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The dislike, even hatred, of the old by the young is so deeply held that even people who believe they are embracing elderhood don’t know how demeaning they are.
“We are hardly the same at forty-plus that our mothers and grandmothers were. We want to approach aging with style and grace...â€
“The forty-plus woman no longer looks, acts or realizes she is older. She has the choice to be young at heart, in body and mind. Unlike the generations before her, she has the ability to control many of her aging issues...â€
“We don’t need to think like our grandmothers.â€
These are quoted in an excerpt published at msnbc.com from a book by Christine Schwab with a title - The Grown-up Girl’s Guide to Style - which, along with those disparaging attacks on mothers and grandmothers, should gag any grown-up woman.
If you are past 40 and still think you are a girl, you may leave the room now. Too many millions of us marched in the 1960s for the right to be acknowledged as women to be infantilized now by some “style expert and fashion consultant†who, although she writes that she “will give you honest answers†and “I still think I am thirty,†doesn’t mention her real age, and reverts to calling us “girlsâ€. (Where’s Helen Reddy when you really need her?)
Ms. Schwab holds up actor Diane Keaton as an older woman to emulate because she “covers her liabilities with gloves and a high neckline.†Is it possible that nearly half a century after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, I am still being told that any imperfection in my body (my wrinkled neck and spotted hands in this case) must be hidden from public view? How Victorian of the writer. And how disgusting to hear it from a woman.
Ms. Schwab does not appear to recognize her own irony when in one breath she extols Eleanor Roosevelt and Golda Meir for teaching “prior generations that our brains were as important as our looks†and follows up in the next breath with “We don’t need to think like our grandmothers.â€
Most people are capable of recognizing that Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Meir are the grandmothers of many 40-plus women – both ideologically and in literal years – and both of them were too busy with world-changing events to concern themselves with age spots and wrinkles.
This book is offensive both for its ageism and its sexism. It is a puzzle why such self-styled style experts think women need this kind of help? Would they write a book titled, The Grown-up Boy’s Guide to Style? And what makes them think a 50- or 60- or 70- or more-year-old wants to “be young at heart, in body and mind�
I like this OLD heart much more than my younger one. It is informed now by decades of pain and joy, grief and exhilaration, hurt and happiness that I hadn’t yet experienced when I was young. I am so much more capable now of better love and understanding. I am relieved to, aside from health measures, let this old body settle into itself. And my old mind? It is light years ahead of what it was even ten years ago, let alone 30 or 40. I have no desire to hide the remarkable gains I’ve made in heart, body and mind that could not happen but with the passage of time.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be stylish and put forward one’s best foot. But there is a big difference between being 20- and 30-something when attracting a man is still of foremost importance to most women, and being 60 or 70 when, beyond being neat, clean and appropriate, matters other than beauty and glamour (or, rather, “glam-ma†as Ms. Schwab characterizes comedian Goldie Hawn’s grandmother status) drive our interests and behavior.
It is such books as this one that perpetuate ageism, convincing gullible readers and the culture at large that aging is the worst thing that can happen to anyone and you’re not holding up your end of the girlie imperative if you are not pretending to be 20-something unto your grave.
And the worst part is that it is most often women who are doing this to other women.
* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By - What it’s really like to get older.,
