Feminism, eros, and the coming of age

Frontiers, 2001 by Rubenstein, Roberta

Nearly a half century ago, Simone de Beauvoir observed that the interval between "maturity" and "old age" is an especially problematic time for women. In her view, women who have outgrown their once clearly delimited social and biological functions as mates and mothers find no clear cultural scripts to guide them during the years and decades that succeed procreation and maternity. As she phrased it:

From the day a woman consents to growing old, her situation changes. Up to that time she was still a young woman, intent on struggling against a misfortune that was mysteriously disfiguring and deforming her; now she becomes a different being, unsexed but complete: an old woman. It may be considered that the crisis of her "dangerous age" has been passed. But it should not be supposed that henceforth her life will be an easy one. When she has given up the struggle against the fatality of time, another combat begins: she must maintain a place on earth.(1)

Although one would like to declare de Beauvoir's statement "dated" by citing the many advances women have achieved in the decades since she published her groundbreaking analysis of the "second sex" (and, later, of "the coming of age"(2)), the fact is that midlife and the years that follow it still remain problematic for many women and disproportionately so for those who are not white, educated, or middle class.(3) Despite the profound social transformation generated (if not secured) by feminist activism over the past three decades, one may legitimately ask: Has the women's movement that empowered an entire generation remained a movement for young(er) women? Have the changes that feminism catalyzed in the public sphere, notably matters of economic and social equity, bypassed more intimate personal matters, notably aging, sexuality, and what might be termed erotic equity, particularly in the years of midlife and beyond?

As the cohort of feminists whose political activism catalyzed the women's movement of the 1970s reaches midlife and beyond at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and as the focused energy of "second-wave" feminism has given way to the less-focused goals of "third-wave" feminism, these questions remain far from closed.(4) The definition of midlife (the term that has replaced middle age) has itself advanced chronologically in tandem with gains in life expectancy during the past several decades. However, it seems to have expanded in the other direction as well. One scholar of aging states that in contemporary American and European cultures the designation midlife encompasses "roughly ages 30 -70."(5) According to another scholar on the subject of aging, the answer to the question, "When do the middle years begin?" is "When the culture gets you to say they do."(6)

Certain elements of that impossibly broad category of midlife have recently been subjected to special scrutiny by feminists. Now that the cohort of women whose pioneering work defined the second wave of the women's movement has reached the life-stage of the women they once regarded as invisible or irrelevant, they have begun to address the challenges of aging from the perspective of their own experience as older women. Among others, Betty Friedan has bemoaned the outworn script underscored by de Beauvoir's assumptions about women and aging. Upon entering her sixties, Friedan began research for the book eventually published in 1993 as The Fountain of Age. Acknowledging her peers' -- and her own -- resistance to the subject, she wrote, "Why did we all seem to feel the need to distance ourselves from age, the closer we got to it?" Proposing the idea of an "age mystique" comparable to the paradigm-shifting "feminine mystique" she named and diagnosed in the sixties, she asserted, "If age itself is defined as `problem,' then those over sixty-five who can no longer `pass' as young are its carriers and must be quarantined lest they contaminate, in mind or body, the rest of society."(7)

A number of other feminist activists and novelists who came of age politically during the second wave have in recent years turned from the larger subject of feminism to their private histories, feminist and otherwise. For example, several novelists whose "mad housewife" fiction defined critical issues for women during the 1970s shifted to nonfiction in the form of personal memoir during the 1990s. Alix Kates Shulman, author of one of the classic novels of the second wave, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), recently published A Good Enough Daughter: A Memoir (1999). During the same year, Anne Richardson Roiphe, author of Up the Sandbox! (1970), another early and influential second-wave novel, published 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir (1999). Two decades after writing the exuberant and taboo-shattering Fear of Flying (1973), Erica Jong articulated anxieties of another kind in the Fear of Fifty (1994), while in Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey (1996), activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of How to Make It in a Man's World (1970), wrote a different kind of guide, using her own aging as the map. Similarly, academic feminist Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Reinventing Womanhood (1979), recently published The Last Girl of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997).(8)