d been responding to outside emergencies for so long that I’d lost what little I had of the muscle that allows us to act instead of react.
Though I’d been countering my childhood and “feminine” conditioning with an activism that was half the battle—it still was only half. I didn’t regret one second of the years spent chipping away at a sexual caste system that oppresses women’s spirits and distorts men’s too, but I’d been submerging myself, not in the traditional needs of husband and children, true, but in the needs of others nonetheless. Having been bred by class and gender to know what other people wanted and needed better than I knew my own wants and needs, I had turned all my antennae outward. Focusing on women as a group had been a giant leap forward, for their needs were mine too. But no one could know my unique talents and demons unless I took them seriously enough to express.
It wasn’t a question of getting back into a balance between the internal and the external, the self and others. As a well-socialized woman, I’d never been in balance. I wouldn’t have known balance if I’d tripped over it. Even thinking about it was a new event.
For three years, Revolution from Within,8 the book that resulted from this exploring that began a few years after I turned fifty, was a living, breathing presence in my life. It helped me to know with certainty that our inner selves are no more important than an outer reality—but no less important either. Could I have learned this earlier? I don’t know. Certainly, I would have been a more effective activist if I had. I would have been better able to stand up to conflict and criticism, to focus on what I could uniquely do instead of trying to do everything, and to waste less time confusing motion with action. But perhaps I couldn’t explore internally until I stopped living in an external pressure cooker. Or perhaps I had to exhaust myself on half the circle before I could appreciate the other half. In a larger sense, it doesn’t matter. The art of life isn’t controlling what happens, which is impossible; it’s using what happens.
Gradually, I discovered I was researching and writing what I needed to learn. What I started out to address in other women, I myself shared: the need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It’s women’s version of the Golden Rule.
In fact, I have yet to meet a woman who has completely kicked the habit of leading a derived life. Even if we’ve refused to be hyper-responsible for the welfare of a family, we often feel too responsible for what goes on at work. Even if we’re no longer trying to surgically transplant our egos into the body of a husband or children, we still may be overly dependent on being needed—by coworkers and bosses, lovers and friends, even by the very movements that were intended to free us of all that.
For myself, learning this lesson was definitely a function of age. I wasn’t ready to admit how deeply into my brain cells and viscera the social role had permeated while I was still within the age range of its grasp.
Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice—or at least to realize I had one—I discovered a new answer to my earlier rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get? The answer was: A lot. I found anger as a source of energy within myself, or in the wonderful phrase of Patricia Williams—writer, law professor, and African-American feminist—“a gift of intelligent rage.”9
As it turns out, love and anger are both emotions of the free will, yet only love is acceptable for the powerless to express. For women or any category of people whose fair treatment would upset the social order, anger becomes the most punished and dangerous emotion. Therefore, showing it is also a sign of freedom. It’s an honesty without which love, too, eventually becomes a sham. So for me, it was and is a step forward to say: I feel anger when I remember how much time I had to spend explaining myself; explaining what was wrong; explaining “what women want”; or explaining at all. I feel anger that I had to fight against living in a culturally deprived, white-only box of the sort this society creates to limit our friends and keep our labels clear. I feel anger that I’ve studied history, watched television, and obeyed governments in which I saw so little that looked like my half of the human race, or the diversity of the country. I feel anger that all of the above are still happening in varying degrees of painfulness; for instance, that I and others still require adjectives, while those who define go unadorned. Just what is the difference between a woman writer and a writer? a black surgeon and a surgeon? a lesbian athlete and an athlete? a disabled mathematician and a mathematician? Why does the operative definition of a special issue turn out to be any issue not important to the speaker? And why is the word “qualified” applied only to those who have to be more so? Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?
Finally, I feel angry that the righteous anger I did manage to express in the past was denigrated as unprofessional or self-defeating, or more subtly suppressed when others praised me as calm, reasonable, not one of those “angry feminists.” (How do we fall victim to the “good girl” syndrome? Let me count the ways.)
But it’s a healthy anger that warms my heart, loosens my tongue, leaves me feeling ever more impatient and energized, and gives me a what-the-hell kind of courage. At last, I’m beginning to ignore the rules altogether—by just not paying tribute to them, whether by conforming or confronting. Now, messages I once heard only with my head go straight to my heart.
For instance, these words from a woman whose birth year I share, the late and well-loved poet Audre Lorde:
I speak without concern for the accusations
that I am too much or too little woman
that I am too Black or too white
or too much myself10
Or these from writer and scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, now in her mid-sixties, about the heroine of the mysteries she writes as “Amanda Cross”—who is therefore herself:
… she has become braver as she has aged, less interested in the opinions of those she does not cherish, and has come to realize that she has little to lose, little any longer to risk, that age above all, both for those with children and those without them, is the time when there is very little “they” can do for you, very little reason to fear, or hide, or not attempt brave and important things.11
In other words, I’m becoming more radical with age.
I don’t know why I’m surprised by this. When I was forty-five, I wrote an essay about the female journey as being the reverse of the traditional male one.12 Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, while women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious and radical as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and a status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color. Yet when I looked at the current wave of feminism, I was surprised to find that the age of self-respecting activism wasn’t all that different. The critical mass were still women of thirty, forty, fifty, or beyond—only a decade or so younger than their suffragist counterparts. I realized that most women in their teens and twenties hadn’t yet experienced one or more of the great radicalizing events of a woman’s life: marrying and discovering it isn’t yet an equal (or even nonviolent) institution; getting into the paid labor force and experiencing its limits, from the corporate “glass ceiling” to the “sticky floor” of the pink-collar ghetto; having children and finding out who takes care of them and who doesn’t; and, finally, aging, still the most impoverishing event for women of every race and so potentially the most radicalizing. To put it another way, if young women have a problem, it’s only that they think there’s no problem.*
I wrote that essay because I was angry with the media—though you probably would have had to be on LSD to sense it from my calm prose—for assuming that the male cultural pattern of rebelling in youth and growing more conservative with age was the only one. Indeed, reporters still look for the red-hot center of feminist activism on campus—and in the male style of dropping out of the system, though it’s often more radical for women to drop in—thus missing the activist centers of battered women’s shelters, rape crisis hot lines, child support and custody actions, economic development groups, pink-collar organizing, and many other sources of energy. If my essay had little impact on journalists, however, I have to admit that it also had little impact on my sense of my own life. I still thought I was reporting on others, and failed to sense that this cultural pattern of growing more radical with age was also happening within myself.
