Fear of Fifty Read Free

My father and grandfathers, sexists though they were, could never have abandoned their children to waltz off with younger women. They may have been pigs. Perhaps they were less than faithful. But at least they were pigs who were providers. They were in for the long haul, providing also a kind of security unknown today. Why did the generation of men who followed them have no such scruples?
    Did women let them off the hook? Or did history? Or did some enormous change take place between the sexes which we still have not recognized or named?
    As women grew stronger, men appeared to get weaker. Was this appearance or reality? As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid—as if we’d disabled them utterly.
    Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?
    The women of my generation are reaching fifty in a state of perplexity and rage. None of the things we counted on has come to pass. The ground keeps shifting under our feet. Any psychologist or psychoanalyst will tell you that the hardest thing to deal with is inconsistency. And we have known a degree of inconsistency in our personal lives that would make anyone schizophrenic. Perhaps our grandmothers were better able to cope with the expectation of oppression than we have been able to adjust to our much-vaunted freedom. And our freedom anyway is moot. Our “freedom” is still a word we can put in inverted commas to get a laugh.
    For decades, we couldn’t expect to take a maternity leave and get our jobs back, let alone find affordable child care. No day care, no Americans who wanted to be nannies—and yet we were (and are) penalized for hiring those who needed child-care jobs.
    The dirty secret in America is that every working woman has had to break the law in order to find child care. I have broken the law. So have most of us. (Poor women use unlicensed day care and middle-class women find nannies without green cards.) Look for a woman who is squeaky clean and you’ll end up with a woman who has no children. Or with a man.
    With ascending expectations and a declining standard of living, we asked ourselves what on earth went wrong. Nothing went wrong. We were merely brought up in one culture and came of age in another. And now we are hitting fifty in a world that is grandstanding about feminism once again. But this time we have good reason to be skeptical.
    The whiplash generation is, in its own way, a lost generation. Like spectators at a tennis game, we keep snapping our heads from side to side.
    No wonder our necks hurt!
    Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. Perhaps there were flappers of the twenties who longed for the security of their grandmother’s lives. But the first wave of modern feminism at least carried its members along on a current of hope. And the second wave (of the late sixties and early seventies) made us dream that women’s equality would soon be universal. So my classmates and I have seen women’s expectations raised and dashed and raised and dashed and raised again in our not very long lives. The brevity of the cycles has been dizzying—and enraging.
    The media still try to comfort us with bromides. Fifty is fabulous, we hear. We should wear hemorrhoid cream on our wrinkles and march off into the sunset popping Premarin. We should forget centuries of oppression in exchange for a new hat with “Fabulous Fifty” embroidered on the brim.
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    What about our need—women and men both—to prepare for death in a culture that mocks all spirituality as “new age” pretension? What about our need to see ourselves as part of the flow of creation? What about the deep loneliness our individualistic culture breeds? What about the dismissal of community and communal values? What about society’s mockery of all activities other than getting and spending? What about our