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I looked for organizations that enable seniors to give back, and I found the following listed in the International Longevity Center’s book
The Longevity Prescription: How to Maximize the Three-Decade Dividend.

THE EXPERIENCE CORPS:
The mission of this organization is to “partner with schools and local community organizations to create meaningful opportunities for adults over 55 to meet society’s greatest challenges.” The Experience Corps has programs in place in twenty cities across the nation. The website is
www.experiencecorps.org
.

RESERVE, INC.:
Its mission is to connect experienced retired professionals with compensated service opportunities that challenge them to use their lifetime skills for the public good:
www.reserveinc.org
.

CIVIC VENTURES:
This group seeks to encourage experienced workers approaching retirement to redeploy their expertise to address serious social problems in areas such as the environment, education, health care, and homelessness:
www.civicventures.org
and
www.encore.org
.

It has been my experience that the most powerful and rewarding forms of Generativity are those that have personal relevance. For instance, I enjoy and am good at working with (and creating organizations that work with) adolescents because I so vividly recall how difficult my own adolescence was and what it was that I lacked: someone to listen to me and make me feel safe with self-revelation. Similarly, I am drawn to work within organizations such as Eve Ensler’s V-Day: Until the Violence Stops because so many women I know—including my mother—have been victims of violence and abuse and I’m sure that, if we can stop the violence, just about every single thing in the world will change! In doing this work, I am moving from the core of my being and with my heart. I do not view it as charity! Charity, as I see it, means creating safety nets. But people can get caught in safety nets. True Generativity is creating trampolines, not safety nets.

CHAPTER 17

Ripening the Time: A Challenge for Women

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

—ARUNDHATI ROY

What is required today is after all what the great religions have asked of human beings, to treat others as we ourselves want to be treated, to accept social responsibilities and to exercise stewardship over all creation. We don’t know if or when the time will be ripe for such a transformation, but we do believe that all of us should be striving to ripen the time.

—PAUL ERLICH

With Bella Abzug.

W
E’VE LIVED FOR FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT DECADES OR MORE, long enough to know that the world is in major trouble. Call me an alarmist but, to paraphrase my friend Robin Morgan, being an alarmist is a principled choice when there is cause for alarm.

This is way beyond equal wages and glass ceilings. I have come to the conclusion that nothing less than the long-term survival of our species—of our planet, actually—will depend on women moving into leadership positions in every arena: electoral, judicial, spiritual, financial, psychological, community-based, artistic.

Far be it from me to be holier-than-thou in the denial department; I’ve done plenty of denial in my time. I understand that to face what’s happening means being called to act, and that’s tough. Some of us have a need to cling to what we want to believe despite evidence to the contrary. One’s identity can be bound up in a certain belief system, and to examine it is to throw one’s very being into question—
If this isn’t true, then who am I?

We need to answer the question “Then who am I?” with a resounding “We are wise enough women, ready to speak our truths to power even if it means dredging up the truths we’ve been trying to bury.” Some anthropologists believe that with age, women reclaim their assertive, aggressive traits, which they may have repressed during the parental years. In studying twenty-six different societies, the anthropologist David Gutmann found that this was true in fourteen of them, and that in none of them did men’s dominance increase.
¹

We are also members of the trailblazing sixties generation. We have experienced what it means to confront outmoded, discriminatory status symbols; to throw ourselves behind efforts to achieve equal rights for people of color, for ourselves; and to create new role models of citizenship in the process.

We can’t wait for the young, though we must lead and inspire them. But they are absorbed in becoming and getting—getting a degree, getting a job, getting a partner, getting a house, getting a family, getting a promotion, getting a grip. The middle-aged are in the midst of the fertile void, anxious about youth and about power slipping through their fingers. They’re still scared of elderhood. We’re past that, and, for the most part, we’re through with the “getting,” too.

You may wonder why I speak of elder women (together with girls and men of conscience) as being the ones more likely to lead society toward a new paradigm that is less violent, less unequal, less ageist, racist, sexist, and homophobic. For one thing, many men have been trained to think that the ideas of diplomacy, peace, and equality are effete, too humanistic—sissy stuff that challenges their manhood. In
The New Earth,
Eckhart Tolle writes that while the ego has gained “absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche,” it is harder for the ego to take root in women than in men because women “are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate [and have] greater openness and sensitivity toward other life-forms and [are] more attuned to the natural world.” As Gloria Steinem has said, “It’s not that women are morally superior to men, it’s just that we don’t have our masculinity to prove.”