I don’t know what I imagined the last thirty or forty years of my life were going to be. Perhaps just more of the same, for I thought I had already disobeyed the rules. After all, I’d left my childbearing years behind without following a traditional pattern. Furthermore, I was constantly aware that very few people, male or female, could work full-time at what they loved without starving. Or perhaps I’d just been confronted so often in my life with people who insisted, “You’re so different from those other ______” (fill in the blank with the group of your choice), that I’d fallen into thinking I was an exception to the trends I myself observed.
What I’d forgotten is that patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all—even as we forge different individual choices within them—just as do the megapatterns of nationalism or racism. This amnesia on my part was all the more remarkable because I knew I’d shared many of the experiences leading up to that more-rebellious-with-age conclusion. For instance:
• I, too, believed when I was in high school and college, as my textbooks led me to, that everything had been solved decades earlier by worthy but boring, asexual suffragists about whom I knew very little, except that I didn’t want to be like them. Today’s young women are encouraged to feel somewhat the same way about feminists who preceded them, a conscious or unconscious way of stopping change by cutting off the supply of changemakers.
• I, too, thought marriage would shape my life more than any other single influence—which was why I kept putting off what seemed to be the death of choice. Young women now can be more honest about delaying marriage or choosing a different path. But if they do marry, they still end up with a life more shaped by marriage than their husband’s life is likely to be.
• I, too, identified with every underdog in the world before realizing there was a reason, that women are primordial underdogs. Today, many young women still take injustice more seriously if it affects any group except women, and support other causes before having the self-respect to stand up for their own.
There’s a lesson here about who’s encouraged to have a sense of belonging and who isn’t. Whether the category is as specialized as “physicians” or as generalized as “white males,” members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On the other hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group’s fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.
Though I would have been delighted to think that I, too, could grow more radical and rebellious with age, for instance, the habit of exempting myself won out. With few role models of daring, take-no-shit older women in my history books, or my family history as transmitted to me (though both held many in reality)—and with even the rebellious older women I had written about consigned to the category of “other” prescribed by my reporter’s role—my own future remained a hazy screen.
Since “radical” is often turned into a word as negative as “aging,” perhaps I should explain why, as a person who came of age in the conservative 1950s, I came to believe it was a good thing. There were two experiences that shaped its positive meaning for me, one of them a decade before feminism came into my life, the other in the way it finally arrived.
The fall after graduating from college, I went to India on a year’s fellowship. (Remember my tactic of delaying marriage? Well, India was not only a place I’d always wanted to go to, but an escape from a very kind and tempting man to whom I was engaged, but knew I shouldn’t marry.) To my surprise, I found that I felt more at home and involved there than I ever had in any other country not my own. I stayed for another year doing freelance writing. In that diverse country that welcomes foreigners with the same equanimity that allowed it to absorb foreign cultures for centuries and yet remain unique, the students at the women’s college of the University of Delhi accepted me as one of two Westerners to live there. They taught me to wear saris and were generally more instructive about India than was the curriculum, which was still shaped by the English system. In the same period, I was also befriended by a group of gentle activists and intellectuals known as the Radical Humanists. From listening to their energetic analyzing of world events, I learned that “radical” didn’t have to mean violent, extremist, or crazy, as a reading of U.S. newspapers had led me to believe. It could mean exactly what the dictionary said: going to the root.
Though many Radical Humanists, women and men, had started out as members of the Communist Party of India when it was supporting the Indian Independence Movement, they had left once the Party did an about-face during World War II and supported the British Raj—an evidence of its allegiance to Soviet needs rather than Indian members. Like many friends who were Gandhians, and who also were to show me new alternatives, these activists felt they had progressed beyond such Marxist tenets as “the end justifies the means.” Their experiences caused me to rethink my romance with Marxism, which had started in college when Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of actual or imagined Communists made them seem admirable by comparison. As the Radical Humanists pointed out, the means we choose dictate the ends we achieve—so much so that one might more accurately say, “the means are the ends.” M. N. Roy, one of their founders, wrote that “the end justifies the means … eventually brought about the moral degeneration of the international communist movement.”13
As Gandhians explained, the goal was swaraj—a Hindi word meaning both freedom and self-rule. Gandhi also used natural imagery: “the means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree.”14
I remember my first hands-on experience with activism that consciously reflected a future goal in its present tactic. I’d been traveling through South India on my own, having passed beyond the friendly chain of Radical Humanists in the north. As I made my way down the coast from Calcutta, I discovered that a Westerner in a sari was no more strange than someone from a distant part of India might have been, and that my English-with-a-little-Hindi was as useful (or useless) as some of the other fourteen major languages of India. In the women’s car of third-class trains and in public hostels, I found myself struggling to respond to the very un-British, thoroughly Indian habit of asking personal questions. In my case, this meant probing everything from why I wasn’t married to whether I knew how to have fewer children—by methods their husbands couldn’t discover.
