In 2014, The Atlantic asked, “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” (The magazine acknowledged it wasn’t an immediate worry.) But the nation was wrestling with health care costs, and one of the easiest targets was expensive medical treatments for patients who were going to die soon under any circumstances. “We spend an incredible amount of money on that last year and month,” warned a writer in Forbes. It was a touchy subject. But even people who had no particular interest in Medicare financing worried about the possibility that doctors might prolong their lives—or the lives of their loved ones—when they were in terrible pain and unable to communicate. When Barack Obama’s administration proposed its health care plan, it included a provision that allowed Medicare to pay for doctors to talk with their patients about living wills and other decisions they could make about how much treatment they wanted, under what circumstances.
That became the famous “death panel” controversy. “We should not have a government program that determines you’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma,” warned Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley. The image resonated so hard and long that Obama was soon complaining about “the notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on Grandma.”
The provision made it into law on January 1, 2016, and paid for about 22,000 such conversations that year. Grandma survived fine.
While the plug-pulling controversy was raging on the one hand, there was another debate going on about who to call a “grandmother.” There always had been something about the word that begged headline writers to tack it on to every woman whose children had had children—whether she was the victim of a mugging or the newest member of a court of appeals. Things had improved, and news stories were less likely to apply “grandmother” to a woman when they’d never use “grandfather” for a man.
A bigger problem was all in the family. American women became grandmothers at an average age of under 50, which a lot of people regarded as part of their prime. Some weren’t comfortable answering to “Grandma” even at home. Yanick Rice Lamb made her sentiments crystal clear on Blackamericaweb.com. “My name is Nini, and I’m a proud, new grandmother. Just don’t call me Grandma. Why? I can’t really say. Maybe it’s because I think I’m too young—or young at heart. I’m not alone.”
Enter “Glam-ma.”
The word cropped up around 2006, after Goldie Hawn published a memoir in which she gave her son credit for coining the word. Pretty soon it was everywhere. Urban Dictionary defined it as part of “the new generation of grandmas, who are stylish in the way they live and dress. These women do not fit the typical cardigan-wearing, permed hair granny stereotype, they are glamorous.”
There were two reactions. One was appalled. “Glamma, to me, sounds fake, pretentious and desperate. It smacks of someone who is terrified of aging, of being old enough to have grandchildren. A panicked, desperate grab for some semblance of youth,” wrote Melissa Charles in the Huffington Post. In the other corner: Lois Joy Johnson, in an article for AARP on “6 Ways to Be a Sexy Grandma,” suggested its female readers look to role models like Hawn or Kris Jenner. “We new Glam-mas bake kale, wear Lululemon and neon Nikes, dance like Beyoncé, sing along to Katy Perry and Skype when we need a major grannie fix from far away,” Johnson declared.
Take your pick. But not everybody likes kale.
Lots of women were happy to have the world know they’d become just-plain-grandmothers. When Hillary Clinton’s second grandchild was born, it felt like she mentioned Aidan and Charlotte in her speeches at least as much as “middle-class income” or “free community college tuition.” If the name “Grandma” didn’t work, there were lots of equivalents. Some women just asked the kids to use their first names. Actress Blythe Danner went for Woof. “My mom’s hot and she didn’t want to be called Grandma, so she kept trying to make the Woof thing stick. It’s even her email address,” explained Danner’s daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Things have certainly changed from the grandmothers of colonial days to the world of Woof. Being the senior woman in a family used to be a critical role. You were the teacher, passing on important householding skills to the next generations, and also the caretaker, looking after the children while their mother and father were out in the fields or off in the factories. The first job sort of faded away—along with the idea that it was necessary for young women to enter adulthood armed with detailed knowledge of how to bake bread and mend the family clothes. The second is still very much alive—there are about 2.7 million grandparents raising children because their parents aren’t around, for reasons ranging from serving in the military to serving time in jail. And, of course, there are the countless women taking care of their grandchildren while the parents are off at work. For low-income families in particular, the burden can be intense. One Harvard study found a 55 percent greater risk of heart disease among grandmothers who cared for their children’s children. “We hypothesize that stress may be the main reason,” said author Sunmin Lee.
Even in wealthier families, the degree to which grandmothers become de facto babysitters turned out to be a little more than some Woofs had bargained for. The New York Times, refusing to give up on That Word, reported that “so-called glam-mas” felt they’d already done their day-to-day childcare duties. Many of them wistfully remembered the postwar world when grandparents came by on special occasions and provided fun outings rather than round-the-clock supervision. One of the grandmothers the Times interviewed thought the model of Michelle Obama’s mother moving into the White House was wonderful, as long as you could also “hire someone to look after the kids.”
In the twenty-first century, women are still complaining about prejudice against anybody who looks as if they’re over 40, but nevertheless a lot of them are planning their lives as if the deadline for retiring to a rocking chair is somewhere around 110. “It seems that old is a moving target,” wrote Anna Quindlen. “Some gerontologists divide us into the young-old, ages fifty-five to seventy-four, and the old-old, over seventy-five. In a survey done by the Pew Research Center, most people said old age begins at sixty-eight. But most people over the age of sixty-five thought it began at seventy-five.”
In real numbers, the normal life expectancy of an American woman is about 81. (Men are lower, at around 76.) And the older you get, the higher the expectancy. A 50-year-old woman can, on average, expect to live to 83, while the figure for a 70-year-old is a little past 86. And if you make it to 80, you can reasonably hope to make 90. The projections are lower for black women, but the older women grow, the closer the numbers come. At 75, an African American woman has a 50-50 chance of making it to 88. And if she does, people will very possibly be complimenting her on her youthful look. A study led by Harvard researchers discovered a “Methuselah gene” that keeps skin from aging, and it’s found in about a fifth of black Americans compared to around a tenth of whites.
If you presume middle age comes around, say, the middle of adult life, a woman in 2018 would figure she’d be living it between 40 and 60. People who want a little more liberal interpretation could consult the Oxford English Dictionary, which sets the dates at ages 45 to 65. One way or another, it is a milestone you reach sometime in your 40s. The next big turning point would be in your 60s, when you became… older. But that’s hardly an end. You’ve already heard the new estimates. “Seventy is the new fifty. That’s not just a cliché. It really is a reasonable statement these days,” said Steven Austad, an expert on aging at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Still moving upward. We have not yet heard a whole lot about 90 being the new 70, but it’s definitely coming. Over in Britain, the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing recommended that people in their 70s and 80s be called “active adults” rather than “old.” If it ever catches on, the 90-year-olds will begin complaining about being tossed into an “inactive” pen.
One big change does involve the age of 65, which used to broadcast “retirement time.” Now, not so much. In 2017, the New York Times reported that two Harvard economists had found that women in their 60s and 70s were having “‘Way Too Much Fun’ to Retire.” A study by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz estimated that nearly 30 percent of women 65 to 69 were working—twice the percentage as in the late 1980s. And 18 percent of women 70 to 74 had jobs, compared to 8 percent back in the day. The big news was that most of them seemed to be working because they wanted to. Goldin, a 72-year-old professor of economics, said later that she felt the same way: “I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t fun.”
