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:

We have gone through so many transformations as we shed the roles we were raised to play, that looking into the uncharted future, we expect that there is still more to discover. About becoming who we want to be. We long for someone to show the way. We look for a connection with our mothers’ experience, but we are unlikely to find the guidance we need there; instead, like her, we look to the women alongside us in a common search for authenticity.

Although there are few role models for us, in the sense of mentors and mothers sharing their wisdom about coping with experiences they have been through, we are establishing a team of guides and protectors. They are us. It has not escaped me that when I call us “we,” I am referring to women who are far enough apart in age— roughly forty- five to seventy five— to be mothers and daughters, technically different generations. But when it comes to finding support, wisdom, and intimacy that will sustain us moving forward, we are a single generation.

Together we struggled to stay afloat in the midst of earth- shattering changes for women in our first adulthood, and we are struggling to assimilate those changes in our Second. I call the women who are meeting the same challenges Horizontal Role Models…

Click here to continue…

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.

Nearly four pages into the book, I wrote Suzanne’s dear friend, Karin, to thank her for this wonderful gift. Likewise, I hope my writing will peak your interest enough that you will buy this book.

Like Christiane Northrup’s The Wisdom of Menopause, Nancy Alspaugh-Jackson and Marilyn Kentz’s Not Your Mothers Midlife, Katrina Kenison’s Gift of An Ordinary Day and Mothers; Doreen Nagle’s But I Don’t Feel Too Old to Be a Mommy, Levine’s How We Love Now should sit on your shelf as a beloved old friend – there when you need it, available to hold, and ready to provide support and answers for your every need. In fact, some of these books should be a friend for life. How We Love Now is my new BFF.

Continue reading…

Cyma Shapiro is the writer and creator of NURTURE: Stories of New Midlife Mothers (www.MidlifeMothers.org) dedicated to promoting the lives of women choosing motherhood over 40 and a traveling art gallery show. The Mothering in the Middle blog for new midlife mothers –  www.MotheringintheMiddle.com – intersperses daily experiences with thoughtful commentary and essays and occasionally featuring guest writers. She is currently working on a number of creative projects, including an anthology for and by midlife mothers: NURTURE: Stories of New Midlife Mothers. 

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.

I will be joining Jane, Mary Catherine Bateson and my friend Laura Carstensen to explore the subject of “Re-Birth.” I will focus on the importance of what I have called ‘The Fertile Void’ – “The fruits of ‘second adulthood’” – which I described in my book Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood.

The event is a continuation of an ongoing TEDxWomen conversation about “how women and girls are re-shaping the future.”

I hope you will be able to join us at an event in your community.

To locate a TEDxWOMEN Event near you, click here…

To find out more about TEDxWomen [x=independently organized TED event],
click here…

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.

But when the late ‘60s/early ‘70s rolled around, we’d had enough of the lackluster, ladylike role. We wanted to shine ourselves and, after years of open battle with the opposite sex, we started doing just that. Yet, although we began to occupy positions of power, the early childhood messages of proper female behavior persisted—one of the most stubborn being the nearly universal hesitancy to toot our own horn.

I addressed this issue in a recent post where I suggested using winning examples as a way to toot with comfort. But this problem is so pervasive and widespread that I turned to my favorite observer of the female experience after 50, Suzanne Braun Levine, for answers.

Suzanne shared both her insights and her personal struggle with tooting in our 15-minute conversation. Yes, Suzanne, a woman of notable accomplishments (Founding editor of Ms. magazine, the only woman editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, author of a number of best selling books, and frequent guest on major media programs) has trouble tooting, too!  She even wrote about her own lack of tooting temerity here on her website.

So what are we to do? Tooting our own horn is tied to feelings of self-worth and personal power. After all the advancements brought about by the women’s movement as well as the feisty hormonal changes of menopause, you’d think we gals would have this one nailed by now. Yet it seems like an ongoing struggle to be straightforward and state our strengths and accomplishments with ease.

How do you line up on the tooting issue? Can you toot like a trouper or is your own horn woefully silent? Suzanne and I would like to know. Please weigh in with any tips or ideas you might have for your fellow tooters and tooter wanna-bes. We’ll all be grateful for your thoughts.

Who knows? Once we get this handled, maybe someday the women of the feisty side of fifty will gather together and sound off with one great, triumphant toot. It would certainly be a welcome and long overdue reverberation; millions of horns vibrating loudly—sharing all of our remarkable achievements with open pride. In fact, what are we waiting for? It would be a “toot heard ‘round the world!”