When I went inland by rickety bus to visit one of the ashrams started by Vinoba Bhave—a disciple of Gandhi who was asking village landowners to give part of their acreage to the poor—Bhave and most of his coworkers had already left; not on one of their usual pilgrimages to ask for land donations, but walking from village to village through Ramnad, a nearby rural area where caste riots had broken out. Government officials in faraway Delhi had responded by embargoing all news coming out of the area and closing it off in the hope that burnings and killings could be kept from spreading. Nonetheless, Bhave’s teams had walked in on their own. Instead of asking people to stay in their houses, they were holding village meetings. Instead of a chain of vengeance, they were offering Gandhian nonviolence. Instead of weapons, they were carrying only a cup and a comb, knowing that if villagers wanted peace, they would feed and house the peacemakers, thus becoming part of the process.
Their problem was that no woman was left in the ashram to join a last team of three. Men couldn’t go into the women’s quarters to invite women out to meetings, and if there was no woman at the meeting, other women were unlikely to come. The question was: Would I go with them? Bhave’s coworkers assured me I wouldn’t seem any more odd than others from outside the area. They themselves were trusted only because of their work in creating land trusts for the poor. Besides, part of their mission was to show villagers that people outside this isolated area knew and cared what was happening to them.
For the next few days, we walked from one village to the next—sitting under trees for meetings in the cool of the early morning, walking during the heat of the day, and holding more meetings around kerosene lamps at night. Mostly, we just listened. There were so many stories of atrocities and vengeance, so much anger and fear, that it was hard to imagine how it could end. But gradually, people expressed relief at having been listened to, at seeing neighbors who had been too afraid to come out of their houses, and at hearing facts brought by Bhave’s team, for the rumors were even more terrible than the events themselves. To my amazement, long and emotion-filled meetings often ended with village leaders pledging to take no revenge on caste groups whose members had attacked their group in a neighboring village, and to continue meetings of their own.
Each day, we set off along paths shaded by palms and sheltered by banyan trees, cut across plowed fields, and waded into streams to cool off and let our homespun clothes dry on us as we walked. In the villages, families shared their food and sleeping mats with us, women taught me how to wash my sari and wash and oil my hair, and shopkeepers offered us rice cakes and sweet milky tea in the morning. I found there was a freedom in having no possessions but a sari, a cup, and a comb, and, even in the midst of turmoil, a peacefulness in focusing only on the moment at hand. I remember this as the first time in my life when I was living completely in the present.
Toward the end, when the violence had quieted down, my unseasoned feet had become so blistered that infection set in, and I hitched a ride in an oxcart back to the bus route, and to the ashram. But I ended those days with regret. I had also learned the truth of what I once disdained as an impractical and impossibly idealistic Gandhian saying: If you do something the people care about, the people will take care of you.
From our team leader, a no-nonsense man in his seventies who had devoted his life to this kind of direct action—to tactics that were a microcosm of their goal—I also remember this radical advice:
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.
Most of us have a few events that divide our lives into “before” and “after.” This was one for me.
When I finally traveled back home to my own country, these lessons didn’t seem very portable. If “radical” is often misunderstood now, consider how it sounded in 1958, with Eisenhower still President and fears of McCarthyite persecution still in the air. At least at a visible level, there was no populist movement against the Cold War; no women’s movement; not even an understanding yet that hunger existed in this country; and only a few groups working on such issues as fallout from nuclear testing, plus civil rights events that had not yet become a movement. As for India, it hadn’t yet appeared on this nation’s media radar as anything other than a place of former British power and present poverty. Even the Beatles hadn’t discovered India yet (indeed, there were no Beatles), and if I brought up India, an island of polite silence would appear in the conversation—and then the talk would flow right on around it.
I was in shock myself, for I was seeing my own overdeveloped country through the eyes of the underdeveloped world for the first time. In search of imagery for this revelation, I remember saying to all who would listen, “Imagine a giant frosted cupcake in the midst of hungry millions.” What really ran through my head like a naive mantra was: This can’t last.
Because India had accustomed me to seeing a rainbow of skin colors, I was also realizing belatedly that in my own multiracial country, you could go snowblind from white faces in any business area or “good” neighborhood. True, skin color in India often carried the cruelty of caste, but a South Indian Brahman might have darker skin than a North Indian harijan (the Gandhian term for “untouchable”), and since all had suffered collectively under British rule, there was at least a striving for a shared identity. Furthermore, Indians described nuances of color as unselfconsciously as any other aspect of appearance. It made me realize that the deafening silence about color in my own upbringing had not been polite but just another way of saying that being anything other than white was impolite. I began to see how caste-divided this country was, how dishonest we were in discussing it, and how effective was this training that I had to experience a different society in order to see.
Sometimes my culture shock took surrealistic forms. In New York, where I had been sleeping on my friends’ living room floors while trying to find a job, I remember insisting on riding in the front seat with taxi drivers. My sense memory of sitting in an Indian tonga—a two-wheeled cart pulled by a man riding a bicycle or running between the staves—was so strong that I felt engulfed by the unacceptable experience of being driven by another human being. Of course, a Calcutta tonga wallah had little to do with a New York taxi driver, but the images of the recent past were still imprinted on my eyes, and the world looked very different when viewed through them. I alternated between trying to explain what I’d experienced in India and leaving gatherings I couldn’t handle because the contrast was too painful.
In other words, I must have been a terrible pain in the ass.
The more I became acclimated to my own country, however, the more India began to seem like two years dropped out of my life—a time whose intensity and lessons I would never be able to match or make use of. Some of my trying to explain was really trying to catch what was slipping away. Though I attempted to work in student politics, it also didn’t yet exist as a movement. I was far too broke and impatient to consider any graduate school.