And if the current trends continue, Goldin said, “it’s quite possible the fraction of women working will exceed men.” Back after World War II, more than 70 percent of men over 55 worked, compared to about 17 percent of women. Not all of those men were thrilled about their opportunities—once Social Security benefits rose and Medicare came along, a lot of them jumped at the chance to retire earlier.
There’s another reason Goldin believes more women want to keep working longer besides the money and their enjoyment of the job itself. “There’s sociability,” she said. When it comes to a place where women can go to see friends, talk about life, and just enjoy being with other people, the workplace has taken the space that used to be filled with volunteer organizations and clubs. As they said in an old TV show, it’s where “everybody knows your name.”
Okay, that show was about a bar. But honestly, hanging out at work is better.
When we’re looking at all the good news about older women working, it’s important to remember that some of them still don’t have a choice. Experts estimate as many as half of American women 65 and older are economically insecure, with 16 percent at or below the poverty line. They tend to make less money over their working lives than men do—for reasons ranging from child care responsibilities to glass ceilings. Then, when it comes time to receive Social Security, they’re still on the losing end—the average benefit for a woman is $13,891 a year, compared to $17,663 a year for men. Ruby Oakley, 74, wound up working as a Tulsa school crossing guard when she couldn’t live on her Social Security income. The job, she said, only “pays some chump change—$7 an hour” for work that involves standing in traffic trying to stay between the cars and the children. But, she concluded, “the people at the city think they’re doing the senior citizens a favor by letting them work like this.” Roberta Gordon, a resident of a senior apartment complex in California, told The Atlantic she didn’t even expect to be alive at 76, let alone working. But there she was, handing out samples at a local grocery store, trying to make enough to cover her $1,040 monthly rent.
Whether women want to work longer for satisfaction or subsistence, they can run into the roadblock of age discrimination. Employers who pride themselves on workplace diversity when the issue is race or gender are often less enthusiastic when it comes to protecting older workers from being denied opportunities for advancement or being particularly targeted when it comes to cutbacks. Although these days they’ve generally learned a little discretion when it comes to expressing their feelings with terms like “old cow.” In 2010, an administrator at Ohio State University forgot that rule—or at least he presumed that he was communicating in private when he said, in an email, that dealing with his older staff members was “like herding hippos.” But the email went astray. Later, two teachers of English as a second language got to see what their boss had written, and they weren’t surprised. Julianne Taaffe and Kathryn Moon had been in their 50s when the new program director arrived on the scene and began dropping hints that he’d like his older employees to go away. When Taaffe went into her annual performance review, she said the first question she got was “How long have you been around here, anyway?”
The older teachers were moved out of their offices and forced to share computers. They were passed over for promotions and good assignments, and found themselves referred to as “dead wood.” Truly, it didn’t take a detective. Feeling forced out, Taaffe and Moon left their jobs before they were eligible for full retirement benefits. Then they filed age discrimination suits. After years of painful, expensive, and stressful litigation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided they were right. Ohio State agreed to rehire Taaffe and Moon and pay them retroactive benefits and attorney’s fees. Plus train human resources staff to prevent such cases in the future.
It was about as good a decision as they could get, given that—thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in 2000—state employers do not have to pay damages to people they’ve discriminated against on the basis of age. Taaffe and Moon said their biggest goal was to make things better for older workers who came later, and pronounced themselves satisfied. But age discrimination cases continue to be tough to pursue, even when the beleaguered employees are blessed with a boss who is careless about his emails.
“Age is treated as a second-class civil right,” said Dan Kohrman, an attorney for AARP who supervises national litigation and worked on the Ohio State case. Women continue to have the most problems and the hardest cases to litigate. Some employers—particularly in office situations—prefer female underlings who are young and attractive, and try to get rid of them as they age. Thanks to previous Supreme Court decisions, if they’re charged with age bias, they can point to their good record with older men. And if gender comes up, they can point to their large supply of younger women.
After Meryl Streep spent her 40s avoiding those witch roles, she decided to play one after all in 2014, when she was 65. It was in a musical, Into the Woods, with a complicated character who struggles to regain her youthful beauty and disappears into a vat of boiling tar. She liked the experience so much that she accepted a part in director Rob Marshall’s next film, Mary Poppins Returns, playing an eccentric supporting character named Topsy. On her first day of shooting, the 67-year-old Streep walked in “and Rob pointed to the chandelier and said, ‘up these steps, then jump off, then you’ll twirl around on that.’”
Pleased with the chandelier-twirling assignment, Streep said she was “very fortunate” to be working in the entertainment industry at just the point when it seems to be getting more open to older actresses. In 2009, she had starred in a romantic comedy, It’s Complicated, the story of a 60-year-old woman caught between the attentions of her ex-husband and a new suitor. And in 2019, she joined the cast of Big Little Lies, a popular TV series about a group of mostly middle-aged women in Monterey who try to solve a murder. Streep was playing the role of Nicole Kidman’s mother-in-law. In 2018, when Kidman, 50, received a Screen Actors Guild award for her performance in the series, she thanked the older female actresses who had gone before and told the audience “how wonderful it is that our careers today can go beyond 40 years old.”
Well, not everybody’s. Remember that study that found only 11 percent of the speaking parts in the top 100 films of 2015 were for characters sixty or older. “Most of the jobs go to people in their twenties and thirties,” said a spokesman for the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. After that, things started to get tougher for everybody—“but men have a longer shelf life into their forties.” Opportunities for female actors tend to evaporate when they are in their forties or fifties, he added. “And then they come back a bit—but while you’re waiting all those years, men have a better chance of making a living.”
So the bottom line is that for women in Hollywood young is good. Old is reasonably well stacked with character parts, but middle age is a desert. Things are somewhat better if you want acting roles on television. In 2016, Forbes determined that the highest-paid women on TV were on average five years older than the ones in movies. “In fact, not a single woman over 50 made the film list,” W magazine pointed out. “Four entrants on the TV list have all reached the half-century mark.” It was not the kind of news that would trigger dancing in the streets, but it was still a move in the right direction. TV is, after all, where most of the jobs are popping up. “Now, movie stars who make the move to television are like European aristocrats emigrating to America after World War II—there are so many opportunities in the new world and so little left back home to reclaim,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in the Times.
And maybe sometime soon Hollywood will figure out how to make an Avengers sequel with aging female superheroes.
As First Ladies go, Michelle Obama was on the younger end of the scale. She came on the job at 45, almost exactly the same age as Hillary Clinton had been and a year younger than Melania Trump. She was, depending on how you counted, either the last First Lady of the baby-boom era or the first Gen Xer in the White House. (Boomers are generally defined as people born between the end of World War II and 1964. Michelle arrived on the scene on January 17, 1964.)
