VA-VA BOOM! - Shaking Up Old Concepts on Aging

By Philene Taormina

Earla Sue. Photo: Jan Doerler

Happy Birthday, Boomers? This year, the first of the country’s 77 million-plus baby boomers will celebrate their 60th birthday. The generation that brought us sexual freedom, civil rights, and rock-and-roll will not grow old quietly. But if they’ve redefined how Generations X and Y are supposed to look, live and love, what will their lessons be on aging?

Earla Sue McNaull, our pre-Boomer cover girl, stays busy and actively involved with her community. She has a Certificate in Gerontology from the University of Vermont and has been a hospice volunteer for the past year.

McNaull also mentors a sixth grader once a week; runs the May and July book sales at the library; and donates her time at SCHIP’s (a thrift store benefiting the towns of Shelburne, Charlotte and Hinesburg) “every six weeks, when I get my hair cut.”

“I always colored my hair when I was working,” she says. “When I stopped working, I stopped coloring my hair – I always thought I had more brown in there!”

McNaull also spends time travelling and hiking around the world, including the Machu Pichu Trail and treks in Scotland, Hawaii, and New Zealand.

“I’m always pushing people to do more and do things they’ve never done,” she says. Hear that, Boomers?

Shagging Past Sixty

The face of aging is changing dramatically, with older adults living longer, having lower rates of disability, achieving higher levels of education, and re-designing their careers rather than retiring from them.

Also, more boomers are single than ever before. According to the U.S.Census, almost 29 percent of adults between 45 and 59 were unattached in 2003, up from 19 percent in the 1980s. Gone are the days when older women felt like they were supposed to stay home and take care of the grandchildren. The boomers are dating and – just like those of younger age – having sex.

Roxbury resident Jane Pincus, now 69 years old, was one of the founders and authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the women’s health bible first published in the 1970s. “Women now have more resources about themselves and their bodies and their sexuality than they ever had before. The book has enabled women to think about their bodies and themselves as one thing,” Pincus said. “Women growing older now who have read the book have a real sense that they are like other women and can talk about their health and sexuality.”

In 2003, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) surveyed more than 3,000 single men and women aged 40-69 on their lifestyles and dating habits. Results show that the gender gap in attitudes about sex is still there, but it is wider in the oldest age groups. Only two percent of women surveyed say that sex is acceptable on the first date, while 20 percent of men think it’s just fine. Six out of ten men feel that their frequency of sex is not enough, while only 35 percent of women feel the same.

Sexual urges may not be the main impetus for older women to date – only 22 percent of single women over 45 reported being sexually active in the last six months – but at least they’re having fun when they do date. Fifteen percent of the single women surveyed had watched an adult film with a partner, 14 percent had used sex toys, 10 percent had had phone sex, and seven percent had exchanged frisky notes or e-mails and 26 percent said they masturbated.

“You were supposed to stay home and be a grandparent at 50,” said University of Washington sociology professor Pepper Schwartz in a recent Newsweek article about boomer sexuality. Boomers, she said, are “very clear about what they want and they’re willing to go looking for it.”

Or as Helen Gurley Brown – the 83-year-old author of the seminal Sex and the Single Girl – told the magazine, “Sex is such an enjoyable activity at any age. Why delegate it only to the young?”

Economic Independence

Financial security is also essential to ensure these years stay golden. Aging women face the real prospect of significant time without partners. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, women now have a life expectancy of 80.4 years, 5.3 more than men. Moreover, according to the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement, by age 85 the majority of women are single.

Nancy Lang, 64, a former Burlington schoolteacher and the current president of the Vermont chapter of AARP, still looks to her 88-year-old mother Mona Carvajal as an example of economic independence. Carvajal graduated from Cornell University with a major in economics in 1939 when only a quarter of the student body was female. She went on to have four children and work outside the home during the war.

Carvajal’s own model for financial responsibility was her mother, who went to work outside the home just after her divorce, when Carvajal was eleven. “My mother knew how to handle money, and having that background made me feel I could do it on my own,” Carvajal said.

According to “Looking at Act II of Women’s Lives: Thriving and Striving from 45 On,” an AARP Foundation Women’s Leadership Circle study released in April, seven out of ten women who are confident about their finances report that they are happier than they’ve ever been. Of those women who were less confident about money, only about half reported being happy.