Finally, I began to work as a freelance writer, but the assignments I could get as a “girl reporter” often widened the gap between what I was working on and what I cared about. I was drawn to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements that were becoming public events by then, but they were not the assignments given to girl reporters. I found myself paying the rent with humor and advice pieces for women’s magazines (while going to a school desegregation rally in Virginia or a civil rights march in Washington); writing about the mayor’s wife or a fashion designer because I was impressed to get a freelance assignment from The New York Times (while lobbying for Peace Corps volunteers to go to communities in India); profiling actors, dancers, and other celebrities for various magazines and newspapers (while organizing with writers and editors to refuse to pay that portion of our taxes going to the Vietnam war); and writing about the “ins” and “outs” of pop culture for Life (while trying to get Cesar Chavez and his new United Farm Workers on the cover of Time as protection against threats on his life from California growers). It wasn’t that I disliked what I was doing. On the contrary, I liked Mary Lindsay, the mayor’s wife, I loved writing satire for an Esquire campus issue or That Was the Week That Was on television, and I enjoyed learning about people while profiling them, from James Baldwin and Margot Fonteyn to Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote. But I never felt fully engaged, as if I were leading other than a derived life. Some of the tactics of those anti-Vietnam days made me feel more estranged than I had in India, for I had absorbed the idea that violent means are unlikely to reach a peaceful end—that ends and means are a seamless web—and this philosophy wasn’t always guiding the most public events of the peace movement.
When New York magazine was founded—aided by a group of us who were to be its regular writers—this gap between work and interest narrowed somewhat. At least I could write about electoral politics, social justice movements, and neighborhood organizing in New York; all assignments that other magazines and newspapers usually gave to male reporters. But I was still a long way from the hands-on, organic, personal kind of activism I had glimpsed in India. Indeed, I had put it out of my mind.
In the movements of the 1960s, there was a saying: “You only get radicalized on your own concerns.” That was to prove true again in the way feminism arrived in my life.
It wasn’t the first brave, reformist variety of the mid-1960s that woke me up. Though I was old enough to be part of the Feminine Mystique generation, I wasn’t living in the suburbs, wondering why I wasn’t using my college degree. I’d ended up in the workforce many of these other women were then trying to enter. Though college had taken me out of my blue-collar Toledo neighborhood and made me a middle-class person, I shared the reaction of many working-class women and women of color: I support women who want to get out of the suburbs and into jobs, I thought to myself, but I’m already in the workforce and getting screwed. The women’s movement isn’t for me. Given the contrast between India and this country’s share of the world’s resources, I also had another reservation: Sure, women should get a fair share of the pie, but what we really need is a new pie.
By the end of the 1960s, younger women were coming out of the civil rights and peace movements with similar feelings. They also had a new phrase, “women’s liberation,” which addressed all women as a caste. Instead of integrating current systems, they were taking on the patriarchy and racism at their base. Instead of trying to make “feminine” equal to “masculine,” they were joining all human qualities into a full circle that was available to everyone. At their speak-outs, I listened to stories of experiences I, too, had known, but had never put into words. When I covered as a reporter an early feminist hearing on abortion, I heard personal testimonies to the sufferings brought on by having to enter a criminal underworld. I had had an abortion too, but I’d been lucky enough to be in England, where laws were slightly less punishing. It was just after college, but I never forgot the weeks of panic before I found a doctor, or how it changed my life to be able to continue the trip to India that was about to begin; yet I’d never spoken to anyone about this major experience in my life. Since one in three or four women had undergone an abortion even then, I began to wonder why it was illegal; why our reproductive lives were not under our own control; and why this fundamental issue hadn’t been part of any other social justice movement. It was a time of epiphanies. I remember sitting amazed in front of my television set watching Anne Koedt, Anselma Dell’Olio, Betty Dodson, and other early feminists talk about sexuality on an obscure local show. It was the first time I’d ever heard women be sexually honest in public (it was rare enough in private) or take on Freud’s myth of the vaginal orgasm (about which Koedt had just written an essay that was to become a classic).15 I started asking why women were supposed to have sex but not talk about it; why Freud got away with calling women “immature” for failing to have a male-fantasy orgasm; and why the so-called sexual liberation movement of the 1960s had been mostly about making more women sexually available on male terms.
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back. Instead of trying to fit women into existing middle-class professions or working-class theory, these radical feminist groups assumed that women’s experience should be the root of theory. Whether at speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, “talking circles” or public hearings, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political—you are not alone.
I’m not sure feminism should require an adjective. Believing in the full social, political, and economic quality of women, which is what the dictionary says “feminism” means, is enough to make a revolution in itself. But if I had to choose only one adjective, I still would opt for radical feminist. I know patriarchs keep equating that word with violent or man-hating, crazy or extremist—though being a plain vanilla feminist doesn’t keep one safe from such epithets either, nor does “I’m not a feminist, but …” Nonetheless, radical seems an honest indication of the fundamental change we have in mind and says what probably is the case: the false division of human nature into “feminine” and “masculine” is the root of all other divisions into subject and object, active and passive—the beginning of hierarchy. Since that division comes from the patriarchal need to control women’s bodies as the means of reproduction—a control that racial “purity” and caste and class systems are built on—digging out the “masculine/feminine” paradigm undermines all birth-based hierarchies, and alters our view of human nature, the natural world, and the cosmos itself. Just a few little things like that.
Everything comes together once we’ve found the work for which experience and temperament suit us. I’ve been traveling around this country every week for most of the last twenty-five years, working with many women and some men in the kind of direct-action organizing I first saw and was so magnetized by in India. Only recently have I understood the resonance between what I have been doing and that long-ago and long-buried turning point. I find the wisdom of our Ramnad team leader still holds true: you have to listen … you have to know … you have to sit down eye-to-eye.