Given her focus on healthy eating and exercise—remember that White House vegetable garden?—it was pretty clear Michelle was going to be one of the fittest First Ladies in history. “When I was at the White House, I often hosted bootcamp weekends for my close girlfriends,” she wrote on Instagram. “It didn’t matter that we were all at varying fitness levels. Our bootcamp weekends were a reminder that if we want to keep taking care of others, we need to take care of ourselves first.” She didn’t share many thoughts about aging until she turned 50 and the media started asking her how that felt. The answer was “fabulous.”
“Every event I go to, every rope line, women are looking better with every passing year,” she told People in a birthday interview. “I run into women all the time who will just happen to mention, ‘Oh, I’m going to be 60,’ and it’s like ‘You’re kidding me!’ I just went to see Cicely Tyson on Broadway. She is in her 80s and did a two-hour play with stamina and passion. I told her, ‘I want to be you when I grow up!’ And there’s Jane Fonda…”
Michelle Obama is a wildly popular former First Lady—her autobiography, Becoming, sold 1.4 million copies the week it was released in 2018. She was, of course, succeeded in the job by Melania Trump, a 46-year-old former model. Melania steered pretty clear of the press, but Americans who were interested in her health routine could pick up some details, like her fondness for Pilates and habit of eating seven pieces of fruit a day. At one point in 2018 she disappeared from public events for about a month, during which time the administration said she was recovering from a kidney condition. We know there were rumors that she’d had cosmetic surgery because her husband tweeted about them:
The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife and our great First Lady, Melania. During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse. All Fake, she is doing really well!
Truly, by that point the nation had so much else to think about that Melania’s antiaging strategies were really not a major point of consideration.
There was possibly no other woman on the planet as famous as Hillary Clinton. We were with her in her 40s, during a rocky career as First Lady, when she fought endlessly and unsuccessfully for health care reform while living through the humiliation of the Intern in the Oval Office. But then—even before her tenure in the White House had run out—she got herself elected to the Senate by a state she’d never really lived in. And she became a fine lawmaker, great at working across the aisle on projects that were important and wonky, obsessive in her struggle to bring economic development to towns in upstate New York. She ran for president, lost the nomination to Barack Obama, and became his secretary of state. Then she ran again in 2016, becoming the first woman ever to get a major party’s nomination. She wore a pantsuit to make her acceptance speech. It was white, in honor of the suffragists.
Early in the campaign it looked as if Clinton’s age might be an issue. She was 67, and Republican candidates seemed to enjoy mentioning it. Marco Rubio, 43, kept talking about a “generational choice” between the politics of the future and people who were “promising to take us back to yesterday.” Rand Paul, 51, stressed that running for president was “a rigorous physical ordeal.” Scott Walker, 47, pointed out that he could wait another 20 years to make the run and “still be about the same age as the former secretary of state.”
Some of this sounded silly even when it was being articulated—Scott Walker could have waited 100 years and he still wouldn’t have been a viable candidate. And, as a Chicago Tribune critic pointed out, while Obama had been described as “a young man on the rise” when he ran for president at 46, the media’s description of Clinton supporters of the same age was “white older women.”
The discussion pretty much evaporated when the Republicans nominated Donald Trump, who was 69. Still, it was not as if Trump recognized that age in a woman was the same thing as age in a man. During the primary campaigns, he had mocked Republican opponent Carly Fiorina by saying, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” Fiorina, 61, retorted that she was “proud of every year and every wrinkle.”
And when the choice came down to Trump or Clinton, Trump began claiming that Clinton, who suffered from a bout of pneumonia late in the campaign, didn’t “have the stamina” for the job.
“To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina,” he said during a debate. “You have to be able to negotiate our trade deals. You have to be able to negotiate, that’s right, with Japan, with Saudi Arabia.” Clinton, whose tenure as secretary of state had been nothing if not stamina testing, responded that Trump could make that argument “as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents and opening of new opportunities in nations around the world.”
Still, the talk about her physical endurance worried her. In September, when she got pneumonia, she kept it secret for fear it would become a campaign issue. Pushing on with her schedule, she weakened and had to be helped into her van after an appearance at the 9/11 memorial. While she was at the ceremony, she recalled later, she ran into Senator Chuck Schumer. Knowing nothing about her condition, Schumer told her he had come down with pneumonia and spent a week at home on doctor’s orders. “Looking back, I should have done the same,” she wrote.
Clinton’s supporters are still debating whether she lost because she was a woman. Or because she was a 69-year-old woman. All we know for sure is that in the end, Trump got elected and went on to become the president who was driven around a gathering of international leaders in a golf cart while the other heads of state walked together to their meetings. And Clinton left the center stage, crushed. It’ll be a while before Americans can assign her a proper place in American history. But when we do, people will remember that she was the pioneer who made a woman running for president seem normal.
In January of 2019, Nancy Pelosi, 78, became the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Getting there had not exactly been a stroll in the park. The Wall Street Journal estimated that during the 2018 congressional elections, Republicans had run more than 135,000 ads that mentioned her “in an entirely negative context.” Pelosi was a natural target, having been the Democrats’ leader in the House since 2007, including four prior years as Speaker. But you couldn’t help wondering about the woman angle. In 2010, when the Democrats controlled the Senate but not the House, Pelosi was subjected to seven times more attack ads than Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.
A lot of rank-and-file House Democrats were grumbling that somebody else deserved a shot at their top job. Pelosi’s supporters pointed out that she was a skilled negotiator who was great at rounding up votes in her balky caucus, and a tireless fund-raiser who got a big chunk of credit for the Democrats’ sweeping House victories in the 2018 elections. (Like Hillary Clinton, Pelosi has a genius for falling asleep at will while she’s flying around the country.) “She works harder than any human being I’ve ever known,” said one of Pelosi’s predecessors, Richard Gephardt. In 2018, Pelosi broke a record for longest speech ever given in the House of Representatives when she talked for more than eight hours without a break, recounting stories of young Americans who had been brought into the country illegally as children and were known as the Dreamers.
But still. Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York, 53, told reporters Americans wanted “a next generation of Democrats to lead the way.” Among the other rebels were Linda Sánchez of California, 48, who’d been saying for a while that it was time for Pelosi to “pass the torch.” She was hardly the only one dropping metaphors about torch passing. Pelosi put the rebellion down rather quickly, but in order to keep her job, she also agreed to a self-imposed term limit—four more years and out.
Complaints about Pelosi came to a screeching halt when the Speaker led her party through a 2019 government shutdown in the battle over Donald Trump’s border wall. But the story of the House rebellion is a very high-profile example of a larger generational dilemma. The American women who fought for a place at the table in the 1970s and 1980s not only showed the country how to win; they also demonstrated that they could keep winning and producing great results when they reached their later years. But at the same time, some restive younger women began to wonder whether their seniors were ever going to step down, go away, and give them a chance to lead. When women fought for a future in which age didn’t matter, nobody talked much about whether there would be enough room at the top for everybody who deserved to be there.