And now for a bit of tooting of my own–I just started blogging for the brand new Huff/Post 50. Please take a moment to check out my post: “Five Keys to Beating the Age Factor.” I’d love hear your comments.

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.

I first became curious about something “going on” was back in the seventies when I was editor of Ms. magazine. Our readers were high school students and grandmothers, home-makers and rebels but if there was one driving editorial principle behind that breakthrough journalistic adventure, it was that if one woman was experiencing something, it was certain that other women were too, only they were not talking about it; the magazine needed to tell such stories and open up the conversation.

When in my early fifties I began to feel dissatisfied and restless that faith in shared experience led me to suspect that there was “something going on.” I checked it out with other women, and sure enough, they felt it too. Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood was the result of my search for understanding and reassurance that I wasn’t crazy – or under some menopausal spell – and neither were the hundreds of women I talked to. (I have always loved a T-shirt I saw once that said, “This is not a hot flash. It’s a power surge.”) After that book came out, other women who were in the process of navigating that transition came forward, and described their versions of our shared experience. The more we shared, the more I began to see some guiding insights that would be helpful to anyone negotiating the bumpy road to the new stage of life. For me Fifty Is the New Fifty: Ten Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood was a kind of personal stock-taking based on what I had learned form other women’s discoveries and disappointments as well as my own.

My newest book (due our next Valentine’s Day) – How We Love Now: Sex and The New Intimacy in Second Adulthood - is a deeper exploration of the new stage of life we are defining as we go along through the all-important lens of love. And sex.

In this case there was another dimension to the “What’s going on?” challenge: Not only was I exploring my own hang-ups and choices, and not only was I gathering experiences from other women, but the women themselves were hearing what they were saying about themselves for the first time. In many cases – especially in the context of sex – they hadn’t dared put into words, even to themselves, why they were doing what they were doing or longing to do.

“I can’t believe I am telling you this. I must be crazy” was a common exclamation. I knew – and they need to hear – that they weren’t crazy or alone, that what they were concerned or curious about was on the minds of countless other women. I write to enter into a supportive conversation among women like them – on the page.

– Suzanne Braun Levine

Happy Anniversary, She Writes!

”She Writes is a community, virtual workplace, and emerging marketplace for women who write, with over 15,000 active members from all 50 states and more than 30 countries. Leveraging social media tools and harnessing women’s collaborative power, She writes is fast becoming the destination for all women who write.”

www.shewrites.com

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.

In other words, for most of my adult life I have belonged to no generation – or all generations. If anything defined me it was in the trajectory of my life, not where I was in the timeline of my life. Therefore, even though the teachers were half my age, their insights about my child and their expertise about teaching made for a very intimate and respectful relationship. They had acquired an understanding of children in their short lives that I was in need of at that parenting starting point in my long life.

Only now that I am way beyond bonding with other parents of young children and just one more “older woman” have I become aware of the ageism that abounds in our culture and the way our accumulated years divide us. More than once I have been chatting with a young man and catch his eyes floating away over my shoulder. I am rarely asked what I “do” although I am still doing it. And “dear” has become a put-down in my dictionary.

Having experienced the intergenerational community of those years when the age of my child was more meaningful than my own, I don’t want to lose that in my Second Adulthood, the new stage of life that we – older mothers, empty nesters, childless-by-choice friends, women in the process of starting over – are all defining as we live it. We are demonstrating that self-invention is a life long process. That is a starting point for a bond among women of all generations.

But there are obstacles to finding common ground. One is that we are not in the same place at the same time often enough. That’s fairly easy to remedy. The technological barrier is a little harder to work around. Women my age talk of a culture gaps in the workplace; for example, we older workers are used to stepping into a colleague’s office to touch base.

To a younger woman, the face at the door is an intrusion; e-mail is the way to go. Technology also enables young women to meet and share and protest in ways that we have a hard time keeping up with. If we are going to “sit down over a cup of coffee” – virtual or not – we will have to meet (or tweet) them half-way.

I believe that women young enough to be our daughters (but aren’t) want to connect with us as much as we want to connect with them. I experience it personally in the tense alliance between waves of feminism. We Women’s Movement types complain that the younger ones have abandoned the cause; the younger ones resent what they perceive as our assumption that we defined the cause for all time. The mass marches that we associate with activism have been replaced by on-line mobilization and actions that we have been slow to sign on to.

Yet when we do engage each other over the issues, they want to know what it was like for us; they want to test their ideas out and get knowing – but not condescending – feedback. And they want to know how it is for us now.