As for the Gandhian adage If you do something the people care about, the people will take care of you, I have to admit there is a big difference here. Walking from village to village could get you arrested, and having to pay for your own airline ticket is very different from hitching a ride on a bullock cart. But like other traveling feminists or organizers for other movements who bring hope in anything like a commonsense way, I do notice that the ticket clerk sometimes saves three seats across so I can sleep; flight attendants may slip me a healthier meal from first class; airport cleaning women stop to tell me about the latest woman candidate from their neighborhoods; women now able to mother other women stock our car with spring water and apples; and even such brief contact as seeing women standing in highway toll booths yields good advice about the traffic or the weather. “It’s going to rain, honey,” one of them said kindly to me last week. “Want to borrow my umbrella?” A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
Even our faults can be useful if we’re willing to expose them. Because I was scared to death of public speaking, for instance, I often began lectures by explaining that only the women’s movement had given me a reason worth making a damn fool of myself, that I’d never spoken publicly at all until I was in my mid-thirties, and that if I could do it, anyone could. It was this fear that led me to speaking in teams in the beginning—which turned out to be a helpful tactic. It’s this fear now that makes me look forward to a discussion time in which the audience takes over and creates its own organizing meeting. Invariably the result is better than anything I or any single speaker could produce. In this way, I learned that being able to use all of ourselves, whether positive or negative, is a good sign that we’re doing the right thing.
I’ve learned from the collective wisdom of these audiences, from the late-night groups that gather after meetings, individuals who stop me in the street to tell me stories of changes in their lives, people who write letters that should be books, populist researchers who send clippings with crucial passages marked, strangers who share what might be difficult to say to friends, and people in groups everywhere who are especially valuable as advisers about what I or others could be doing better.
I’ve always been hooked on this “found wisdom,” as I’ve come to think of it. When I went back to India almost twenty years after my student days, I realized it was a form of populist teaching to be preserved. I met with Indira Gandhi—then prime minister, though she had been a lonely and uncertain young woman when I first saw her—and she told me the story of her own third-class travels around India as a young mother in crowded women-only railway cars like the ones I remembered. On learning that she had only two children, women invariably asked her: “How did you do it?” And often: “How can I keep my husband from knowing? How can I keep him from thinking I’ll be unfaithful?”
As prime minister, she defied population experts who insisted that poor and illiterate women didn’t want birth control, or couldn’t understand it until they became literate, or would accept it only if their husbands approved. She instituted family planning programs that were the first to offer women contraception in private. She also offered small financial rewards for men who agreed to be sterilized, and told health workers to explain to them that this way, husbands would know if their wives were being unfaithful. Those measures were very controversial, but often more effective than the conventional ones. She received delegations of grateful women, and also criticism within her own country and in international circles for encouraging male sterilization. But the day we talked, she seemed unperturbed. She had never forgotten the words or the desperation of her populist women teachers.
On this same trip in the late 1970s, I was often told by academics, reporters, and others in India’s big cities that feminism was a Western phenomenon, that it had no roots in India. I later learned that unknown to many in the cities, a movement called Stree Shakti Jagritti (Women’s Power Awakening) had been organizing conferences and padyataras (foot journeys) through rural India. Combining women’s issues with the teachings of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, both of whom honored their populist women teachers by saying that only awakening the inner strength of women could overcome India’s obstacles, this movement had been working since the 1950s on everything from literacy campaigns to giving women small loans so they could produce and sell vegetables or handicrafts, and wouldn’t be forced into prostitution. At the time I was being told feminism was peculiar to the West, 10,000 members of this loose federation of women workers were marching from village to village, asking women about their problems, helping them to organize, offering the principles of self-strength and nonviolence—just as we had done in a much smaller way two decades before. Though most of the funds and women came from the poor areas in which the work was being done, 75,000 women participated in the second padyatara.16
Now there is much more acknowledgment of the role of Indian feminist groups, urban as well as rural, in working for many forms of empowerment and against everything from sexual harassment in the workplace (often called Eve teasing in the Indian media) to the dowry murders that still take place when a husband or his family, wishing to acquire a second dowry, cause the “accidental” death of his first wife. But the truth is that every country has its own organic feminism. Far more than communism, capitalism, or any other philosophy I can think of, it is a grassroots event. It grows in women’s heads and hearts.
Each day or week or month seems like a morass of confusion, missed plans, happenstance, and bewildering detail. One of the great advantages of age is a longer view that suddenly reveals patterns. An internal voice, an intrinsic set of values, a DNA that is powerful and unique within each of us—something has been organizing and occasionally prevailing over that morass of detail. It took me years to see the connections between discussions with Indian women in a third-class railroad car and the feelings that finally gave me the courage to speak in public, or the links between walking in Ramnad and getting on planes to unknown places with Dorothy or Flo or Margaret—but they were there. I’m looking forward to the still longer views that reveal more patterns, for they tell us what is true within us. That means we know what should be continued in the future.
I also see patterns of my resistance to what I knew in my heart I should do. Some people hang on to the familiar and the things they already know out of fear. Others do it out of defiance. The latter has always been my drug of choice. It’s taken me a long time to realize that when I said so defiantly at fifty, “I’m going to go right on doing everything I did at thirty or forty,” this was not progress. I was refusing to change, and thus robbing myself of the future. I’m indebted to Robin Morgan for reminding me that for women like us, defiance for defiance’s sake is a political version of a face-lift—a denial of change.