While Pelosi was reclaiming the Speaker’s job, the House Democrats did bow to the younger generation by electing 48-year-old Hakeem Jeffries of New York to the important post of caucus chair. Jeffries beat Barbara Lee of California in a 123–113 vote. Both lawmakers were black, both were regarded as party stars. But Lee was 72, and she blamed ageism for her loss. “That’s something that women, especially women of color, African American women, have to face,” she told reporters.
For a long time, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked whether she was going to step down from the Supreme Court, she would remind her questioners that Louis Brandeis didn’t retire until he was 82. When she hit 81, it was clear she was going to need another example, and as Ginsburg progressed on into her late 80s she was telling people that “John Paul Stevens didn’t step down until he was 90.”
Ginsburg had always been a heroine to American liberals, but after Donald Trump was elected president, her health became something of an obsession. People who might not even be able to name John Roberts, the chief justice, were keenly aware that Justice Ginsburg worked out several times a week with a personal trainer. She became a cult figure. Young women collected RBG T-shirts and coffee mugs. Some even had her initials tattooed on their arms. (If reports of the breadth of this phenomenon were possibly exaggerated, remember that there’s probably nobody walking around sporting a John Roberts tattoo.)
Ginsburg is unique in many ways, including for her health history; she is notable for making big comebacks. She was treated for colon cancer in 1999 and for pancreatic cancer in 2009. She had a heart problem in 2014 that first showed itself while she was working out. None of it seemed to slow her down, but in 2015 she did nod off during Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech. She explained later that she was possibly just the slightest bit tipsy. At a meal the justices had before the event, she said, she had “vowed this year, just sparkling water, stay away from the wine. But in the end, the dinner was so delicious it needed wine to accompany it.”
She heard about it. One of her grandchildren called her after the event and said: “Bubbe, you were sleeping at the State of the Union!”
Ginsburg also broke two ribs in a fall in 2018, and doctors treating her discovered cancerous growths on one lung. They removed them, and she appeared to be ready for another year on the bench. Her admirers didn’t want to see her retire while Donald Trump was in the position to appoint a successor, but some of them couldn’t help regretting that she had ignored suggestions that she ought to step down while there was a Democratic president in office. “Who do you think Obama could have nominated and got confirmed that you’d rather see on the court?” she demanded.
She was also probably more than a little fearful of what life would be like without the job. Her friend Sandra Day O’Connor had retired in 2006 to be with her husband, John, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. The loss of O’Connor, a Republican moderate, left Ginsburg voting in the minority in decisions she felt would have gone her way 5–4 if O’Connor had stayed around. And those retirement plans fell through. Ginsburg remembered her friend talking about all the activities she and her husband would do together, but his condition deteriorated quickly. “John was in such bad shape she couldn’t keep him at home,” Ginsburg recalled.
The story got even worse. John O’Connor, who no longer even recognized Sandra, was moved to an assisted-living center, where he fell in love with another Alzheimer’s patient. Their son said his mother was “thrilled” that he had at least found some happiness. But it had to be painful, visiting her husband while he sat on a swing holding hands with his new partner, totally unaware he was chatting with his wife of 55 years. O’Connor devoted her retirement years to working for Alzheimer’s research and a personal crusade to get young people more interested in civics. In 2018, at 88, she announced that she had been diagnosed with dementia—probably Alzheimer’s—and dropped out of public life entirely.
Ginsburg’s husband, Marty, whom she married in 1954, died in 2010. When she wasn’t serving as a justice on the nation’s most powerful court, or working out with her trainer, or visiting with her grandchildren, she was constantly on the move: giving speeches, sitting on panels, introducing friends when they were giving speeches. And occasionally going on working vacations. Once, she and her improbable friend the very conservative justice Antonin Scalia had joint gigs teaching in France. They were taking some time off on the Riviera when Ginsburg stunned Scalia by going parasailing. “This skinny little thing, you’d think she’d never come down,” Scalia said.
Which, metaphorically, was exactly Ginsburg’s plan.
In 2011, when ABC was promoting its coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the news talent it featured included Katie Couric, 54, Diane Sawyer, 65, Christiane Amanpour, 53, Barbara Walters, 81, Elizabeth Vargas, 49, and Robin Roberts, 50. Things had changed. TV news was a good example of how quickly the nation adapted to seeing women in positions of power once people were given the opportunity to regard it as normal. In 2006, CBS made Couric the first national news sitting-there-all-alone anchor and it was a huge story. Three years later, when Sawyer got the same job at ABC, it was pretty much business as usual.
Sawyer stepped down from the anchor job in 2014, when she was 68, and there were no longer any women at the head of any of the nightly news shows. But the evening news itself had slid in popularity—it had been a long time since families gathered around the TV after dinner to see what had been going on in the world that day. Women were starring in other network TV news programs, and the age barrier seemed to be cracking. In the years immediately following Sawyer’s departure, Robin Roberts of ABC’s Good Morning America was in her late 50s and Rachel Maddow, who had her own evening talk show on MSNBC, was in her mid-40s. There was also Mika Brzezinski, 50, the co-host of Morning Joe, an NBC talk show named after her husband, Joe Scarborough. The couple courted and married while they were working on-air together, and had a famous falling-out with Donald Trump, a former pal who alienated them as his politics went increasingly right wing. By June of Trump’s first year in office he sent out an enraged tweet claiming Brzezinski and Scarborough had tried to wrangle a New Year’s Eve invitation to Mar-a-Lago: “She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!” Trump’s attitude toward plastic surgery was more along the line of catty gossip than disapproval. In 2014, he tweeted, “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon,” after 81-year-old Kim Novak presented an Academy Award on TV. Novak was traumatized and went into seclusion.
Back on the local news scene, viewers were getting a mixed message. The media company Meredith, which owns 15 local television stations, was being sued by female former news anchors from Kansas City and Nashville, who were dismissed and replaced with younger people. One of them, Demetria Kalodimos, then 58, discovered her walking papers in a package that was left at the station’s front desk. “The face of WSMV in Nashville for three decades, she is one of the most decorated reporters in the city.… Her departure was a farce,” wrote journalist Steve Cavendish, in an op-ed for the New York Times called “The Fight to Be a Middle-Aged Female News Anchor.”
On a brighter note, Jean Enersen, anchor at Seattle’s KING-TV, was still at her desk in 2016, when she was 72. No one, she said, had ever tried to force her out the door over the years. But when the station offered buyouts to its higher-salaried staff, Enersen “took it just to see if I had another chapter.” The departure, she said, was “cordial,” if not the rousing farewell tribute you might have expected for a 50-year employee.
Enersen did have another chapter, which involved building a children’s health clinic. When the station became interested in promoting the project, too, she was invited to come back and do some programs about it. Then, when President Trump’s attacks on the media ratcheted up, KING asked Enersen to return as an editorial spokesperson. “I couldn’t be happier—I’ve gone from anchor to advocate,” she said.
