Right now I’m reading a book that was a huge bestseller in the ’70s and that’s really making me think: Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Actually, I know the author. She’s about 20 years older than me. As most of us know, her book was a huge, huge hit and kind of an autobiographical novel. She writes a lot about growing up right after World War II and coming of age in the ’50s and early ’60s, kind of the pre-hippie generation. I was more the hippie generation; she was before that.
Alix writes about very ordinary girls growing up in a way that makes me realize why there’s often a lot of negativity and fearfulness there. For instance, she writes about the kind of terrorism boys practiced, at that time, against girls on the playground. Little kids, but also the wrestling in the backseats of cars, over sex.
Alix writes about the gender divide where girls were supposed to be good girls and they were really fearful of boys. There was a certain brutality back then that I think is not really recognized in a lot of cultural history. Compared to the way my kids grew up where they got, you know, sensitivity training in school, diversity training – and things like sexual harassment are obviously taboo.
Back then, sexual harassment was par for the course. You just have to watch an episode of Mad Men to see how a lot of older women today grew up in a world where they were regularly harassed and criticized and brutalized on a lot of levels, physically and emotionally. I think young women today are not subject to the same kind of ill treatment. Maybe I’m making this too serious and heavy, but I think that there is some deep reality there that kind of informs the difference in attitudes across older and younger generations of women.
I used Noxzema from the time I was old enough to wash my own face, all through school and into adulthood. Then I decided it wasn't 'sophisticated' enough and went with higher priced, higher end products. About 5 years ago, I went back to 
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Have started trying some of the uses. I tried using it a
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Pamela, I completely agree with you. I think part of our confusion as older women comes from the fact that we often forget we were raised in different times, and that we are therefore products of different social mores than those that predominate in the present day. I find Mad Men to be a blessing, because it reminds me of how different things were when we were youngsters, and it helps me understand some of the things we have had to overcome in the intervening years. If we are current at all, it is because we have grown and changed over time, refusing to allow ourselves to stay stuck in the kind of thinking we were raised with.
Do you remember this cigarette ad? “You’ve come a long way, Baby!” It is so much more applicable now than it was in the 1970s.
We have gained and we have lost over the years, but I see a net gain in the areas of self-respect and possibility.