Suzanne Braun Levine
Encore.org

One of the most persistent and misguided assumptions about the relationship of younger and older workers is that they are adversaries – competing for the same jobs and incompatible in work habits. This presumption of intergenerational hostility ignores the productive synergy that happens when their skills and work styles mix and energy meets experience, technological fluency meets accumulated people skills, ambition meets not sweating the small stuff.

My Post-Fifty Posse

We are five former Ms. magazine colleagues who have been having dinner together once a month for over 20 years. We like to try new places, which is a good thing, since I am not sure we would be welcome back to a restaurant after a visit. We generally sit there for three or four hours, order an assortment of appetizers, laugh uproariously — and pay with five credit cards!

Each brings her own kind of support, encouragement, empathy and humor to the table. We tease each other about the very traits we cherish. There is the Do-Gooder; the Fierce One; the Peacemaker; the Pragmatic Midwesterner and me (“the Terminally Modest One,” according to the Fierce One, whom I consulted). Collectively we are more than the sum of our parts.

by Ann Voorhees Baker, founder
Women at Woodstock

I’ve started to write about Women At Woodstock East 2013 a dozen times – and stopped, because I can’t really talk about what I experienced without first talking about my friend Deb. And for the last month I haven’t been able to talk about Deb, even via a blog post.

Suzanne Braun Levine
Huff/Post50

“To deny your age is to deny yourself,” Oprah said recently. Amen to that. Conversely, admitting your age is empowering not only yourself but every woman who is made to feel less valuable because she is over forty. Or fifty. Or seventy.

My mother denied her age all her life. She was beautiful and youthful-lookyouthing until the day she died at 94. By then she had shaved so many years off her age that she was publicly young enough to be my big sister. But just imagine if women of all ages had the facts and could see how glorious 94 can look.

Suzanne Braun Levine
National Girlfriends Day
Huff/Post 50

Girlfriends Day is a great idea. It invites us to search for the words and gestures that can only begin to acknowledge the importance of our own precious “circle of trust.” Moreover, unlike the other designated days of honor, this one isn’t about one person; it is about the alchemy that binds women together.

I’m celebrating National Girlfriends Day, Thursday, Aug. 1 on Huff/Post50 with a new post: “GIRLFRIEND POWER – Your Post-Fifty Posse Can Change the World.” It will have a slide show featuring women friends, women and girls exercising their power, videos and popular quotes from my ebook You Gotta Have Girlfriends. I believe that work and women working together are among the greatest gifts of the Women’s Movement. My years at Ms. magazine taught me that girlfriends give each other the courage to do things we could not have done alone.

I’ve been writing a lot about my own girlfriends lately in connection with my new e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-fifty Posse is Good for Your Health, and each time I sit down to describe my “circle of trust” I wonder what to do with my lifelong guyfriend Nick. Our friendship is as profound and historic as any I have with a woman, but it is also different.

WHOA! Network, Women
Honoring Our Age
 
Invite your post-fifty posse over to your house on Tuesday, June 11 for a 7:00 p.m. (ET) for a celebration of one of life’s most important relationships – our girlfriends – on the WHOA! Network. You can watch it together  ”Live” on the WHOA! Network “You Gotta Have Girlfriends”  Show Page.
Joining me on this program – in addition to the wonderful co-founders of WHOA!, Lynn Forbes and Darryle Pollack – are my friends Mary Eileen Williams, Pat Wynn Brown, Amy Ferris and Karin Lippert who are …

I’m not crazy about the current Dove campaign in which a police artist draws a portrait of a forty-ish woman from her description (dour and harsh) and then draws another from the description by another woman who has spent a little time with her (warmer and more pleasant looking); the punch line is “you are more beautiful than you think.”

This is not news. We have been prettier than we thought all along. When we are not comparing ourselves unfavorably to models and movie stars — who, the fan magazines show us gleefully, don’t look at all like their glamorous selves when out doing errands — we are comparing present selves with our younger selves.

Cyma Shapiro
Motheringinthemiddle.com

Q: On the heels of your last book How We Love Now: Women Talk About Intimacy After Fifty, what compelled you to write this new book?

With each book about women of my generation – Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, Fifty Is the New Fifty, How We Love Now – I talked to more women, did more research, and learned more about the exciting new stage of life we are exploring. Every interview, no matter how wide-ranging, eventually got to the subject of girlfriends. “I couldn’t have done it without my girlfriends!” was the phrase I heard over and over again. I realized that I needed to write a book that focused on that life-enhancing subject. Hence, my just-out e-book You Gotta Have Girlfriends: A Post-Fifty Posse is Good for Your Health.