Enersen’s pleasure was partly about her TV work but also very much about that clinic project. “I think it’s going to be a shining star on the hill that other communities are going to look to,” she predicted. All in all, that new chapter was turning into the equivalent of at least a novelette. “I love it. I absolutely love it,” she said. “I feel more jet-propelled than ever because I really want this thing to fly.”
It is a story that Lydia Maria Child would have applauded in the nineteenth century—finding extra meaning in later life by serving your community. Given her passion for political reform, Child would probably also have appreciated the idea of coupling volunteer work with editorials denouncing Donald Trump. But in general, the twenty-first century hasn’t been working out the way Child might have hoped. Older women are becoming less inclined to volunteerism. It is true for older Americans in general—only about 28 percent of people 55 to 64 report having done nonpaying work for their church, school, or charity. The rate is less than 25 percent for people 65 and over. And those who still put in some time aren’t exactly devoting their lives to it. Most of the older volunteers are spending less than 100 hours a year, which boils down to an average of about two hours a week.
“It’s not what it used to be for many different reasons,” said Anna Quindlen, the novelist and opinion columnist whose work with Planned Parenthood included a stint on the board of directors. “One is that women have jobs now—some jobs that last into their seventies and even beyond. And women who are retired more and more find themselves acting as caregivers for their grandchildren.” These days, she said, a prime source for volunteers is “kids who just graduated from college and are given unpaid internships” that count as doing good while also enhancing the résumé.
It is certainly true that retirees have plenty of other options: travel, sports, exercise, relationships. And, of course, there is work. Close to a third of women 55 and over are employed, and others are being encouraged to think about it—even if reality isn’t always as enticing as the media suggests. When Southern Living published “12 of the Best, Dreamiest and Most Unusual Jobs for When You Retire,” the list included everything from cruise staff to Uber driver to clown. (“The nation is facing a clown shortage.”)
Or you might be busy online. For most pre-millennials, life on the web is a learning process. At a White House correspondents’ dinner during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, President Obama compared her to an elderly relative who couldn’t get a grip on Facebook: “Did you get my poke? Is it appearing on your wall? I’m not sure I’m using this right. Love, Aunt Hillary.” But a great many women who never looked a cellphone in the eye until they were in their 50s or 60s are figuring out how to master the new media and use it for everything from posting on Facebook to doing the accounting for their businesses to organizing political campaigns.
Aging-fabulously blogs are popping up all over. Judith Boyd, a retired psychiatric nurse, started Style Crone in 2005 to document the over-the-top outfits she donned as distraction for her husband when he was undergoing chemotherapy. Helen Ruth Elam Van Winkle, better known as Baddie Winkle, has been constantly referred to in the media as “an internet sensation at the age of 85.” A Times report on the older women bloggers—after noting that they are “often grandmothers”—pointed out that many stars of this new world are able to monetize their work, collecting advertising contracts. Baddie Winkle, the story said, “has millions of followers and is paid to tout brands like göt2b hair products and Smirnoff on her account and has made personal appearances at Sephora.”
The idea that older women can attract advertisers has been kind of revolutionary. Many makers of consumer products had shunned them because they believed older readers/viewers didn’t buy anything—or at least wouldn’t buy anything new. That is obviously untrue, and a Nielsen survey found that consumers over 55 aren’t more attached to their brands than younger people.
The baby-boom generation, which dominated national culture and conversation for half a century, is moving into its 60s and 70s, and it did seem for a while as if the economy was losing interest in them. Nielsen, the global information company, bemoaned the way boomer-targeted ads appeared to be confined in large part to stair lifts and diabetes medication. (“They do not think of themselves as broken and neither should marketers.”) It wasn’t as if the money was missing. Boomer women have a median income of $795 a week compared to $516 for the much-sought-after male in his early 20s, “but they remain invisible to advertisers,” noted the American Marketing Association. Even Jane Fonda felt neglected—at least on television, where her character Grace on Grace and Frankie is ignored by the staff at a store where she’s shopping. “Do you not see me?” she demands. “Do I not exist?”
But this is still America, and wherever there’s money, there’s eventually going to be attention. The glossy fashion magazines realized that many young women simply couldn’t afford the products in their ads. “We exist in a post-recessionary world and the millennial generation is more challenged in terms of its buying ability,” Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman told Adweek in 2015. Somewhere during the second decade of the twenty-first century, things evolved. “All hail the rise of the over-70 campaign star,” decreed the style magazine Dazed, when the luxury brand Céline announced that 80-year-old Joan Didion was going to be the face of its spring line. Saint Laurent gave the honor to Joni Mitchell, 72. “Older models are like so in right now, so it makes total sense that Marc Jacobs wants to jump on that trend,” Elle magazine enthused, when the fashion brand picked Jessica Lange, 64, as the face of its 2014 campaign.
It’s largely true that to be featured in a big consumer campaign when you’re over 60, you already have to be internationally famous for doing something else. But still, companies were trying to appeal to what they had seen—rather suddenly—as a new market.
Models in their 60s and 70s—even some who never had been famous singers or actresses—were appearing more frequently in magazine fashion spreads. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times had quoted Ginni Conquest of Wilhelmina Models as saying that older models were “our fastest-growing area.” She was co-director of the “sophisticated women’s division” at Wilhelmina, a group that included anybody 25 or over. While the outside world was no longer used to attaching the age of 25 to “older,” this was obviously a big deal for the fashion industry.
During the older-women-models boom in 2014, Julia Roberts, 46, became a face of Lancôme, where she was named the main perfume model. She told a British magazine she had “taken a big risk” in not preparing for her assignment by having a face-lift: “I’ve told Lancôme that I want to be an ageing model, so they have to keep me for at least five more years until I’m over 50.” Her secret to looking young while getting older, she said, was about “non-grasping, non-hoarding, cleaning out your closet, dusting out your mind and letting go of the things that weigh you down mentally and emotionally.” It was yet another version of Lillian Russell’s Think Beautiful Thoughts dictum. As time went on, not everyone who viewed Roberts’s completely seamless face was convinced she had never had work done. But only the true cynics cared. Audiences were used to seeing their favorite stars looking… improved upon. Unless things became really stiff and scary, average viewers seldom complained.
In 2016, a film critic, Owen Gleiberman of Variety, wrote a reasonably thoughtful piece about actress Renée Zellweger, asking, “If She No Longer Looks Like Herself, Has She Become a Different Actress?” Gleiberman didn’t definitively say he thought Zellweger had had cosmetic surgery—a rather dicey topic unless the celebrity herself acknowledges it. And he didn’t criticize her appearance. It was just that he felt she looked attractive in a different way than the Bridget Jones star, who looked beautiful, but “in the way an ordinary person is.” If Zellweger was going to make sequels, Gleiberman said, he wanted the future Bridget Jones to look the way the old one did. The piece drew a super-scathing response from the actress Rose McGowan, who claimed Gleiberman was “an active endorser of what is tantamount to harassment and abuse of actresses and women.” If Gleiberman didn’t like the way Zellweger was aging, she suggested he shut up: “What you are doing is vile, damaging, stupid and cruel.” McGowan would go on to become a central figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, which everybody can probably agree was a much more critical problem for women than gossiping about face-lifts.
