By Louise Anike
Until my mid-50s, I called myself a middle aged or mid-life woman. But where is middle aged? One woman said middle age is when you suddenly find that your parents are old, your kids are grown up and you haven't changed.
As each decade passes, women often groan fearfully, regretting their birthdays because of bodily changes. Even now, when I look in the mirror I wonder at how I look. I don't feel the way the woman in the mirror looks, I feel a lot younger, and the woman in the mirror seems almost like a stranger. What happened to that other woman who was me? Why do I want to deny my appearance as I become old?
The very word old itself is often accompanied with a shudder. Old is equated with being sickly and having a poor memory. Crankiness is often attributed to "getting old". Thus, old is awful, sickly, forgetful, ugly and querulous, plus other derogatory adjectives such as pathetic, powerless, fearful and asexual. Old is a horror coming at the end of our lives.
Ageing is what we personally experience as we grow from day one, each of us experiencing it differently. Ageism is a bias against senior people by the temporarily young. Ageism is social ageing, the negative response with its accompanying segregation, patronising, discrimination and stigmatism against the natural process of ageing. A great deal of ageism is female directed.
Woman-focussed ageism cannot be extricated from sexism. From the time our mothers put little pink bows in our newborn hair, we were being socialised into believing our chief value was to be attractive and useful to men.
Constricted by cramping and inconvenient clothes and shoes, we painted, plucked, shaved, modified our faces and bodies: we crippled our minds into accepting the male definitions of beauty and service. We often stifled our own reason when illogicalities, contradictions and unrealistic standards set by patriarchy were so apparent and unjust, because we were brainwashed by endless pressure to conform, and sometimes for survival, which was closely tied into pleasing men.
To be beautiful is to be young. You only have to consider the frenetic endless search some women engage in to try to erase signs of ageing. The last arrow in the quiver of sexism is the ageism loosed against ageing women.
As a woman who will soon be 65, I define myself as an old woman. My peers and I have not reached our old years unscathed. We have suffered pain, delusion, illegal abortions in "backyards", breakdowns, breakouts, disorientations, loss and depression.
We have been tenacious and resourceful to live through many of the issues which younger women are going through, without the help of the therapies now available for incest, rape, alcohol, obesity, drugs, violence, breakups of relationships and more. We had no legal aid, no supporting mother's benefits, and little or no community sympathy or
Some of these same issues are what older women experience right now: domestic violence, rape, addiction. Age gives no immunity against these issues.
Our society has the idea that women are over the hill when they come to the dirty word beginning with "f": forty. Women looking for employment hit the age barrier — as though skills, experience, energy and appearance are now only fit for the discard heap.
Double standards apply at all ages and go on into older years. Older men are overwhelmingly shown in the media in positions of authority and power, and with much younger partners. Indeed, in reality, older men are often in positions of power.
Claiming to reflect the world, the media selectively interpret the "truth". Older women, as a rule, are just not there; when we make the exceptional appearances we are bitches, witches, dithering dills, asexual housewives or naive, dependent women. Or we can be the fantastic granny tap dancing on her 50th solo balloon flight: isn't she good for her age?
Older women who wish to find male partners have very few chances. The older woman who subscribes to the idea that sexual desirability centres in being more physically attractive will have to invest extraordinary amounts of effort, money and emotion in striving for beauty by dieting, constant hairdos, cosmetic surgery, lying about her age and agonising over wrinkles and drooping stomach.
The ending of our fertility does not end our sexuality, nor does it mysteriously sever us from our acquired skills and experience. Our sexual feelings may, in fact, increase after menopause.
Older women are the butt of jokes about menopause and cruel jokes about mothers-in-law. There are no equivalent jokes about domineering, interfering fathers-in-law.
What can be done? We can make a start not to cut ourselves off from the natural process of our age. That phrase, "you're as young as you feel", is a self-alienating defence. Age is a fact.
The women who led the struggle for the vote for women were middle aged. When the old black woman Rosa Parks, 69 years of age, refused to move to the back of a bus, she sparked the civil rights movement in the USA in the 1960s. Female elders in Belau led the protests to stop the US using their territory for nuclear testing. Older women in Argentina spend risky years looking for their disappeared ones.
In Australia, there are older women in all kinds of protests, working for peace, the environment, better social conditions and issues in the women's movement. Aboriginal women are fighting for land rights and the survival of their people.
And there are older women active for older women. Older women speak-outs have been held in Adelaide and Perth. Older women's festivals have been held in the Blue Mountains and in South Australia. Next International Women's Day, look l be there, as we have always been.
[Abridged from a talk given at an International Women's Day collective forum in Sydney in August.]