Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 24, 1993 TAG: 9310270039
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANE GLENN HAAS ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After years of denying her own aging, Friedan said, she realized that age is something more than the decline of youth.
"This woman and I were talking, and she was clearly older than me - I was 62 at the time," Friedan said. "I remember she had flaming red hair with white roots and crepey legs sticking out from one of those tennis outfits, the kind with a miniskirt.
"And she said to me, `I hear you are writing about older people. How nice.' " Freidan bites off the last two words with archness, her face mimicking the woman's smug disdain.
"Well, this just so irritated me I said, `No, I'm writing about us.'
"And in that moment, it happened. I faced my own denial about aging."
For the next decade Friedan worked through that denial, unwinding the shroud of stereotypes that old people are useless, sexless, declining.
She interviewed hundreds of people. She participated in the first "Outward Bound" experience for people 55 and older to understand the limitations and opportunities that come with age.
The result is "The Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993), a seminal study that uses her personal experiences and research to define new truths about the years after 60.
"It's only been in the last couple of years that I've felt amazingly liberated," said Friedan, 72.
She is sitting in a straight chair beside a table in her Beverly Wilshire Hotel room, taking a break after doing a morning television interview and completing a brisk 45-minute walk.
Bright lipstick and soft touches of makeup are her only concessions toward masking the lines life has etched on her face. Energy sparks her words, forces her brown eyes wide in excitement. Ideas, concepts, conclusions tumble out.
Friedan, universally recognized as the catalyst for the modern women's movement, is invigorated. She is embarking on another great crusade.
She will raise the nation's consciousness about age.
She will liberate future generations of men and women, forcing society to shed its myths that venerate youth and deny the benefits of wisdom and experience.
"Once we have broken through the dreary miasma of age, we see that we don't need to do things the way we have always done them," she said.
"We have to evolve. There are no roadmaps for us. My generation, those of us in our 60s and 70s, are pioneers of a new kind of aging.
"There are so many years of vital life left open to us if we don't get bogged down in self-fulfilling stereotypes."
Friedan's quest began with a realization that most men and women frantically deny age, refuse to admit their years, even face deep depression that they have survived so long.
But others, she realized, found age an exhilarating time. These people had "crossed the age divide and found beyond it previously denied aspects of themselves," she said.
As she talked with these people, she began to question the way medicine, psychology and the social sciences have depicted age.
Focusing on those living in nursing homes or afflicted with Alzheimer's disease is wrong, she said. "These people represent only a very small part of the aging society."
She confronted the "nursing home specter," concluding that nursing homes of any kind are a highly imperfect, depersonalizing last resort.
She studied the way people lived out their later years.
She often visited her mother, living in Laguna Hills Leisure World, and came to conclude that separating older people from the rest of society is a mistake.
"I spent a lot of time and met a lot of grand people who made a life there, but underneath the clubhouse mentality was another strata. A denial of age. A playpen mentality. These people really were withdrawn from the rest of the community."
Better to live amid a vibrant, free-spirited community of all ages, she said.
"A social structure that tries to wall age off from the rest of society denies us personhood and our role in the community."
Equally demoralizing are the standards of beauty in fashion magazines.
"They are absurd," Friedan said. "The latest look is a 15-year-old with no tush, an invitation to pedophilia.
"Women are getting independent enough to slough that off, to see a standard that celebrates even old, beautiful women.
"But men have more difficulty. Women are used to society saying you are invisible once you lose youth, but men are not prepared for that."
Men also feel more threatened with the loss of reproductive ability, she said.
"Reproduction doesn't define your life," Friedan said. "That's what `The Feminine Mystique' was all about. That was the breakthrough. Reproduction doesn't define you, and you don't need to depend on it.
"Men have to give up the notion that loving has to be the way it was at 30, or not at all. Get over that obsession."
Women also have to pass beyond what Friedan labels "the menopause brouhaha," she said.
Hormone replacement therapy may be appropriate for some women, but symptoms and treatments have been vastly overblown, she said.
And she argues that to deny women a natural end to reproductive years is wrong, possibly even dangerous for their health.
"We need to keep evolving. To not let our bodies age naturally is wrong. That's like trying to keep a caterpillar a caterpillar forever when it wants to evolve into a butterfly."
Denial of aging regresses both men and women, she said.
It also leads to exploitation.
"I'm worried about the attempt to trifle with Social Security, to make old people the scapegoat for the impasses of society.
"People in their 50s have been the first to go in this downsizing.
"We have to develop new concepts of work, of what defines your values. If you cut Social Security and Medicare, you will create a self-fulfilling prophecy that age is decline."
In the end, age is about values, Friedan said.
"How we value ourselves is how we define ourselves. We have to risk new ways of living, of loving, of the way we approach health care. We have to go beyond where we are."
The two words she writes when she autographs her books sum up her message: "Evolve, Enjoy!"
by CNB