Zellweger had in fact caused quite a stir a year or two earlier when she appeared at an event looking—very much younger. But by the time she wandered into Gleiberman’s crosshairs she had “actively returned to her old look,” noted writer Caroline Siede in Quartz, who felt Zellweger had become “a walking metaphor for the shameful way we treat aging women in Hollywood.” Siede then launched into an update of complaints made by every generation of women since the invention of motion pictures. Angelina Jolie had, at 29, been cast as the mother of 28-year-old Colin Farrell in the movie Alexander. Maggie Gyllenhaal, 37, had reported being told she was “too old” to play opposite an unnamed 55-year-old actor.
“Put another way,” Siede continued, “Robert Downey Jr. is currently playing one of the world’s most popular superheroes, while Marisa Tomei and Diane Lane are playing the mother figures of superheroes. All three actors are 51 years old.”
Zellweger herself wrote that the whole thing was “deeply troubling.”
The country’s 7,000 cosmetic surgeons performed more than 17 million procedures in 2017, most of them minimally invasive procedures like Botox injections and chemical peels. But 1.8 million patients—the vast majority of them women—underwent surgery. This wasn’t all a story about resisting aging. The most common procedures were liposuction and nose reshaping. And more than a million involved women under 30. Still, the biggest clump of patients were 40 to 54, followed by those 55 and over.
Having gotten this far, we ought to discuss whether or not all this is a bad thing. For some actresses, cosmetic surgery is part of the work agenda—one of the burdens of movie stardom is having your every nip and tuck noticed and gossiped about by large numbers of complete strangers. A lot of ordinary people wanted to look a little younger, too, yet felt some angst about having a doctor cut into their face or shove chemical compounds under the skin. And there was also that sense of guilt, the questions about whether having work done meant caving in to the wrong values.
In 2016, Debora Spar, at the time president of Barnard College, published “Aging and My Beauty Dilemma” in the New York Times. Like most women in her “liberal, feminist-leaning, highly educated peer group,” she said, “I am ideologically opposed to intervening in such a natural and inevitable process as getting on in years. But,” she continued, “like many of my peers I am also a two-faced hypocrite, at least when it comes to parts of myself that may well benefit from a twinge of not-quite-so-natural intervention.” After all, almost everybody colors their hair, she pointed out, and these days “many women will quietly confess to a shot of Botox from time to time, or a dose of filler to soften their smiles. It’s after that point that things become dodgy.”
We’ve been down a long, historic path on the fixing-your-face front. Remember the colonial debate about whether it should be illegal for women to trick men by wearing cosmetics? American women spent a couple of centuries agonizing about hair color—an argument that finally ended when the answer to “Does she or doesn’t she?” was “Almost everybody does.” Now Spar was saying we’d pretty much passed the point—at least in places like Manhattan or Los Angeles—when having a physician inject chemicals into your face to fill out wrinkles was anything but standard operating procedure. The debate had moved on to the next level, she continued: “Brow lifts. Estrogen. Tummy tucks. Cellfina cellulite treatment.… Does a little face-lift along the way constitute treason, or just reasonable accommodation? I don’t know.”
What she did know, she wrote, was that for women at the top—in business or entertainment or society—the physical appearance bar kept rising, and it was becoming harder and harder to turn down intervention. Women “facing the onslaught of middle age are armed with an arsenal of age-fighting implements and, for many, a feminist inspired philosophy that disdains using them.” It was pretty clear the philosophy was on the losing end. Spar recalled a party she had been to in Manhattan that featured “women of a certain age, mostly from the news media and politics,” in which everybody looked great but suspiciously similar. “Everyone (at least in certain high-profile or professional circles) is doing it, and very few are confessing,” she concluded.
Spar’s piece triggered a lot of responses, ranging from outrage (“Vintage faces, like fashion, should be worn proudly”) to agreement (“so happy I went under the knife”). But even some of the support letters were tinged with regret. “Although Ms. Spar invokes the need of high-powered women to conform to ‘professional standards’ all women face the same pressure,” wrote one correspondent. “Not all risk losing high-paying jobs, but they face losing a spouse, or a salary, which can mean the difference between home and homelessness.”
It always got back to those bag ladies.
In Hollywood, insiders had been reporting for ages—really, ever since they began talking about such things in public—that one standard demand from male directors, producers, and other authority figures was that actresses be young enough to look “fuckable.” In 2015, comedian-writer Amy Schumer took the whole thing on in a skit called “Last F**kable Day.” In it, she stumbles on Tina Fey, 45, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, 54, and actress Patricia Arquette, 47, celebrating Julia’s arrival at that marker. The partygoers burst into laughter when Schumer asks whether men run into similar deadlines. “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then like twenty minutes later she was his mom in Forrest Gump?” asks Fey.
In the non-entertainment world, women were discovering that as long as they didn’t have to prove it by having an affair with Tom Hanks, their sexual life span could go on pretty much forever. On Saturday Night Live, comedian Leslie Jones announced that, since she was 51, she was giving up sex: “No one wants to have sex with an old bitch.” She bantered with 36-year-old Colin Jost (“you sexy, full-headed, Old Navy–wearing millennial”), who finally noted that he had just read that “your sexual peak actually starts at age 54.”
“I’m baaack!” Jones announced.
Women have, of course, been having sex in their later years forever. But there is definitely a twenty-first-century tendency to talk more about it. “At 80, I met a man.… David is the great love of my life,” says Frances, 87, in the documentary Still Doing It, which chronicles the sex lives of women like Frances—who met her lover in a home for the aged—and Betty, 73, whose partner, Eric, is 47 years her junior. “When she was 67 she had a hip replacement,” he explains. “If I’d have come too early, I’d have run into that. And it wouldn’t have worked. If I’d come later probably someone else would have been here by now.”
“Yep,” Betty retorts.
To stay in the game, women have found all sorts of helpful aids, from lubricants to special pillows designed to elevate their hips. And then there’s estrogen. Hormone therapy had dropped like a stone after that report by the Women’s Health Initiative in 2002. Doctors were worried about prescribing it for their menopausal patients, and women themselves were afraid to take it. Use was down about 80 percent. But the wheel was going around again, and medical experts were beginning to take another look. It was paradoxical, wrote Dr. JoAnn Manson in the New England Journal of Medicine, that “FDA-approved hormone treatments for menopausal symptoms are being used so infrequently even though our understanding of their benefits and risks has never been clearer.” Feel free to object that we’ve been down this road before. But HRT was back on the table, with many doctors recommending it for short-term use. The Mayo Clinic announced that the bottom line was—drum roll, please—“Hormone therapy isn’t all good or all bad.”