Probably, hanging on to the past brings more destruction than any other single cause. It’s the strict constructionists who prefer a literal U.S. Constitution to the mechanisms for change that were the greatest creation of its framers. It’s the Muslim fundamentalists who worship the past and ignore the reformist spirit with which Muhammad viewed women. It’s the backward-looking Christian literalists who interpret religious teachings in a way that consolidates their power. It’s the fearful politicians who cite the “good old days” and tell us we’re going to hell in a handbasket. Nostalgia may be the most tempting and deceptive form of opposition to change. In truth, no day or situation is identical with any other. To resist this constancy of change is to be as ridiculous as I was when I sat in front with a New York taxi driver. It’s to be as dangerous as fundamentalists who bring glorification of death out of the past and into a nuclear present.
Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the solution. If we remember that our tactics must always reflect our goals, there will be a flexible structure of continuing values—not to mention greater success. There’s no such thing as killing for peace, strengthening people by making their decisions for them, or suppressing dissent to gain freedom.
There’s also no such thing as being fully conscious in the present while preoccupied with the past or the future. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I had a habit of mind that I just accepted then but realize now was robbing me of living the present. I used to fantasize pleasurably about being very old. Some part of my consciousness must have decided that only an acerbic, independent old lady would finally be free of the vulnerability and lack of seriousness that attach to female human beings. Only much later would I no longer be an interchangeable moving part, “a pretty girl,” a group rather than an individual. Fortunately, by the time I was in my late thirties, feminism had helped me to understand that I could fight the role instead of wishing my life away. It makes no more sense to wish for age than to fear it. But not until I was past fifty did I read Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life and understand that many women become ourselves after fifty, and that my odd habit of mind had a good political reason.
What we all need, whatever our age, are personal role models of living in the present—and a change that never ends. We need to know that life past sixty or seventy or eighty is as much an adventure as it ever was, perhaps more so for women, since we are especially likely to find new territory once the long plateau of our role is over. Explorers of this region have always existed in some number, but now their lights dancing on the path ahead will guide many more.
I think of Frieda Zames, who at the age of sixty-two is now answering reporters’ questions about how she successfully integrated the Empire State Building, part of a class action suit against a number of hotels and office buildings that were not accessible to the disabled. In 1980, her work also helped put lifts on New York buses so disabled passengers could ride, and in 1984, she helped to make New York polling places accessible to disabled voters for the first time. Having retired as a professor of mathematics, she has more time for Disabled in Action, the civil rights group with which she works.17 Felled early by polio, she spent her childhood in a hospital, and then became a mathematician—only to be told that high schools would not hire disabled teachers. She got an advanced degree, but discovered that being a woman was even more of a disability than getting around on crutches or a motorized scooter—at least, in the eyes of the all-male technological institute where she taught—so she became an activist twice over. She is now writing a book on the disability movement, and her scooter can often be seen at the head of demonstrations.
I think of Charlotta Spears Bass, who was a pioneering newspaper reporter into her sixties, and who then used her expertise on issues to begin another career. At the age of seventy, she became the Progressive party’s candidate for Congress from California. At seventy-two, she ran on that party’s ticket against Richard Nixon—thus becoming the first black woman to run for the vice-presidency of the United States. I wish I had known her when I was struggling against being a “girl reporter” in the 1960s, for she had begun work as a journalist in 1900 at the age of twenty. She became the editor of a small newspaper and crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan and segregated housing, for women in political office and for early efforts to ban the atomic bomb. As a candidate, her slogan was “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.” She died in 1969 at the age of eighty-nine, knowing she had helped to put civil rights, women’s rights, and peace on the national agenda.18
I think of Mary Parkman Peabody, a Boston Brahmin by birth and marriage. In 1964, at the age of seventy-two—without telling her son, who was then governor of Massachusetts—she left for a civil rights demonstration in Florida organized by Martin Luther King. When she was jailed for sitting in at a segregated motel dining room, she made national headlines because of her illustrious family and her status as the widow of an Episcopal bishop. At a press conference, she commented cheerfully that the jail was very clean, there were beautiful flowers outside it, and she had enjoyed eating hominy grits with her fingers. Well into her eighties, she continued to demonstrate for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, and against military spending. When she died at eighty-nine, obituaries called her “a prominent civil rights and antiwar activist,” and only later mentioned her illustrious family. To this day, she is a symbol of rebellion for women born into a class trained not to rebel.19
I think of Edith Big Fire Johns, who began a new career four years ago at seventy-five. As a representative of Travellers and Immigrants Aid at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, she receives babies arriving from Korea and Romania for adoption, helps African students and Asian immigrants coming to this country for the first time, and talks to runaways who feel they have no home but the airport. Having earned her nursing degree in 1937—one of the first Indian women to do so—she had a long career in that profession, and was one of the first staff members of the Native American Educational Services College, the only private Indian college in this country. At sixty-five, she joined the Peace Corps as a nurse on the island of Dominica, and traveled to meet with indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. Now she also teaches the Indian beadwork at which she is expert as a member of both the Winnebago and Nez Percé tribes, helps others in the Indian community to maintain tribal values in the midst of urban life, and looks forward each week to “meeting people from parts unknown.”
