Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. IN OUR PRIMEHow Older Women Are Reinventing the Road AheadBy Susan J. Douglas In a country as hysterically age-phobic as the United States, where women in their 20s are so terrorized by our culture’s punitive response to the realities of the human life span that they succumb to regimens of “preventive Botox,” the title of Susan J. Douglas’s new book may elicit mixed reactions.
With a vast array of well-funded forces conspiring to make them feel eternally ashamed of their bodies, many women squander their hard-earned dollars on an endless array of products in a desperate quest to defeat time. For those who find comfort in wishful thinking and enough botulinum toxin to kill a mastodon, the idea that a 70-year-old is in her “prime” may seem like a consoling respite from the vicious cultural consensus that older women are repulsive, irrelevant and should be neither seen nor heard. Other baby boomers — less enamored of the fraudulent promises of what Douglas witheringly describes as “aspirational aging” — readily admit that neither our knees nor our stamina are as sturdy as they used to be. Some of us even wonder why this is supposedly tragic.
My own prime is a distant memory, but my later years find me happier, more financially secure and unexpectedly exhilarated by a sense of freedom I’ve never experienced before, so I have zero desire to turn back the clock. Douglas’s subtitle is equally debatable, since her entire book makes a powerful case that our society consistently ignores and betrays the interests of older women — and that they have not yet mobilized in sufficient numbers to wield the clout they deserve. But semantic quibbles seem trivial compared with the overall importance of “In Our Prime,” which is a clarion call for older women to “rip off the invisibility cloak” and reinvent the world they live in so it stops cheating them. Aside from the title, it’s hard to find anything here that a fair-minded reader could dispute — and also impossible to deny the political, economic and cultural potential of what Douglas describes as an incipient demographic revolution, albeit one that is “underappreciated” and “undercovered” to date.
Although the millennials are overtaking them, the nation’s 73 million boomers are still the largest cohort in America, where about one-third of the population is now 50 or over. Since the majority of older people are female, the demographic power of women in the second half of life is a sleeping giant that has only to be awakened to transform our society. A University of Michigan communications professor whose previous books deconstructed the role of sexism in the idealization of motherhood as well as in the media and pop culture, Douglas devotes much of “In Our Prime” to documenting various forms of social tyranny that blight women’s lives, from the anti-aging industrial complex to the grim financial realities facing women, who are 80 percent more likely to spend their later years in poverty than men are. In a chapter called “The War on Older Women,” Douglas details the ways in which the reactionary forces of conservative politics and ruthlessly unfettered capitalism have exacerbated women’s vulnerability by weakening the nation’s social safety net.
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“To justify this shrinkage of government services, the gospel of market fundamentalism glorifies individualism and individual responsibility as if they were sacraments,” Douglas observes. At every age, the victims are disproportionately female. Whatever target she’s skewering, Douglas’s tone remains calm and sardonic; it’s easy to picture her as the witty but gimlet-eyed friend who sits at your kitchen table, listening sympathetically to your complaints while making rapier jabs at their patriarchal roots. The evidence she presents is as damning as her ultimate prescription is earnestly impassioned.
Douglas is an enthusiastic booster for the pioneering activism of the women’s movement, and another chapter, “Why the Seventies Mattered,” highlights the galvanizing role of crusaders like Maggie Kuhn, who founded the Gray Panthers after being forcibly retired at 65. The author believes that boomers ought to reassert their influence: “We once changed the world. Let’s do it again.
“” That should, theoretically, be easier this time around.”
The feminists of the 1970s were an embattled minority, but American culture has since assimilated many of their values into the mainstream. “According to a 2016 Washington Post poll, 68 percent of women aged 50 to 64 and 58 percent of women over 65 identify as feminists,” Douglas reports. The actual meaning of that word is much simpler than you would think from the toxic stew of ageism and sexism proffered by angry misogynists like Rush Limbaugh, who broadcast his contempt with epithets like “feminazi” and “slut. ” Dictionaries define a feminist as someone who believes that women deserve social, political, legal and economic rights equal to those of men.
In other words, a feminist is any person who is not a bigot, since bigots think some people are second-class citizens. And yet such bigotry remains pervasive and systemic; the opponents of women’s rights often pay lip service to equality, but American culture remains deeply hostile to the idea that women are autonomous. Their most basic needs are routinely ignored by everyone from politicians, advertisers, the media and the entertainment industry to the older men on dating sites who won’t consider partners their own age. As one analysis of the data concluded, “Statistically speaking, a woman’s desirability peaks at the age of 21,” according to men.
Although this prejudice limits our romantic prospects, its economic toll is far more consequential. Women may still be raised to believe that salvation lies in finding Prince Charming, despite the fact that the old blueprint left many women stranded if their husbands died or divorced them. When my grandmother was born, women’s average life spans were half what they are now; these days many boomers have already celebrated their mothers’ 100th birthdays. The need for a cultural overhaul is obvious, but our society remains stubbornly invested in what Douglas describes as its “utterly ossified notions of what it means to be an older woman.
” Her solution is that women should embrace a “life-span feminism” that addresses the interests of the larger half of the human population “throughout the entire arc of a woman’s life. ” We’re pathetically far from her prescribed utopia; Douglas admits that we still live in “a cultural and media environment that is, for the most part, either clueless about this transformation or does not wish to recognize it. ” Umm, that’s putting it mildly — unless “does not wish to recognize it” is synonymous with “wants to crush it like a bug. ” But why is this the case?
Whose interests might be served by limiting women’s freedom and access to resources? Let’s see, could it possibly be those of the men who guard their stranglehold on the levers of power and the spoils of plunder so fiercely? Come to think of it, men are curiously absent from Douglas’s book, which refrains from singling them out as a specific class of culprits. Instead of getting down and dirty with the ways in which men’s passive resistance combines with active aggression to reinforce a deeply damaging status quo, Douglas simply makes the indisputable case that women could change this sorry state of affairs if they work together to advance their common interests.
Our to-do lists are long and onerous, but when it comes to prioritizing, there’s much to be said for changing the world so you don’t end up as a destitute bag lady picking through somebody else’s garbage for dinner. Too many women still fail to recognize that they’re on their own in avoiding that fate. The rom-coms don’t tell you that Prince Charming rarely goes the distance; while 54 percent of men still have wives to take care of them at the age of 85 and beyond, only 16 percent of women that age have husbands. So it’s up to us to take care of ourselves — and it would help if the game weren’t rigged against us to such a diabolical extent.
Douglas has performed a valuable service in explaining why and how that should change. The men who run our country have failed to make it a fair one, so it’s up to us. In this as in so much else, women are the logical candidates to lead us to a better world.
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