The Lady Vanishes is not just the title of an Alfred Hitchcock movie; it describes the marginalization of women of a certain age. The sayings we have to describe the elderly reflect this mindset: long in the tooth, over the hill, past expiration date. The words hit close to home for females, conditioned by lifelong exposure to beauty magazines taking it as a given that desirability is the kissing cousin of beauty. As a result, we bid good riddance to our gray; we get pumped, lifted, and tucked; and we lie like hell when asked our age, which never hovers above forty, though, as children, we lived in terror of the Cold War. However, trying to look younger is analogous to a gay person masquerading as straight: It rarely fools anyone, and the effort is debilitating. Of course, the decades bring a host of physical ailments, and the situation is even more hurtful when younger people use the same voice with elders they do when speaking to kids, foreigners, or the feeble-minded. What I always found so painful was when strangers addressed me when speaking to my mother: how to make the elderly fifty shades of invisible. What the younger demographic does not understand is that inside an aging body is an individual who still has desires and dreams, something that dissipates when they are no longer seen, no longer heard. Dorothy Parker understood the hardship in navigating the terrain of age in her poem, “Afternoon,” when she wrote, “I wish those blessed years / Were further than they be!”
On the upside, the years bring pluses; we want less, and we care less about what others think. Stepping off the hamster wheel in our farewell to youth is an important step in making the Golden Years, well, golden. After all, there is a tsunami of liberation in not giving a damn. What I have learned from researching the subjects profiled here is to embrace wrinkles, the roadmap of our past. To judge ourselves by the years on our birth certificates is testimony that the patriarchy has won: women wane in post-reproductive years. We must not succumb to the lie that we are more desirable, both to advertisers and partners, when in the eighteen-to-twenty-four age bracket. As teens, we burned our bras, at least figuratively, to protest sexism. Now, we must do the same, and set fire to our support hose to denounce ageism. The ladies burned the former to gain power; the latter, to hold onto it. Gerontophobia is the final frontier of discrimination.
The titles of Erica Jong’s three books encapsulate the stages of the author’s life: Fear of Flying, Fear of Fifty, Fear of Dying. The common denominator of the ladies in Great Second Acts is that they arm-wrestled age and were unstoppable till the end of their long lives. Many other women merited a chapter in Great Second Acts; for example, the legendary Joan Baez deserves to be recognized. Forever young at age seventy-seven in 2018, she went on a European tour and released an album, Whistle Down the Wind. In her role as singer/activist, she met some of the most iconic people of the twentieth century and was the lover of two famous men. An Australian journalist called her and asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that you are the only woman in the world to have seen both Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan naked?” to which Joan replied, “But not at the same time.”
For allowing me to write a book in praise of older women, I have to thank my literary agent Roger Williams. The three-book deal he brokered has given me a purpose―the best antidote to aging. Brenda Knight has been my knight—always encouraging, always unstoppable. The last nod of gratitude is to my husband, Joel Geller, who always sees me through the lens of love, despite the ravages of Time. As Robert Browning wrote, “Grow old with me! The best is yet to be / The last of life, for which the first was made….” Love is the best Fountain of Youth.
By following in the footsteps of the women in Great Second Acts, we can thumb our noses at ageism, a phenomenon as old as time itself. Vintage wine, vintage cars, and vintage clothes are not the only hallmark of worth. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote in the first century AD, “Senectus morbidus est,” “Old age is a disease.” Fast-forward to Mark Zuckerberg, who declared, “Young people are just smarter.” The battle is real. But, as the women in my book prove, older ladies do not need rocking chairs. They rock.
Marlene Wagman-Geller
San Diego, California 2018