REMEMBER SUPERWOMAN? THE ONE IN the designer suit, with the fabulous job and the loving family and the two hours daily at the gym? Bad news: she’s back. Now she’s pushing 80, but don’t let that fool you. She’s not old, she’s…Supergeriatric! She’s traded in that suit for biking shorts, runs her own successful business, and can’t wait to climb Annapurna again. Health? Never been better. Menopause? She laughed at it. Money problems? Not in this book.
Betty Friedan helped spark one of the most far-reaching revolutions in history when she published “The Feminine Mystique” 30 years ago. Now she stands ready to liberate another vast population, namely everybody who makes it past 50. But this time she’s late to the revolution. Word has been out for years that old age need not be synonymous with deterioration and that staying in the mainstream of society, rather than being shunted off to the peripheries, keeps people vigorous. She resists-barely-taking full credit for women’s longevity (the gender gap in average age of death is now eight years, up three since 1950). But she does see the women’s movement as responsible for women’s greater ability to embrace change and move into the “further stage of growth” that characterizes really first-rate aging.
Friedan includes a useful chapter on menopause (at least for those who missed all of last year’s books on this subject) and an entertaining account of her travails on an Outward Bound expedition for old people. But she spends most of her time repeating and elaborating her thesis, piling on example after example of admirable aging. All the women she interviewed seem to have found dream jobs in their 50s, while the men seem to think their sex lives have never been better even if they’re impotent (they love the new world of cuddling). There’s even an interview with Hugh Hefner, whom Friedan visits at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Hef. 65, and wife Karen, 26, have a year-old son. “I’m savoring this autumn season of my life most of all,” he tells Friedan. It’s an awfully moving moment.
Friedan, 72, seems pleased with her own aging, too. “I have never felt so free,” she announces at the end of this long book. Readers who slog that far are likely to say the same thing.
