The New Stage of Life

Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood
by Suzanne Levine

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Reinventing Ourselves and Rewriting History

In many respects, we have been here before. Thirty years ago, at the beginning of our first adulthood, we were also on the verge of big changes; we were struggling to address what Betty Friedan had identified as The Problem That Has No Name - the dismissive and restrictive assumptions about women and their role in society. At that time, many women felt isolated and confused and guilty for not being satisfied with what they had been given, but fearful of talking about it.

Time and again, they found that the simple, yet risky, act of telling the truth about their doubts, failures, and fears to someone who appeared confident and accomplished resulted in a reassuring - and amazed - "me too!" response. In sharing frustration over household demands, impatience with children, anger at husbands, concerns about sexuality, and doubts about measuring up to media images, women found validation for their own perceptions, support, and the emotional high of not feeling like the only crazy woman on the block. One by one, those intimate revelations changed the conversation about women's roles as they changed each woman's own life.

The discovery that the personal is political - that our most private efforts have meaning in the community of women and impact beyond - led to the revolution that got us to this place. Today, motivated by that energy and those achievements, we are confronting a new unknown - The Problem That Has No Name has been replaced by The Question That Has Many Answers: What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Second Adulthood.

Second Adulthood is a journey each of us embarks on, but it is also a stage that our generation is in the process of defining as we live it. This book is about both. Sharing the stories of individual women's journeys gives reassurance to others; describing the parameters of the new life stage highlights the substantial upside of what can feel like a meltdown. There is great promise in Second Adulthood, but there is also an inescapable downside to getting older. A woman turning fifty this year has a 40 percent chance of living to one hundred, but she has the same chance of being erased from her world by Alzheimer's. Hormonal shifts can throw us off kilter into depression and anxiety, but they can also release a heady dose of defiance and energy, a second wind. Despite our professional breakthroughs, ageism is pervasive and insidious in our culture. Poverty among women increases with age. Some of this bad news we have to accept, but every day we encounter situations that can be turned around. As we zero in on what really matters in our lives now, we become better able to recognize - and make peace with - circumstances we cannot change and we become more experienced in taking charge of those we can and want to change.

My understanding of Second Adulthood is drawn from the insights of women with diverse life experiences - from the most traditional or ambitious to the most off-beat or spiritual, from celebrities to retirees - because I know that the baseline experience for each of us is more similar than different. In addition, it provides needed perspective to hear how others are coping with common problems in unfamiliar situations. I interviewed fifty women in depth and spoke with numerous others in that casual-yet-intimate kind of conversation women often strike up. I learned from every one. As Gloria Steinem has pointed out, "anyone who has experienced something is more expert in it than the experts."

I also sought out the professionals who are following our trajectory. They are finding patterns that illuminate our anecdotal accounts and set our experience in the larger context of social change. The broad message of my research is that both the personal and the societal status quo are being challenged. As we make our individual ripples, we are collectively creating a major paradigm shift that has consequences well beyond our own lives. Just as women did during the years of discovery and rebellion that began in the seventies - whether or not an individual considered herself a part of the Women's Movement - we are now rewriting history as we are reinventing ourselves.

The New Stage of Life

Almost thirty-seven million American women in our late forties, fifties, and sixties are the beneficiaries of scientific and health breakthroughs that are prolonging our active lives. At an average life expectancy of eighty-plus years, we are likely to live as adults almost as long again as we already have. This is a new era for women. The choices we have made so far have set the stage for this new era. The choices we each make will define it. Our numbers will call attention to it.

Born in the 1940s and 1950s, we were raised in a culture that had a limited view of women's prospects; then we spent our first adulthood breaking free of those narrow expectations. During the seventies and eighties, we became acquainted with what women could do, even if we didn't personally achieve all we could have. And many of us have achieved more than our mothers ever could have dreamed. As a result, we bring to our Second Adulthood a double awareness: a first adulthood full of experience in reinventing ourselves; and the conviction that women belong in the public sphere - the marketplace, the civic arena, the sports stadium - not only in the home.

Now the last frontier is before us - the grandma assumption. In our mothers' generation the conventional wisdom was that once a woman reached the change of life, her life stopped changing. What she had not done by fifty, she would never do. What she did afterward wouldn't matter to anyone but the grandchildren she would spoil rotten. We are already turning those assumptions around.

It's not that we aren't reveling in the joys of participating in a new life. "I feel like I have taken a lover," a doting grandmother confessed to me. "My heart flutters when my granddaughter calls. I daydream about her at work. I shop for the silliest gifts for her." It's just that the momentum of our eventful, busy, productive first adulthoods is propelling us past an all-consuming granny role. "I'm a doctor, a teacher, a lover, a political activist, a friend - and a grandma," another woman protested. "But as much as I adore my grandchildren, they are not the defining part of my life."

We are mature achievers and late bloomers. We are taking on challenges and taking care of ourselves. Far from fading into the woodwork, we are full of surprises. Most of the women I talked to about the onset of Second Adulthood reported at least some of the surprises that I experienced on my Outward Bound adventure:

• an impulsive decision to do something out of character

• a willingness to take a calculated risk into the unknown

• a determination to make contact with one's authentic self and tap into the true passion there

• a desire to become a source of truth about women to the next generation

• the delicious freedom of looking the latest expectation - in a lifetime of expectations - in the eye and saying, "Not me. Not now!"

I don't think it is an accident that the triumphant tomboy I longed to reconnect with dates back to an earlier stage when I felt power and confidence and then lost it. Like just about every woman now over fifty, I experienced adolescence as a time of increasing self-doubt, of abandoned not-for-girls dreams and of limitations closing in. For girls today, and even for us, it is hard to conjure up the time when girls had to wear only skirts and play jump rope and learn to giggle and make every statement into a question - a time when they had to rein in the high spirits of grade school days and start concentrating on the serious business of learning to please other people.

When readers of More magazine, a publication for women over forty, were asked about their age, the majority said they felt their best years were ahead of them. What they liked about being older was "not worrying about what other people think" and "being more self-confident" and even "no more menstrual cycle." Their words sound like a celebration of the girlhood sense of power and independence that our generation had to renounce. Second Adulthood is, in part, about recapturing that earlier state of mind and - at last - growing with it. For women of our generation, this is a unique moment, a second chance at growing up strong.

When we gather for fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays, we ask each other if we are grown up yet. The answer is: Yes, we are grown up, but at the same time we are only halfway there. We are about to grow up again.

© 2005 Plume, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor, and nationally recognized authority on women, media matters, and family issues. Editor of Ms. magazine from its founding in 1972 until 1989 and editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review, she is currently a contributing editor of More magazine . The author of a book about fatherhood and numerous articles and essays, she has also produced a Peabody Award-winning documentary about American women. She has appeared on Oprah and the Today show and has lectured widely.