Ask a woman in her 60s or 70s what she’s not willing to do anymore, and you’ll usually get an answer pretty fast. She refuses to perform. She will not shrink. And she vows to avoid treating the next 20-some years as a slow fade rather than decades of more freedom than ever.
It’s akin to the moment when Dorothy stops apologizing to the Munchkins for landing in Oz and accidentally dropping a house on the Wicked Witch, and just starts walking (well, dancing) down the yellow brick road. She may not know what comes next but does it anyway. Even friends and readers admit that the social script our mothers inherited (quiet down, dress for invisibility, defer) isn’t one this generation of once-mini-skirted, feminist-leaning independent chicks signed up for.
Of course, the women I talk to may not be a representative sample of all boomer women. None are sedentary retirees. Like me, many of my 70-something friends still work because they want to, take care of properties they rent out, or save their pennies for travel. What I notice is that the change in us is more of a shift than a vibe. I don’t think any of us planned any of it. We just “Dorothy-ed” our way through it.
First off, many of us worked while raising kids. Whether it was because we wanted a more lush lifestyle, the freedom of having our own money, or just survival, it makes little difference. It’s less like The Shawshank Redemption’s references to being institutionalized, and more like a woman busting out to find her own personal Zihuatanejo. “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.” (Any of you who read me regularly know I love movie references.)
Okay, we divorced more. That meant we learned to lick our wounds, take a stand, and support ourselves for long stretches or in perpetuity, changing the assumption that any part of our identity should be built around marriage. And if we were ever to couple up once again, no doubt the next guy won’t resemble the one we finally had the nerve to leave.
We live longer. Everyone keeps saying aging is relative, and it is. A 65-year-old today often plans for 20-plus more years, closer to a third life trimester than an epilogue. Why? First off, medical and cultural ageism is finally getting named instead of ignored. Women will no longer be dismissed by their own doctors, and unlike our mothers, we don’t treat them like gods.
Saying our concerns are valid (in public) is new. My mom’s generation absorbed that dismissive role quietly, the way Olympia Dukakis absorbs everyone else’s chaos as a given in Moonstruck, until she finally tells everyone what she actually thinks. No more taking it on the chin and shutting up about it.
We also stopped apologizing for our bodies. Confidence and visibility aren’t things we are willing to surrender when we turn 60, even though appearance is still what gives us a leg up. That’s not a contradiction. Plenty of us are looking into or have reveled in the miracles of GLP-1s, Botox, and jowl treatments right alongside refusing to treat aging itself as the enemy. Caring how you look and accepting how old you are can coexist; one isn’t a betrayal of the other. Why take this sacred thing we call life and reduce it to a label? I honestly believe this generation is the first to shed labels out loud.
Okay. Race, class, geography, and health status produce very different aging experiences, and most public conversation skews toward women with more resources to opt out of the old script. I also haven’t seen solid research showing that refusing the old script is actually healthier than embracing it. That’s a real gap, not something I’m going to paper over with a stat I haven’t checked. But I can tell you that the women whose company I keep are not the shy, retiring old ladies they might have been in 1965.
While some women find real peace in a more traditional path. everyone’s life is her own. It’s not about statistics, at least not yet. It’s about personal preferences among those sharing my age range. Bottom line: Boomer women aren’t refusing to age. We’re simply rejecting a lifestyle that reflects a time when the world looked very different, when women had fewer options. We grew up with more resources than our moms did to write a new way of life. Whether you call it structural change or generational self-mythology, nobody’s waiting around to make our golden years more golden anymore.