As the twenty-first century moves along, Generation X is approaching middle age and looking beyond. They’re the women who were born, roughly, in the ’60s and ’70s, post–baby boom, and their nickname is a good sign of what they’ve been up against. Google “Gen X” and you may find some kind of addendum along the lines of “often perceived to be disaffected and directionless.” If you’re squashed between the booming boomers and the moaning millennials, it’s easy to be ignored. As the oldest Gen Xers pass 50, they find themselves facing aging issues that had always seemed reserved for their parents or older siblings.
“While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter describes it bluntly: ‘Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young,’” wrote Pamela Druckerman, who was living in Paris and unnerved by the way waiters began calling her “madame” instead of “mademoiselle” at around the time she turned 40. Another Gen Xer, Ada Calhoun, said it felt a little strange to be complaining about a midlife crisis. After all, her generation got fairer wages and more equal rights than women ever had before in history. Plus their spouses knew they were supposed to help with the housework. “Insert your Reason Why We Don’t Deserve to Feel Lousy here,” she invited her peers.
Boomers had lived out the women’s revolution—they might well have been the first in their family to go to college, have a career, or combine work and family. Just having come through their era was a sort of achievement. The Xers, having grown up in a world where trying to have it all was a given, may have had more pangs of unmet goals. “Nearly 60 percent of Gen Xers describe themselves as stressed out,” wrote Calhoun. “An awful lot of middle-aged women are furious and overwhelmed.” There was, she added, that famous “U-curve” they were supposed to look forward to, when happiness that dipped in midlife went shooting back upward later. “But I hate hearing about the U-curve. That U-curve isn’t necessarily a guarantee of future performance. What if ours is the first generation in history with no curve at all, just a diagonal line pointed straight to the lower right-hand corner?” Many felt stalled in their careers, she said, stuck behind the boomers who don’t want to retire, with the millennials breathing down their necks.
Plus there was the pressure to have cosmetic surgery. Gen Xers, Calhoun noted, had to compete against not only younger women but also the very large number of women their own age and older who looked younger because they’d already had work done. “Midlife is when we need to take care of everyone else while we are most tired, to trust ourselves when we’re most filled with doubt,” she concluded. “What makes it worse is that many of our midlife fears are well founded. We may, in fact, die alone. Our marriages may never improve. We may never get the number of kids we hoped for. We may never save enough money to make the retirement calculators stop screaming. We may never do a fraction of what we thought we would do in our career.”
Okay, that was not encouraging. Ten million surveys showing middle-aged people generally enjoyed being middle-aged are not going to make you feel better if you’re the one with an unsatisfying job and a failing marriage. So I am not going to give you a list of quotes from Gen Xers who are happy with their stage in life. Well, okay. One. “I’m pretty damn thrilled to be 40,” announced actress Katherine Heigl, in a 2018 Instagram birthday post that celebrated her freedom “from all the self doubt, insecurities, self loathing, uncertainties and anxieties of my 20’s and 30’s.” We’ll draw a veil over the commenters who told her not to worry because “soon you’ll be 50 and then you’ll feel really old.”
As America moves toward the 2020s, the 60-somethings do seem to be taking over. “During the twentieth century the number of persons in the United States under age 65 has tripled,” the U.S. Census Bureau reported. “At the same time, the number aged 65 and over has jumped by a factor of 11!” By 2050, it projected, “the elderly population will more than double” to 80 million. Most of the growth, the experts said, would happen between 2010 and 2030, when “the ‘baby boom’ generation enters their elderly years.” No matter how many experts announce that 70 is the new 50, you’ll notice that as far as the Census Bureau is concerned, once you’re 65 you’re elderly.
This isn’t a story of longevity-ever-longer for all Americans. In 2016, a Washington Post headline announced “U.S. Life Expectancy Declines for the First Time Since 1993.” But the big drop involves white men, who are falling victim to the opioid crisis and alcoholism. A woman who is 65 can expect, on average, to live into her 80s. That isn’t all that terrific by international standards. Japan, France, Italy, and Hong Kong all have higher life expectancy. The United States is about on par with Vietnam, Uruguay, and Lebanon. But it is still quite a leap from the beginning of the century, and about five years longer than in 1950.
And the chances of reaching 90 are getting better and better. There were about 720,000 American nonagenarians in 1980, but by 2010 the number was closing in on 2 million—two-thirds of them women. Because we’re Americans, we’re going to be assigning tasks to this new generation aged 80 to 100. Most of them will have left behind their traditional jobs or careers, may have lost their partners, and will need to figure out what new opportunities and challenges there are for them as they march toward the triple digits. It’s not irrational to say: “Well, good grief, just take a rest.” But if you’re pushing 95 and in good health, somebody is going to point out to you that there’s a 96-year-old visiting patients at the local hospital, or read you the story of a 97-year-old woman employed by the National Park Service.
Yes! We’ve got career triumphs for 90-somethings. Our 97-year-old park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, got her job at 85, giving popular history talks to park visitors in Richmond, California. Soskin, who’s African American, made sure to give attention to the non-white side of the story. She received a presidential medal for her work. It was later stolen from her home, and although Soskin wasn’t able to stop the burglar, she did manage to tackle him and give his genitals a painful squeeze. Barack Obama sent her a replacement.
This was, of course, the twenty-first-century version of those articles celebrating the 100-year-old female race-car driver or the little old lady lighthouse keeper who kept rowing out to rescue drowning sailors. It was not what you’d call normal. But it was one of many signs that there’s not necessarily any fixed stopping point to an American woman’s life in our era. Betty White made one of her innumerable comebacks in 2010 when she was 88, playing touch football in a Superbowl ad. That led to a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live and a role in a new TV comedy series. At 96, White was still appearing at parties and awards shows, usually to get another prize herself. Pressed for the secret to a long, happy life, she generally recommended positive thinking, and threw in an occasional plug for vodka and hot dogs, “probably in that order.”
In 2014, Gloria Steinem had a “This is what eighty looks like” party at a benefit for the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. “Fifty was a shock because it was the end of the center of my life,” she recalled. “But once I got over that, 60 was great. Seventy was great. And I loved aging. I found myself thinking things like: ‘I don’t want anything I don’t have.’ How great is that?” But 80 was giving her pause. “Eighty is about mortality, not aging. Or not just aging.” She quickly bounced back—after the birthday celebration, she was off to ride elephants in Botswana.
Before she left, Steinem listed the good things about moving into her ninth decade. One of them, she said, was a dwindling libido. She always had been a woman with an extremely active romantic life. But looking at it from 80, Steinem couldn’t help thinking of what she might have accomplished if she hadn’t been distracted by sex. Finally, she decided, she was free to just focus on her priorities. And when she met a new man, she wouldn’t have to wonder whether an interesting conversation was going to morph into an assignation. “The brain cells that used to be obsessed are now free for all kinds of great things,” she declared. None of the younger women she knew bought into this theory, Steinem admitted. “When I was young I wouldn’t have believed it either.”