At first I was surprised when a young woman would come up to me after a bookstore reading with two copies of my first book Inventing the Rest of Our Lives – “one for my mother and one for me,” they would say – but I came to understand that they wanted to read about their own futures. They understand that we are opening up possibilities that they can look forward to taking advantage of when they get there. Together we can be nourished by a community of women, which has no age requirements for entry.

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

“Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?”
An editorial by Jane Addams
Ladies’ Home Journal

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was 54 years old when she wrote this essay at the invitation of the editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which in 1914 was the nation’s most widely read women’s magazine. At the time, Addams was the most famous and admired, as well as the most politically accomplished, woman in the country.

Two years before, she had seconded the nomination of former president Theodore Roosevelt as the presidential candidate for the Progressive Party, and she regularly testified before and lobbied state legislatures and Congress on behalf of such progressive legislation as banning child labor, providing women with the vote and the eight-hour work day, and, in the case of Congress, defeating proposed immigration restrictions.

In 1914 she was serving on the board of the NAACP and the Women’s Trade Union League, was as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Progressive Party, had just stepped down as a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and within a few months would be elected president of the Woman’s Peace Party and the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. The readers of the Journal knew that Addams was herself an example of a woman over fifty who, to say the least, did not feel old.

– Louise W. Knight, author, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago, 2005), website: www.louisewknight.com

“One of the most remarkable changes in the lives of women in this country has been the postponement of old age. Chiefly because they had nothing else to do, our grandmothers, after their children had been reared and safely launched into homes of their own, expected to give their remaining years to a general oversight of the households of their sons and daughters and to the upbringing of their grandchildren, confirming both as nearly as possible to their own excellent although somewhat inflexible standards.

It is useless to deny that this admirable and highly domestic occupation occasionally led to difficulties. A vigorous woman, accustomed to the cares of a large household in which her word was law, when deprived of an absorbing occupation could not all at once reduce herself to a negligible quantity, and the traditional “mother-in-law” was quite as much of the victim of circumstances as was the cherished family upon whom her unused energies were expended.

The easy assumption of old age under the circumstances is readily understood, for when the individual valued herself largely as a repository of wisdom and tradition it was quite in character to don a cap, and to sit, knitting innumerable pairs of stockings, where she might easily be consulted. Almost any family album will reveal these sweet-faced women, a fold of linen over their placid breasts, a cap upon their smooth hair, whom we are happy to claim as our grandmothers, and yet if we knew their exact ages, in almost every instance we would be surprised to discover how young they were, many of them scarcely fifty years old. They assumed that life was over for them at the very time their husbands were still in the midst of business and professional activities, often receiving their highest honors and rendering their most distinguished public services after they were fifty years old.

We regret the passing of these charming women and we certainly deplore those women of seventy years occasionally seen rushing from one social function to another, attired in modish gowns, with picture hats surmounting their elaborately coifed heads. Although so dissimilar it is nevertheless true that both types of women are without adequate activity. The former dissembled a placidity which certainly they could not have felt in every instance; the latter continue a round of vapid occupations which they fear to drop lest they be faced by insupportable leisure. Both are obviously without absorbing interests.

Happily there is another type of woman between the ages of fifty and seventy years of whom every section of America has its shining examples; first discovered perhaps through church sewing circles and missionary societies, although the widely spread Woman’s’ Christian Temperance Union organizations had much to do with enabling her to find herself. The Woman’s Club movement has also been a great factor in developing the powers of women who are over fifty years old. Many of them learned to write papers, to address audiences, to preside over meetings, to organize committees for the first time after they had passed that age. The women’s clubs also gave to thousands of women their first sense of responsibility in regard to public education and civic reform. It was largely through the efforts of these older club women that kindergartens, manual training and domestic science were introduced into the public-school system of America. In many cities these women were also the pioneers in agitating for public playgrounds and vacation schools.

These same elderly women who, in their youth, had been sheltered from any knowledge of crime and the ways of criminals, and who would have considered it most unladylike even to refer to a “disreputable woman” [a prostitute], were often responsible for securing matrons in the police stations, teachers in the jails, the establishment of juvenile courts and the abolition of vice [saloon, gambling, drug-dealing and brothel] districts. These women are now in no small measure responsible for municipal concerts, for crafts and trades schools and for exhibitions for the encouragement of local artists. In their girlhood they knew no exercise more violent than playing croquet, no dietary more rigid than preserves and sponge cake for supper, no notion but that all diseases were Heaven-sent, and that a certain number of children must inevitably die in infancy, but they are now agitating for public gymnasiums and municipal baths, for pure-food laws and a clean milk supply; they are quite tigerlike in insisting that all children shall be protected from contagious diseases through school nursing and medical inspection, and they have come to consider a high death rate among infants a disgrace and a reproach to the community. . .