I think of Carrie Allen McCray, whose fresh and true poetry I have just discovered—which is not surprising, since she only began to write seriously at seventy-three and is publishing and giving poetry readings at eighty. The daughter of one of the first black lawyers and a mother who was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1917, she herself was a social worker and professor of sociology in South Carolina and Alabama. With a memory that stretches from the Harlem Renaissance to the poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Sharon Olds, she is now at work on a novel about her mother, her grandmother who was a former slave, her grandfather who was a Confederate general, and the surprises she has found in researching their stories. Widowed by a husband whose work as a journalist she admired but who said, “I’m the writer in the family,” she now writes every day. As she says, “I get up writing.” Here are some of her words:
Nobody wrote a poem
about me
In ugly tones they
called me “Yaller Gal”
How lovely to have been
born black or brown
Pure substance the artist
could put his pen to
Not something in between—
diluted, undefined, unspecific
I search the poets
for words of me
Faint mention in Langston Hughes’
Harlem Sweeties, I think,
yet I’m not sure
So full of “caramel treats,”
“brown sugars” and “plum
tinted blacks,” it was
Soft, warm colors
making the poets sing
I, born out of history’s
cruel circumstance,
inspired no song
and nobody wrote a poem
At last, Carrie Allen McCray is writing her own poem—and a novel besides.20
I think of Esther Peterson, born in 1906, a tall, slender young woman with brown braids encircling her head, who came out of Utah to become a labor organizer in the sweatshops of New England and the South. In the lonely years between suffrage and modern feminism, she carried the heart and conscience of the women’s movement—learning from Eleanor Roosevelt to “draw a wider circle” around issues, and in her fifties becoming head of the Women’s Bureau under President Kennedy, a man she had educated on labor issues when he was a young Congressman. In the Johnson and Carter administrations she was a voice for consumers, and at eighty-six she was appointed by President Clinton to represent the United States at the first United Nations session of his administration. She knew the U.N. well, having pioneered its international listing of products considered dangerous in their country of manufacture but “dumped” in other countries nonetheless, a listing opposed by many U.S. corporations and the Reagan administration. I see her now at eighty-seven, her snow-white braids encircling her head, speaking on international consumer issues, women’s equality, and the needs of the United Seniors’ Health Cooperative, a new organization she founded to help older people become informed consumers of health care and health insurance.21 As always, she is on the path ahead.
Now that I am finally retrieving the importance of India in my life, I think most of all of sitting on a New Delhi veranda in the 1970s, drinking tea with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, whose first name was (and is) enough to identify her in many countries of the world. Biographical dictionaries list her as “freedom fighter, social worker, writer.” In the 1950s, when I first met her, she was also in her fifties and already a legend for her leading role in the Freedom Struggle with Gandhi and Nehru—an activism for which she spent five years in British jails—and for her pioneering of the Indian handicraft movement. Our meeting was arranged by my oldest friend in India, Devaki Jain, because we wanted to ask Kamaladevi’s advice. Since Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics were so well suited to women’s movements around the world, we were thinking of studying his letters and writings, distilling what was most useful, and creating a kind of Gandhian/feminist handbook.
Kamaladevi listened patiently. Only at the end did she say, “Of course Gandhi’s tactics were suited to women—that’s where he learned them.” It was a sudden understanding that made us all laugh; one more instance of history lost, and then being attracted to what once was ours.
When I returned home, I lost track of Kamaladevi. I knew only that she had continued to travel the world into her eighties, helping other countries to preserve their creativity and culture in a handicraft industry, too, and also writing many books. But I always remembered this woman who taught us women’s history over a cup of tea, while continuing to make history herself.
She died at the age of eighty-five on her way to make a speech, effective to the last. Devaki Jain wrote a moving tribute: “I weep for her absence—a central support for realistic idealism. … She made museums appear like bread or water—things without which one could not live.” She described how Kamaladevi, asked to join dignitaries on a podium and light a lamp celebrating the golden jubilee of the All India Women’s Conference, had said, just a year before she died, “I have never gone on to a raised platform, it connotes hierarchy, distance.” As Devaki explained, “She lit the lamp at the back of the hall, to the delight of the last rows.”22
I don’t mean to say that all of us have to do illustrious deeds; quite the contrary, all our deeds are illustrious. How we speak to each other, how our bodies feel, what we wear, how we work, what we buy, what we eat, whom we love—all these are part of the impact of our lives. Indeed, I’m not sure we have any idea which of our actions is important while we are doing it. Therefore, to get us out of any sober, historic, or otherwise intimidating mood, I’ll risk placing a poem here—nothing is accomplished without making fools of ourselves, and poetry for me is like singing in the shower. I well understood while writing it that groups of women mentioned here might have little choice as to how they dressed or acted—but this poem refused to be politically correct. Even its title is only the answer that popped out when someone asked me what I planned for my old age: “I Hope To Be an Old Woman Who Dresses Very Inappropriately.”
Women in business
Dress in man-style suits
And treat their secretaries
In a man-style way.
Women on campus
Wear “masculine” thoughts
And look to daddy for
Good grades.
Married women
Give their bodies away
And wear their husbands’
Wishes.
Religious women
Cover sinful bodies
And ask redemption from god
Not knowing
She is within them.
That’s why I’ll always love
The fat woman who dares to wear
A red miniskirt
Because she loves her woman’s body.
The smart woman who doesn’t go to college
And keeps possession of her mind.
The lover who remains a mistress
Because she knows the price of marrying.
The witch who walks naked
And demands to be safe.
The crazy woman who dyes her hair purple
Because anyone who doesn’t love purple
Is crazy.
Dear Goddess: I pray for the courage
To walk naked
At any age.
To wear red and purple,
To be unladylike,
Inappropriate,
Scandalous and
Incorrect
To the very end.
As you can see, I’m just beginning to realize the upcoming pleasures of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman; of looking at what once seemed outer limits as just road signs. For instance:
• I used to take pleasure in going to a feminist Seder every year, subverting that ancient ceremony by including women in it. In our Women’s Haggadah, we honored not only Deborah, Ruth, and other heroines of the Bible, but also our own foremothers. “Why have our Mothers on this night been bitter?” we read together. “Because they did the preparation but not the ritual. They did the serving but not the conducting. They read of their fathers but not of their mothers.”23
Lately, however, I’ve been wondering: Why start with anything that must be so changed, so fought against? Why not begin with the occasions of our own lives and create the ceremony we need for births or marriages, adopting friends as chosen family or setting off on a new adventure, recognizing the life passage of divorce, or a new home? Having learned the pleasures of ritual, I’m thinking of founding a service: “Ceremonies to Go.”