For another thing, there are more elder women than ever before: forty million—51 percent of the aging boomers. Women are the single largest demographic in U.S. history.

Then there’s the fact that women navigate changes and adjustments more easily than men and so have an easier time with aging. While men’s lives have tended to be focused mainly on job or career, women’s have been marked by discontinuity: having babies, balancing careers while keeping house, moving as our husband’s jobs dictate, raising children, then sending them off (often to have them return till they become economically independent, which is happening later and later!). The women’s movement inspired many of us to examine and reappraise our roles in life and work. Then there are the major changes brought on by hormonal shifts. We’ve learned to adjust to discontinuities. The cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson points out that although for much of our lives these discontinuities were seen as vulnerabilities—
women’s ways—
as we age, our adaptability becomes an asset, a core of our resilience. Besides, we have less to lose from change than men do. Too few of us have ever really been in control within our nation—perhaps even within our families; we’ve suffered the most from the status quo, and in Act III we’re no longer in the marketplace, trying to please. What have we got to lose?

Ready or not, here we are, with more time and experience on our hands and less fear about upsetting anyone. It’s time to scrounge around in our house of memories and pull up the things we once knew and then forgot we knew because knowing meant authenticity—being who we are fully, in the truest sense—and au-thenticity was dangerous. Let’s bring back the girls we once were before we became the women our husbands or bosses thought we ought to be. The girl with hands on hips, jaw jutting, saying, “Oh yeah, says who?” Bring her back, nourish her with our hard-earned wisdom, and let her guide our footsteps as we face our challenges.

One of our challenges is to help one another understand the new global reality and redefine our nation’s place in it. We face a shrinking, congested planet with diminishing resources. Globalization may be creating one sort of unified world, but for it to be a peaceful, just, sustainable form of unity, our global consciousness needs to catch up to it.

The new reality demands internationalism, multilateralism, diplomacy (with humility), and compassion. But these approaches are considered “effeminate” or “effete” by too many men we’ve elected to office. If you study the gender gap—which exposes the differences between how women vote and poll on issues and how men vote and poll—you can see that these are, in fact, overwhelmingly women’s values. But men are wrong to view them pejoratively. These are the values that will save us. And, on a hopeful note, when the gender gap does narrow—as it appears to be doing on war and peace issues, for example—men are moving in women’s direction, rather than the other way around.

I’ve said in many different ways why
elder
women are best suited to take the lead in saving the world. Let me say it again: We have the time, the wisdom, the breadth of vision,
and the numbers.
We have less to lose, and now we’re not afraid to be angry. At least according to some anthropologists, we’ve become the more assertive gender. And there’s the future of the young—in some cases our own grandchildren and step-grandchildren, nieces and nephews—to motivate us further.

It seems overwhelming, doesn’t it? The idea that we can actually change how the world’s institutions conduct themselves? But think of a trim tab! A trim tab is a miniature rudder, a tiny thing that is attached to the edge of the big rudder at the back of an ocean liner. If you move the trim tab just a little bit, it can, with hardly any effort, build up a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Women constitute a critical mass, and older women are the critical mass
within
the mass. Women over eighty-five are the fastest-growing age group in the world! Let’s become the trim tab on the rudder of the ship of state.

In the time of the founding of our nation, the trim tab was a council of elder wise women who chose the chief for the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The women weren’t chiefs themselves, but it was recognized that they were the ones who would know which man had the appropriate qualities of leadership (which meant the ability not to go out after things but to hold things together). It was the elder women who decided when to go to war and how to maintain the peace. So successful was the government of the Seven Nations that our founders used it as a template for our Constitution. Except that—surprise!—they left out the elder wise women part.

If we really wrap our minds around what’s at stake and bring all our experience and wisdom to the task, we can not only choose our chiefs; we can
be
the chiefs.

The cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson has written a book about aging,
Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom,
and, like me, she feels that the growing number of older people has the potential to play a major role in bringing about change. “You and I are living at a turning point,” she told me. “The rise of feminism was a turning point, and the awareness of climate change as an environmental danger is a turning point. And this extension of longevity is a turning point. The question is, Can we contribute to the process of change in a way that really enriches and deepens lives for people of all ages; will we claim the right and mobilize the energy and find our voices again and do it?”

In his
Letters to a Young Poet,
Rilke said, “Life and Death are the greatest gifts—and usually go unopened.” Shouldn’t our ultimate task be to tear open our gift of life and use our wisdom and deepened consciousness to ripen the time? We ourselves are ripe—“going to seed,” as they say. So let’s sow those seeds far and wide and see what grows! Might this not be our ultimate evolutionary purpose?