I can easily visualize the elder women of an indigenous tribe passing on their accumulated wisdom to the next generation: their daughters and granddaughters. In my mental exercise, I do not think of the elder women apologizing for either their accumulated power or their past mistakes. In fact, I imagine the younger women sitting respectfully at their mentors’ feet, gratefully soaking up everything they can from those who have lived and learned over the course of many moons.
And of course, while this may actually be the way it continues to play out in certain traditional cultures, this is not what is happening in my own culture: the western industrial complex that tends to view the elderly, no matter how accomplished, as last year’s model in need of replacement by generation 2.0.
I expect to feel this tension in business circles, where Gens X and Y hungrily eye the grey ceiling of positional power occupied by Boomers who have not gotten the memo yet that it’s time to step aside. Boomers, too, worry about the traffic jam at the top, as the longevity bonus we’ve received — coupled by the hits our savings have taken — have made the very notion of retirement a luxury many can not afford, even if they wanted to.
And what to do with the urge to mentor — especially when the youngsters are all too eager to take their turn?
Business is one thing. I did not expect to stumble across this tension in the women’s movement, as well. But there I was, last week, attending “Women and Power,” a conference convened by the Women’s Institute at Omega featuring such luminaries as Gloria Steinem, Isabel Allende and Helen Thomas, unexpectedly thinking about adding ageism to the list of -isms — racism and sexism — we women 50+ have been addressing most of our lives.
For those of us who were around in the hey-day of Ms Magazine, you will remember the notion of a “click.” A “click” was an unexpected moment in which one’s consciousness was raised regarding previously unacknowledged issues women face.
Imagine any one of these lines coming out of the mouths of any of the indigenous tribal elders I’ve envisioned, and you may begin to hear clicks, as well. The following bullet points are direct quotes or close paraphrases of statements issued from the podium of the conference by women 50+, all of them pioneers of the women’s movement. Sadly, the comments were directed at both themselves and our entire generation of women.
- Older women need to listen more and talk less.
- Older women just write the checks. The younger women are the activists.
- We don’t get wiser as we age—we just become more.
- Our generation (Boomers) knows less about collaboration and community than do younger women.
- We need co-mentoring: you young women have as much to teach us as we have to teach you.
And finally, while I fully embrace the sentiment, can any of us truly imagine one of the tribal elders having to voice these words of Gloria Steinem’s: “Me pass the torch? Not on your life. Light your own torch.”
To be fair, there were some wonderful things said about older women at the conference, but rarely by the 50 plus women about themselves. As I pointed out in Part One, it was the younger women who took on the role of coach/therapist, bringing legions of their elders to tears simply by saying “thank you” for what we accomplished “back then,” rather than bashing us for our shortcomings.
Once again, I feel compelled to ask: “Don’t we, ourselves, have the right to be proud of what we accomplished, to forgive our own shortcomings and to own our wisdom and our power?
And to those special young women who take the opportunity not to be co-mentored but mentored, here’s a truly revolutionary response: You’re welcome.
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Sounds very interesting.
Spike, you are awesome! Love your perspective, thanks for sharing.
I am not retiring. I’m in school preparing for another career–as a counselor. I don’t feel I’m taking a possible future job away from anyone else by doing so. To the contrary: it is my firm conviction that my deposits to the wisdom bank are current, and that it is nearing the time when I start to make some withdrawals. It is my prayer that others will benefit when I do so, whether they are older or younger than I am.
Thanks for this thoughtful analysis.
This is a difficult issue because there are just so many jobs, just so many position of leadership in the feminist movement. I decided to retire from paid work and my main volunteer job in part to make room for younger folks, but that is much easier for me that a women in her 50’s. I’ve written about this at my blog, The Next Stage.
From the blog post:
Granted, it’s easy for me to step aside and make room for a younger generation. I am so ready to retire from both my paid and unpaid jobs, but then not everyone is. Here’s where it gets complicated. Should women who have struggled hard to reach positions of real power and influence (think Ruth Bader Ginsberg) be under any pressure to make room for younger people?
But if everyone hangs on, what happens to younger people in a very tough job market? And how do progressive/feminist organizations, develop the next generation of activists if people in their sixties hang onto most of the leadership positions?