Betty Friedan changed the way we think about women. Nowshe's
changing the way we think about growing older.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, A SUBURBAN HOUSEWIFE TOSSED OUT A BOMBSHELL OF A
BOOK THAT IS STILL CHANGING LIVES TODAY. ITS PUBLICATION SET OFF A
MOVEMENT THAT VIRTUALLY REDEFINED THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY, EVER
SINCE, SUCCESSIVE WAVES OF FALLOUT HAVE BEEN REDEFINING THE ROLE OF MEN
AND THE PLACE OF WORK IN ALL OUR LIVES. HER NAME IS BETTY FRIEDAN, AND
HER BOOK, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, ARTICULATED WHAT PEOPLE WERE IN FACT
FEELING BUT HADN'T BEEN ABLE PUT INTO WORDS BEFORE.
Friedan has struck again. This time the subject is age and the way
our culture regards both men and women who are growing older. Her new
book, The Fountain of Age (Simon & Schuster; 1993), is large and
sprawling-sort of like life itself. Now a feisty 72, Friedan argues that,
just as women were invisible three decades ago, so are older persons
invisible today.
American culture is wedded to seeing people over 60 as sick and
lonely. Those are the only images of aging we find in the media, says
Friedan, and they shape the way we view our lives and our experience of
growing older.
PT: Do you think that, privately, most people buy into the vision
of old people falling apart?
BF: That image is certainly what motivates the dreaded denial of
age in our society. When I was researching material for this book, I
searched through a month of magazines looking at the images of men and
women, and I found almost complete invisibility. There were no images of
people clearly over 65.
Then I looked for images of people under age 50. Again, no image of
people doing what it is that people do except as a face of horrible
decline. No image of the reality, the vibrance of older people, which I
myself thought would be rare when I was first interviewing people for my
book. But I found people all over the country who continued growing and
developing into their 60s and 70s-even into their 90s.
PT: What's wrong with the lack of public images of how older people
actually define themselves?
BF: What's wrong is that we have no role models, no guidebooks that
affirm or even let us recognize the new strengths emerging in ourselves.
After interviewing women and men moving into this new period of life with
openness, with change, with vitality--people who continue to evolve with
wisdom and wholeness--I now call it the strength that has no name. We
need to affirm those strengths in ourselves and each other.
I'll tell you why we hold on to that debilitating image of age.
There have been some interesting studies by a researcher from Harvard
named Ellen Langer. She found that if you ask older people and younger
people about stereotypes of age--old people as sick and lonely--the older
people themselves and the young people all buy into it a little
bit.
But they are less likely to buy into the stereotype than those in
their middle years--in their 40s and 50s--who are within striking
distance of what our country defines as old, which is over 60. They are
in such a state of suppressed anxiety and denial that they hold on to
that image. They just don't like to identify with older people.
Even now, there are some publications that don't want to deal with
my book. They say, "We only want to represent the youth look." And the
reason, they feel, is that the only market that has money to buy is the
40-69 range.
PT: The media are willing to deal with age only as a
problem?
BF: Age with the connotation of someone who's going to look
decrepit. You could put someone vibrant on your cover, someone like me.
I'm 72. I look vibrant.
But I do think we're on the verge of breaking through this
definition of age as leprosy. There's a great hunger of men and women to
break through. People in their 30s and 40s are coming to the
book-signings and buying two or three copies, saying, "One is for my
mother and one I'm keeping for myself." People are stopping me and
telling me, just as with The Feminine Mystique, "This is changing my
life. It's changing the way I see the rest of my life."
So if my book is hitting a chord, it's because the time has come to
break through this pernicious image.
PT: You may sell magazines with your image on the cover. But if you
put a garden-variety 65-year-old person on the cover you wouldn't sell
magazines.
BF: You might be surprised, my friends.
PT: We might be, but that's the conventional wisdom.
BF: And so was the conventional wisdom in 1962 that American women
could not identify with anything beyond husband-children-home. You
haven't tested it. You only get what you're seeing. Garbage in, garbage
out.
We are talking about the fastest-growing group of the population,
people over 60. You're not affirming their existence, and you should. The
trouble is, the models today are anorexic and appealing to pedophiliacs,
to child molesters.
There are no models with exuberance or experience in their faces.
No models beyond 30, beyond 40, beyond 50. It's surprising, but not if
you are holding on to that image of old as debilitated. Where are the
evolving, adventurous, gutsy kind of people that I interviewed? I
wouldn't buy a magazine with pictures of dreary, passive people. But
that's not the reality. Look at the reality.
PT: How do you define yourself now?
Tags:
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American culture,
Betty Friedan,
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decline,
fallout,
feminine mystique,
feminism,
fountain of age,
gender,
images of men,
media,
men and women,
role of women,
role of women in society,
simon schuster,
suburban housewife,
thirty years,
three decades,
vibrance,
waves,
women in society
