Suzanne Braun Levine,
TEDxWomen.org

Last December in New York City, Suzanne Braun Levine captivated the TEDxWomen community with her frank, humorous and insightful words on womanhood and aging. Ms. Levine has one of those stops-me-in-my-tracks resumes: the first editor of Ms. magazine; an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review; a producer of the Peabody Award-winning documentary She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the Twentieth Century; a web maven, with a thoughtful and resource-filled website of her own, who blogs on many popular sites; and the author of numerous books, including the recently released How We Love Now: Sex and Intimacy in Second Adulthood.

Wanting to hear more from Ms. Levine, we asked her to answer a few questions to share with the TEDxWomen community. We’re thrilled she said yes!

By Suzanne Braun Levine,
@Feminist.com

My new Column at Feminist.com – Navigating Second Adulthood – will look at the many challenges raised by the question: “What Will I Do with the Rest of My Life?” The answers are different for every woman, but they all reflect new opportunities for self-discovery, intimacy, and activism.

The first column in the Ongoing Series – “We are Each Other’s Role Models” – is an excerpt from How We Love Now: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood:

By Cyma Shapiro, founder
MotheringintheMiddle.com

“You’re Not Who You were Only Older,”
Suzanne Braun Levine

I haven’t written a book review for Mothering, yet, since I believe our readers are a widely diverse group of women representing many ages, interests and ideologies. So, when I received How We Love Now, I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, other than read it.

By Suzanne Braun Levine

Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday of the year – no gifts to worry about, the chance to collect people you love from all corners of your life, and the best food ever!

This year, while the leftovers are still tasty, there is yet another event I am looking forward to: I have been invited by Jane Fonda to join a panel she is leading at the TEDxWomen at a one-day bicoastal event on December 1 at the Paley Media Center in New York, + Los Angeles.

By Mary Eileen Williams
Feistysideoffifty.com

Women over 50 have wrestled with a lifetime of mixed messages. In our formative years we were taught the virtues of adhering to the1950’s & early ‘60’s standards of conformity. That meant being “ladylike” and fashioning our futures based on the June Cleaver/Donna Read models of matrimonial bliss.

By Suzanne Braun Levine,
“Happy Anniversary,
SheWrites.com™!”

Finding material to write about is not always easy. One route is the memoir, which is built on revealing material you know well. Or you can write about something you don’t know well but would like to learn about. I combine the two by weaving some – but not all – of my own life story with answers to the question “What’s going on with women?” I have spent most of my professional life chronicling that transformation of women’s lives at different stages, and the experience has, in turn, inspired and empowered my own. Every time over the past forty years that I posed the question “What’s going on with women?” the answers were different.

By Suzanne Braun Levine

One thing about being an older mother is that you are constantly reminded of the truism that age doesn’t really describe the shape of a person’s life. Nor does our place on the family tree, the generation we are assigned to at birth. When my daughter was born I was 44, old enough to be her grandmother. When she went to school, I was old enough to be her teachers’ (and her friends parents’) mother. At the same time my contemporaries had long since forgotten about coping with babies and young children – they were on to the joys of grandchildren. My most meaningful cohort was other women with children my children’s age, but not my age themselves.

Introduction by Louise W. Knight, author
“Jane Addams: Spirit in Action”

By now it should come as no surprise that our foremothers did know a thing or two, but it is always stunning to come upon words of wisdom that are totally relevant today.

My friend Louise Knight, who has written the definitive biography of the reformer Jane Addams recently passed along the essay below. What is stunning here is how these words written almost a century ago speak to the current conversation about Second Adulthood or the Encore stage of life (just check out www.encore.com) in which we have an opportunity turn the wisdom, expertise, and confidence of our pre-fifty years – what Addams calls “moral energy”- to making our world a better place.
– Suzanne Braun Levine

By Joyce Ellen Weinstein

During the late 1960’s and into the 70’s I was a commercial textile designer working in the garment center in New York City to support myself and two children.

My boss at that time, the woman in white, was getting married for the second time.

By Ruth Wooden

President, Public Agenda & Chair of the Board, Civic Ventures
There’s a new chapter required in The Etiquette Handbook:  “What to say to someone who is retiring.”
I can’t get over some of the things people have said to me after a routine announcement that I plan to retire as President of a NYC-based nonprofit later this year.  By the time I retire, I will be 64 and will have served more than seven years in this position after a working career of more than …