• I used to pass urban slums, or rows of poor houses anywhere, and compulsively imagine myself living there: What would it be like? It was a question of such fearsome childhood power that I only recently realized it had fallen away. It’s simply gone. The deep groove worn by such imaginings has finally been filled by years of words written and deeds done, crises survived and friends who became family, work done for others and thus an interdependence. In other words, I no longer fear ending up where I began.
• I used to indulge in magical thinking when problems seemed insurmountable. Often, this focused on men, for they seemed to be the only ones with power to intercede with the gods. Now it has been so long since I fantasized a magical rescue that I can barely remember the intensity of that longing. Instead, I feel my own strength, take pleasure in the company of mortals, and no longer believe in gods. Except those in each of us.
• I used to think that continuing my past sex life was the height of radicalism. After all, women too old for childbearing were supposed to be too old for sex, and becoming a pioneer dirty old lady seemed a worthwhile goal—which it was, for a while. But continuing the past even out of defiance is very different from advancing. Now I think: Why not take advantage of the hormonal changes age provides to clear our minds, sharpen our senses, and free whole areas of our brains? Even as I celebrate past pleasures, I wonder: Did I sometimes confuse sex with aerobics?
• I used to be one of the majority of Americans whose greatest fear was dependency in old age—a fear that must have roots other than economic, for it is no more prevalent among women or the racial groups of men most likely to be poor. Then I listened to the historian Gerda Lerner question that fear among a group of middle-aged women gathered to talk about aging. As she pointed out, we don’t fear dependency in the early years of life. On the contrary, we understand that being able to help children find what they need can be a gift in itself. Why shouldn’t we feel the same about the other end of life? Why shouldn’t the equally natural needs of age be an opportunity for others to give? Why indeed? Now I wonder if women’s fear of dependency doesn’t stem from being too much depended upon. Perhaps if we equalize the caretaking and the giving—with men, with society—this will bring a new freedom to receive.
• I used to think that uprooting negative childhood patterns was an activity reserved for individuals. Now I wonder if this familiar healing process wouldn’t benefit countries and races too. In the country in which I live, there is a glorification of violence and a willful denial of how much it hurts—not to mention how much of this hurt is passed on to future generations. I wonder if we’re collectively doomed to keep repeating these violent patterns until we admit the hurt that took place in this nation’s childhood: the reality of genocide that wiped out millions of indigenous peoples and all but destroyed dozens of major cultures, plus the still only half-admitted realities of slavery and its legacy within each of us. I’m happy about the new Holocaust Museum in Washington, for I know our government refused to admit thousands of Jews until it was too late. But we also need to have a Native American Museum, which finally admits that the “uninhabited” Americas were home to as many people as Europe, and a Middle Passage Museum to memorialize the beginning of the massive injustice of slavery that’s still playing out. We need this remembrance not for guilt or punishment—which only creates more of the same—but to root out the patterns of our national childhood.
• I used to think nationalism was the only game in town. The most radical act was to support poor countries in their rights against rich ones. Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nations in the sky.
As a group who can never afford the expensive fiction of having a nation—and whose bodies suffer from nationalism by being restricted as its means of reproduction—women of all races and cultures may be the most motivated to ask: How can we create a future beyond nationalism? After all, it has been around for less than five percent of humanity’s history. Surely there are other ways of sharing this spaceship Earth.
• Lest this all seem too impractical, let me add one more: I used to think I would be rewarded for good behavior. Therefore, if I wasn’t understood, I must not be understandable; if I wasn’t successful, I must try harder; if something was wrong, it was my fault. More and more now, I see that context is all. When someone judges me, anyone, or anything, I ask: Compared to what? When I see on television a series about children of divorce, for instance, I find myself asking: What about a series on children of marriage? When a woman fears the punishment that comes from calling herself a feminist, I ask: Will you be so unpunished if you don’t? When I fear conflict and condemnation for acting a certain way, I think: What peace or praise would I get if I didn’t?
I recommend the freedom that comes from asking: Compared to what? Hierarchical systems prevail by making us feel inadequate and imperfect, whatever we do, so we will internalize the blame. But once we realize there is no such thing as adequacy or perfection, it sets us free to say: We might as well be who we really are.
By the time you read this, I’ll be sixty. I realize now that fifty felt like leaving a much-loved and familiar country—hence both the defiance and the sadness—but sixty feels like arriving at the border of a new one. I’m looking forward to trading moderation for excess, defiance for openness, and planning for the unknown. I already have one new benefit of this longer view:
I’ve always had two or more tracks running in my head. The pleasurable one was thinking forward to some future scene, imagining what should be, planning on the edge of fantasy. The other played underneath with all too realistic fragments of what I should have done. There it was in perfect microcosm, the past and future coming together to squeeze out the present—which is the only time in which we can be fully alive. The blessing of what I think of as the last third or more of life (since I plan to reach a hundred) is that these past and future tracks have gradually dimmed until they are rarely heard. More and more, there is only the full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now.
I was about to end this with, There’s no second like the next one, in much the same spirit that I ended the preface of this book, I can’t wait to see what happens—which remains true. But this new state of mind would have none of it: There’s no second like this one.
* Which makes the many organizations of young women active on their own behalf more remarkable. Their number is growing. For instance, Students Organizing Students (SOS, 1600 Broadway, Suite 404, New York, N.Y. 10019), a national feminist student and youth movement; the Third Wave (185 Franklin Street, New York, N.Y. 10013), a multiracial, direct-action group, whose first activity was Freedom Summer, 1992, a bus caravan that crisscrossed the country to register voters in poor areas; and the Young Women’s Project (1511 K Street, N.W., Suite 428, Washington, D.C. 20005), a national organization that promotes political activism. There are many more such groups at a local level.