However, Elaine McCrate, an economics professor at the University of Vermont who specializes in livable wage studies and gender economics, believes many women are not financially prepared for their retirement years.

“At 60, hopefully a woman has saved most of what she will need to retire securely, but most women don’t even make a livable wage,” McCrate said. “Basically, many women are not going to save enough for retirement on their own, without a partner.”

For ten years, Vermont’s legislative fiscal office has calculated a livable wage – the amount of money needed for shelter, food, health care, and transportation. Since 1998, that figure has included a modest five percent-of-income savings rate for retirement. For a single person without children, this year’s livable wage is about $26,600.

“When Vermont first started calculating the livable wage, we didn’t include savings,” McCrate said. “We calculated a wage based on spending all of the income on living now. Saving for your kids’ college tuition or your retirement was not factored in.

“But five percent isn’t enough savings to retire on. Their quality of life could be shaky without additional savings,” McCrate added.

Reinvention, not Retirement

Ending a career or finding an empty nest used to mean retirement couldn’t be too far behind. But many women are no longer content to ride out their golden years sitting around, going on cruises, or moving to Florida. One of the dirtiest little secrets is that women, given the chance, are more interested in getting better with age – not older. It isn’t easy in this youth-obsessed era to define “better.”

“All the media attention is on being older and looking younger,” said Pincus. “These are not real older women. I look at myself and I can’t believe the wrinkles sometimes. But I am 69. I don’t identify myself as older, but I want to be content with who I am. I get glimpses of myself and realize that I don’t necessarily look how I feel.”

“We have earned our gray hair and the right to live fully,” Lang said. “I really want people to understand that as we age we can be the best at that age. When society sees older people as powerless and frail, we have to fight against that image. I say, ‘The hell with that.’ There is no way that I will not have a voice.”

Of her mother, Lang said, “she redefines herself as she grows older. Her secret is staying involved in life. A person has to be comfortable with where they are at and not be reluctant to share their age, set new challenges, and break new barriers at every age. That is what my mother does.”

Women have long been catalysts for social change, and the boomers have begun to shift perceptions about aging. Getting old alone, for example, is no longer an occasion for sadness. Some who were married and now live alone, do so by choice. Women like Carvajal aren’t really alone, either: she has her family and an extensive network of friends and neighbors. “Every day she has a significant conversation with friends or neighbors,” said her daughter. “She takes care of herself. She swims and plays golf. She has been very smart about reviving her life so she can live well at each stage.”

“Getting older is a long road,” Carvajal said. “The biggest challenge with getting older is you really do have to take it one day at a time and not worry about things, because the things that go wrong are never what you worried about. Why let it weigh on you?”

Being Here Now

The quest to understand how we can live more meaningfully as we age is a full time job for me – literally. For the past four years I have worked as the lobbyist for AARP in the Vermont Statehouse. I get to think and talk about aging every day.

As a 40-year-old single mother, I balance a lot in my life: a full-time job, keeping up with a home, stretching my paycheck today, saving for tomorrow, and a love life. Being able to shed day-to-day worries and live in the moment seems so alien to me.

But one thing is perfectly clear: I – we – are not alone. We are all growing older, all heading toward a time when, if we’re lucky, most of our daily worries about the future will fade away into a life lived now.

If I have anything to do with it, retirement won’t be the same when I reach that age. In fact, I’ve often wanted to banish the word and all its connotations of passivity. After all, how can anyone face all the challenges of aging with determination and dignity if the script is already written for us?

Sure, like any woman, I want financial security – but I also want economic independence. I want my health to remain good, but I also want to know that I have options if my body should decide it’s going in a different direction than the rest of me. I want my brain to be stretched every day; I will not be content to while away my 50s, 60s, and 70s without intellectual challenges. I want the freedom to explore the world to my heart’s content. More often now, I find myself evaluating my current life decisions against the measuring stick of, Will this make me a better old woman? If not, I don’t do it.

I want to be better at 70 than I am now at 40.

These women face life with both grace and humor and I got the sense from each that cultivating her inner being was her priority now, not the outside package that is paramount in our youth-obsessed culture.

That prospect of aging well – that awesome challenge – should be enough to keep us women going strong for the next couple of decades.

Philene Taormina (JD, Georgetown University Law Center) is the Director of Advocacy for the AARP in Vermont. She lives in Montpelier.