One woman of sixty whom I know is most widely useful in many church activities, not only in the local circles of her denomination but also as president of a State organization. Her husband died several years ago, her children are both married and living in two distant cities. It would be hard to imagine a more desolate life than hers might be did she not have an outlet, not only for her splendid energy, but also for her social gifts and her affection. Her small but charming house does not give an impression of emptiness, but it is as if it were the center of beneficent activity, a place where a woman dwelt not alone but surrounded by the affection of countless friends. It would be absurd to say that if she had remained “quietly at home,” exchanging social amenities with her neighbors, her life would have been so filled with satisfactory interests..

Another woman over fifty years old [Florence Kelley] is the executive head of a National organization [the National Consumers League] which has for years urged and secured better conditions for working women and children, both through legislation and voluntary effort. She has moved from one difficult piece of social organization to another until probably no one else in the United States is more conversant with the conditions surrounding working women and children in every part of the country, and with the laws which have been enacted on their behalf and with the efficiency of their enforcement. . . .

That weariness and dullness which inhere in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when such gracious and gray-haired women become a part of it, and when new social movements, in which men as well as women are concerned, naturally utilize woman’s experience and ability.

Ever-widening channels are gradually being provided through which woman’s increasing moral energy may flow, and it is not too much to predict that in the end public affairs will be amazingly revivified from those new fountainheads fed in the upper reaches of woman’s matured capacity.”

– Jane Addams
Ladies Home Journal
October 1914, Vol. 31 page 7.

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.

The ceremony was held out of doors at a lovely location in the Hamptons. The bride was an exceedingly beautiful woman, smart, talented and very charming who attracted men wherever she went. The man standing next to her worked at the same company we did as a textile salesman. Although it may appear that way, he was not the groom, but her lover of many years.

His wife who may or may not have known of her husband’s relationship (everyone else did!) with the bride is placed at the edge of the work on the right. She is not quite in the picture.

Between the salesman and his wife is a woman who was the bride’s very close friend. She had never been married but had very much wanted to be. In empathy for her friend, the bride threw her bouquet in her friend’s direction so she would easily be able to catch it, which she did. You see her in almost orgasmic ecstasy.

Hope springs eternal.

On the opposite edge of the canvas is me, the artists. I am part of the proceedings. The strange expression on my face is due to the quantities of cocaine I had inhaled along with the others in the painting. It was at time cocaine was ubiquitous as a sign of affluence.

Second Wedding (1985) – an oil painting on linen is an autobiographical work. It is 54” x 62”. All the people in the painting are real (left to right): Me (the artist), the bride, the salesman, the friend and the wife.

Joyce Ellen Weinstein – finds her inspiration in the personal and emotional as well as the interaction developed through self, family and community, all of which are parts making up the whole of her unified body of work.

BlueStone Gallery – Fine and Functional Art

104 East Ann Street

Milford, PA 18337

570.296.9999

www.bluestonegallerymilford.com

www.bluestonegallerymilford.com/artists/weinstein

www.joyceellenweinstein.com

To celebrate the recent release of the paperback edition of “Fifty Is the New Fifty,” I was interviewed this week for She Writes.com {have this link to Suzanne Interview} by Pamela Redmond Satran–author of the bestselling book “How Not To Act Old,” creator of the online serialized novel “Ho Springs,” and the developer of “nameberry.com”– for She Writes.com, the leading online destination for women writers.

She Writes™ is a lively community of women writers – 8,000 strong and growing. I enjoyed this interview and think the questions about Feminism, Ageism, Role Models, and What’s Next, are right on target. Take a look! http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/five-questions-forsuzanne

The She Writes™ Mission – To transform the landscape in which women write, publish, and read.

Since its inception in June 2009, thousands of women writers from more than thirty countries and all fifty states, including many bestselling and award-winning authors, have been sharing support, organizing their knowledge, and doing business on the site. It is a unique community where women writers can create networks and get the services and support they need to make every stage of their writing lives easier, She Writes™ is a business on a mission: to forever transform the landscape in which women write, publish, and read.

We believe writing has the power to change the lives of women; we believe that when women write and publish, they have the power to change the world. She Writes™ is the brainchild of founder Kamy Wicoff, an author and salonniere based in New York City.

The site is a wonderful resource and community for women writers.
I urge everyone to take a look and join!

www.shewrites.com