Women & Ageing: I've Developed the Courage to Live my Own Truth

I love my age of 64 years - right now! It’s a fascinating time as we have had so much experience in life before now and so many opportunities to learn more. I meet many women who are just not content with themselves and remind them, Whitney Houston who had everything….didn’t get to 60 - she died at 48 years.

I do not feel invisible, I make sure I am not!!

- Chris Vidal from Power of Women in our Sixties

I found this article from The Guardian: Seven Australians in their 50s, 60s and 70s who challenge the notion that older women become invisible. Do you resonate with any of them?

Women have always had an acute awareness of growing old. In her acclaimed May 2015 essay The Insults of Age, Helen Garner explores the ways in which getting older means being erased from a culture that equates youth and beauty and beauty with value – a cruel and thankless algebra. “Your face is lined, and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid,” she writes. “It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business.”

When women lose cultural currency, they also pay for it in literal currency. According to a 2016 report from Monash University researchers, commissioned by the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, 34% of women aged over 60 live in permanent income poverty. In the same year a report from the Australian Human Rights Commission found that nearly one-third of workers 50 and over were discriminated against in the workforce, with older women being more adversely impacted than older men. And March 2018 figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found a 31% increase in older women experiencing homelessness since 2011, while men experiencing homelessness increased by 26%.

On one hand, the cultural conversation surrounding women and ageing has never been louder. On the other, the language of the pro-ageing movement – centred on the likes of Joan Didion in Céline campaigns, the lack of roles for celebrities like Nicole Kidman and wealthy, (mostly) white style bloggers – can create another ideal that’s impossible to aspire to. 

Older women’s experiences are as shaped by cultural background and life trajectories as they are by birthdates and generational divides. Ageing is the sum of many conflicting feelings and forces. Freedom from the erotic gaze can spark a sense of grief and loss. But it can also lead to a newfound sense of independence and radical possibility.

There is no right way to get older.

Please read this interesting article taken from The Guardian a few years ago here.