Last Sunday was the first anniversary of the death of Betty Friedan. Without her seminal book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1964, BlogHer might not be here today because the women’s movement of the mid-20th century would not have got off the ground. Or, at least, not as soon as it did.

Ms. Friedan was a giant influence in my life. Although I never met her, it is not going too far to say that she changed the direction of my life. When I finished high school, few “girls” went to college and the only jobs reasonably open to us were secretary, waitress, teacher and nurse. Fortunately Betty came along when I was in my twenties to teach me and every other woman that we could aim for something more or different.

I did and went on to a fascinating career in media which, although I am “officially” retired according to the Social Security Administration, continues in a new manner today.

These days, I write about getting old and one of the first resources I turned to ten years ago when I first began researching aging was The Fountain of Age, written by Betty Friedan who put as much thought, hard work and energy into exploring the problem of ageism (which hardly anyone acknowledged when her book was published in 1993), as she did to the feminist argument in the 1960s.

The book cannot be summarized in a short, blog post. As with The Feminine Mystique, Friedan asked hard questions of the aging establishment and challenged their assumptions at every turn. Here are some excerpts from the Preface in which Ms. Friedan details her journey through the realities, myths and misunderstandings of aging in America she traveled while writing The Fountain of Age:

“Why were many women and men frantically denying, avoiding, refusing to admit their age, enduring deep depression at the prospect, while other crossed the age divide and found beyond it previously denied aspects of themselves?”

“Now, at the aging conferences, I heard myself asking how people in their thirties and forties could identify the crucial questions and ethical issues for people over sixty-five. ‘Them.’ Wasn’t it like having a bunch of men define the problems of women?”

“But when I asked [feminist theologians] if there was a seminar on spiritual development in the late stages of life, they studied the catalogue and found ‘Funeral Services’ and ‘Concepts of the Afterlife.’”

“What were the motives that made all these ‘experts’ want to keep the aging out of the places where the productive activities of society go on? Out of the activities that earn money and status? Well, if you were intent on making a successful professional career or building a lucrative business out of nursing homes, geriatric care, or other ‘help’ for the aging, the more helpless the better.”

“Was feminine solidarity an adequate answer to the rage we felt about men our age to whom we had become sexually invisible? If we didn’t want to be defined solely as sex objects, that didn’t mean we wanted permanently to eliminate the pleasures of being one.”

“I was, in any event, feeling better about myself as a woman, more at ease about growing older. In fact, I was taking new delight and comfort in my new an old men friends, without wanting or expecting the friendship to end in bed, much less marriage.”

“The pursuit of youth was blinding us to the possibilities of age. Could denial of our own aging block further growth, foreclose the emergence of a new life otherwise open to us?”

“I have discovered that there is a crucial different between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be. There are truly fearful realities reflected – and imposed – by that image. To break through that image, we must first understand why, how and by whom it is perpetuated. We must also glimpse some new possibilities and new directions, both as individuals and as a society, that belie that image.”

Ms. Friedan found some of the answers she was seeking, which she reports in her book. However, with a few stunningly good and interesting exceptions, not much has changed in our culture’s attitude toward aging and old people since Ms. Friedan’s book was published nearly 15 years ago.

There is a lot of hard work still to be done to raise aging issues to the level of public consciousness that women’s issues have reached in the past forty years. This book is an excellent starting point and contribution to the cause.

* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By - What it’s really like to get older.