A few years after Steinem celebrated 80, she went to the 90th birthday party of Muriel Fox, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. They had been in the trenches together since the 1960s. Most of the guests were activists, organizers, and educators, and, except for Fox’s daughter and granddaughters, all 70 and beyond. There was toasting, and talking about stages of life, along with quite a bit of moaning about Donald Trump. Afterward, Fox saw everyone off to their many appointed rounds and happily returned herself to Kendal on Hudson, a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
Fox’s husband, a physician who once served as the president of the New York chapter of NOW, died in 2003. She heard about Kendal and put herself on a waiting list. It took four years to get an apartment. About two-thirds of the 330 residents are 86 or older. They’re engaged in all sorts of group projects, from counseling undocumented immigrants in nearby communities to holiday entertainments. One of Fox’s assignments was the Fourth of July show—a favorite memory was the time residents celebrated Independence Day by voting on what the national anthem should be. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” demolished “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“There are a bunch of lefties here,” she said, quoting Gloria Steinem’s theory on how women get more radical with age. But Fox parts company with her old friend on the desirability of giving up on sex. “Since Shep died I’ve had three really lovely romances,” Fox mused. “All the men died. But it was great.” She and her female friends at Kendal frequently lament the shortage of single men: “My guess is the ratio is eight to one.”
We’ve come a long way from the era when smart, independent women dreaded an old age filled with well-meaning helpers, forcing them to weave potholders or take classes on how to name the 13 colonies. With luck and money (yes, sometimes a lot of money), people can wind up in retirement communities where they’re able to live their own lives in their own homes, supported by some services and surrounded by neighbors like themselves who probably would invite them over for barbecue or golf or a book club. Fox’s place is typical of the latest models, which offer a progressive care program. She simply gets housekeeping help now, and the ability to eat in the communal dining room if she chooses: “There are lots of dinner parties, which are pretty easy, given that you can just reserve seats in the dining room.” Later, if she needs it, there will be a home health-care attendant, and then maybe all the services of a regular nursing home.
“I still don’t feel old,” Fox observed. “Except when I have spinal stenosis, which practically everyone here has.” An avid tennis player, she had to give up the game due to knee problems, “so I started a ping-pong group.”
This is a good time to remember that less than a century ago Ladies’ Home Journal was informing its readers that it was the job of older Americans “to adjust themselves to conditions made for them by people who belong to a later generation in a new world.” Getting older, the magazine decreed, was to become “obsolete, like fine old words erased from the epic of living.” Fair to say that things have improved. True, Lydia Maria Child would be unnerved by all the dermabrasions and the blogs from senior hotties. But it’s easy to imagine women from the past looking at our era and finding things pretty darned good. Well, at least on the aging front. Can’t say they’d all envy us Donald Trump.
Aging is the one part of life that every human being shares, and it’s never an easy territory to navigate. A couple of centuries ago, American women had so few options for how to make the journey that it was natural most of them simply settled for pious acceptance. Then, thanks to modern medicine—and those geniuses who figured out that it was a good idea to separate the sewage from the water—life spans lengthened and people thought a lot more about how to make their later years as full as possible. And now, for the first time in human history, great numbers of women are moving into old age after lives that have been jam-packed with careers, family life, and adventures of their own choosing. The nation is just beginning to appreciate what economic powerhouses they are. They’re in the world and they can change the world. Can’t wait to see how it works out.
If you’re lucky and healthy, there are, as we’ve seen, a lot of options. You can fight every wrinkle and try to make time stand still at 37. You can re-create yourself at 65—go back to college or move to Cambodia or start a commune. (Okay, we have noticed, over the course of this history, that communes hardly ever work. But you never can tell…) If you always keep your options open, maybe you’ll find yourself wearing a park ranger uniform at 97.
While we’re teaching ourselves how to get old in the best way possible, we can be grateful for the way the deadlines keep getting pushed back. Forty isn’t really seen as middle age anymore—unless, God help you, you’re trying to get a job in tech. Fifty is, but so is 60. This is the time when a lot of decisions are made about how long you intend to work and where you want to live in the next stage of your life—presuming the kids have genuinely left home. And for most women, it’s the time when friends are going to begin to die. Not the elderly lady you used to talk with at the library. Real friends. Mortality is approaching.
Yet quite a few people feel the best is still ahead. “I wouldn’t be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty,” wrote Anna Quindlen. “And when I say this to a group of women at lunch, everyone around the table nods.” Quindlen’s hitting-sixty book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, chronicled her two-year quest to learn how to do a headstand. It wasn’t your typical life goal, but to her it was “about the determination not to give up and give in, the refusal to see ‘older’ as synonymous with ‘less.’” And darned if she didn’t make the grade.
Or, on the other hand, you could listen to Nora Ephron, who complained about reading books in which the author “says it’s great to be old.… it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?” The way a woman’s neck changes with age was Ephron’s metaphor for the downside of growing older. In fact, she wrote a book about it: I Feel Bad About My Neck.
“According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at forty-three and that’s that,” Ephron mused. “Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.”
Actually, Ephron—the one who concluded that everything changed for women when the use of hair coloring became nearly universal—had a very American, very twenty-first-century vision of women and aging. She was diagnosed with leukemia in her 60s, and she had a very keen sense that she was facing the end of life. But she was also still having a great career—writing and directing a movie about the cookbook author Julia Child that would win Meryl Streep another Academy Award nomination. She was very happily married to writer Nick Pileggi; she knew everyone in the New York literary/media circles, and she was busy all the time. She wanted to keep watching and writing about all the things that amused her, warmed her, irritated her, and… tasted good. (In her last book, Ephron concluded a list of “Things I Will Miss” with “pie.”) She wanted to keep doing everything, and also talk, very ironically and very realistically, about the day-to-day experience of getting old.
Remember the hair-color motto about “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better”? Opinions differ. And these days we even have debates about how you define “older.” Advertising guru Faith Popcorn calls 60 to 68 “the childhood of old age,” and then moves on to 68 to 78 (“the adolescence of old age”), followed by “the adulthood of old age,” which lasts until the mid-80s. Then, by Popcorn’s reckoning, you spend your late 80s and 90s in “early late old age.” Finally, it’s time for genuine “old age,” which runs, in her mind, from 92 to 110.
Wise women do seem to agree that you’ve got to find a way to embrace the whole adventure. (Calling it an adventure isn’t self-deluding if you acknowledge right off the bat that this one may involve hip replacements.) Essayist Vivian Gornick recounted how “turning sixty was like being told I had six months to live,” until she discovered the advantages that came with realizing she could no longer retreat from the problems of today by taking refuge in “a fantasized tomorrow.” Gornick stopped daydreaming about what she might do later; when she walked familiar New York streets, she tried to pay attention to what was really happening around her and interact as much as possible with the people she met. “Energy—coarse and rich—began to swell inside the cavity of my chest. Time quickened, the air glowed, the colors of the day grew vivid; my mouth felt fresh. A surprising tenderness pressed against my heart with such strength it seemed very nearly like joy; and with unexpected sharpness I became alert not to the meaning but to the astonishment of human existence.”