I noticed long, long ago--in my thirties, really, that my older women role models, my aunts and my mom, were feeling less valued. And as many people do, I blamed the victim/s. Later, as I approached my sixties and grew into my seventies, I realized that our society is particularly cruel to older women. Often, these days, I find I am spoken to as if I am hearing impaired or slightly demented. Sometimes, younger wait staff will call me "sweetheart" or "dear." I don't see them doing that with men or younger women. I believe it's meant to be nice, but I find it pejorative.
I was thrilled to see the BBC series and film "Downton Abby" with its take on older women. Played by veteran actresses, Dame Maggie Smith, 85, and Dame Penelope Wilton, 73, the older women in the Crawley family are important in their communities, advisors to their children and grandchildren, and, even, the objects of love relationships. In the same way, I was excited to see Jane Fonda, 82, and Lily Tomlin, 81, in Netflix's "Grace and Frankie," where socialite Grace and hippie Lily are catapulted into living together after their husbands (former law partners) come out as gay and in love with one another. Both of the female characters have love interests, ideas and businesses, caring families and good friendships. (Though most of us don't have California beach homes, children who live nearby and are very involved in our lives, and opportunities to bring forth new inventions, like the Menage a Moi, a vibrator for arthritic older women.)
I do think, ever so slowly, I am seeing the occasional ad with Mae Musk, the glamorous silver haired seventy-something year old Covergirl model and Dame Helen Mirren, the still-sexy 74 year old L'Oreal model. And I love that CBS Sunday Morning stars Jane Pauley, 70 years old, and features Rita Braver, 71, as one of its reporters. Who's the toughest broad in the Senate? Eighty-year old Nancy Pelosi. And other working women artists of age are singer Tina Turner, 80 years old, and actor Loretta Devine, 71, Meryl Streep, 71, Diane Keaton, 74, and Betty White, 98. A good sign, as well, was first time novelist, Delia Owens, 71, for her topper of the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019, Where the Crawdads Sing.
In the past, the 39-year old Jane Pauley was replaced on the Today Show with the younger Deborah Norville. The ageist premise of the time was that nobody wanted to see an "aging" woman. My theory is that ad guys and television power guys had to want to bed or at least desire their female anchors. And in commercials, except for dental adhesives or chair lifts, they cast only women they considered sexually viable (i.e. young and "hot"). And in films, the real life directors and actors most often traded in their older wives (often much younger than they were to begin with) for younger ones to help them avoid feeling their age. Exceptions were Carl Reiner, married to Estelle Reiner, ten years his senior, for sixty-five years and Samuel L. Jackson and LaTonya Richardson, married 40 years, along with a handful of others.
So, if all these public images are in our faces; of youth equals attractiveness or worthiness for women, how are the rest of us ordinary women supposed to feel? In my case, I had a couple of family role models who did not buy into the if-you're-old-you're-over media message and I have several friends who are who I want to be when I grow up--and I'm seventy-three.
With this blog, my book, and with womens' groups I am facilitating, I hope to empower older women, as well as with becoming most comfortable with my own age--in the manner of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dames Helen, Maggie, Penelope and Judy, I hope to be (as Gandhi said, and I'm paraphrasing here), at least a small part of, the change I want to see in the world.
