Out of Time (10 page)

Expressing her appreciation of this book, Miller’s contemporary, Penelope Lively, having herself written so wonderfully on the paradoxical, unpredictable experiences of ageing, both applauds Miller’s attempt to undercut the caricatures of the old (condensed into the iconography of two figures bent over
walking sticks on road signs warning of elderly pedestrians) and also confirms the obstacles to overcoming them. Illustrating those caricatures, Lively tells us: ‘I once judged a children’s writing competition in which entries had been invited on the subject of grandparents; without exception, the people represented were ancient, white-haired, knitting by the fireside.’ All the stranger, she adds, when ‘the average granny in this country is likely to be around sixty, and still at work’.
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All the stranger, too, when, as Lively goes on to suggest, over the last fifty years the enormous gulf between the generations has seemed to be in decline. As grandparents today, my ’60s generation really are likely to be closer to our grandchildren in values and outlook than we were to our own grandparents. Indeed, as Lively herself reflected in her late seventies:

it does seem to me that there has been a seismic change over the last fifty years in the relationship between the generations. I adored my grandmother, but was aware that a whole aspect of my life was unmentionable – anything that made reference to sex. My own granddaughters know, I think, that nothing they could say would shock me. Where attitudes are concerned, the generation gap has narrowed, for many of us.
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Narrowed, perhaps, but still it seems vast effort must be put into the work of trying to counter those fears and anxieties, from within and without, that keep us so wary of each other across age divisions, all the more so when we are up against forces working to enhance them.

It is this persistence of the sharply differentiating and dangerous dynamics of ageism that has triggered the very recent appearance of a field calling itself ‘Age Studies’, now sometimes
referred to as ‘life-course research’, to engage with the continuities and disruptions people experience across a lifetime. Thus Age Studies courses are designed to combat fixed ideas about discrete age groups, explicitly seeking out best practices for promoting intergenerational understanding and cooperation.

This was the goal of all the papers presented at a conference advertising itself as the ‘First Global Conference on Times of Our Lives: Growing Up, Growing Old’, which took place in Oxford in the summer of 2009.
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The papers presented there bore optimistic titles, such as Peter Caws and Julia Glahn’s ‘The Irrelevance of Chronological Age’, in the opening session, and the following day James Gambone’s ‘Together for Tomorrow: Building Community through Intergenerational Dialogue and Action’. Yet, although in line with the hopes of most of the other contributors, the ‘irrelevance of chronological age’ seems rather whimsical, even if thought desirable, when its authors also assert that the possibilities for intergenerational friendship are currently hard to sustain against the backdrop of persisting cultural preconceptions insisting on their difficulties. Nevertheless, Caws and Glahn argued that there were many ways of challenging such prejudices and trying to shift the usual pattern of perceptions and practices. These begin, in their view, with highlighting the very high social, political and economic costs of supporting such generational separation and isolation.

Also aiming to combat ageist stereotypes, other conference papers pointed out that sometimes the best comes last: Verdi wrote Falstaff, perhaps his best comic opera, when he was eighty; Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens when he was seventy-eight; Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Guggenheim Museum, one of his masterpieces, when he was ninety-one; Michelangelo was painting the frescoes in the Pauline chapel of
the Vatican at eighty-nine; Georgia O’Keeffe was still painting until her death at ninety-eight.
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In London in 2007 many admirers were drawn to an exhibition of the life’s work of Louise Bourgeois, the extraordinary French-American artist who kept on painting and exhibiting her work to enormous acclaim right up to the day she died, aged ninety-eight, in 2010. Certainly, as we will see often enough in subsequent chapters, for the most fortunate, life may be lived creatively till the last.

The hope is that the greater our knowledge of the life-long persistence of creativity, at times even of exceptional talent, among some of the already eminent, the easier it becomes to encourage more positive awareness of the potential and perhaps hidden creativity that might be fostered in the lesser-known elderly folk we encounter. Nonetheless, there is also some wishful thinking in the strategic denial of trying to assert the irrelevance of ageing and old age, ignoring what is distinctive about the layers of years lived. At this early stage, though, I imagine these champions of old age feel such simplification is necessary to embolden forces of resistance to routine ageism – rather like the slogans ‘Black Is Beautiful’; ‘Gay Is Good’; ‘Women Are Strong’, to which they perhaps hope to add, ‘Ageing Is Admirable’. Such rallying rhetoric may indeed be useful, but it is necessary to insist that all forms of prejudice and isolation are cruel and wrong, even if someone is thought unappealing and disagreeable, whatever their ethnicity, sexuality, gender or age. To argue that age is irrelevant thus runs the risk of turning our attention once more away from the varied distinctiveness of old age, with its gains and losses, its demanding challenges and fluctuating temporalities.

Feminist Genealogies

Unsurprisingly, as second-wave feminists grow old, some of us have also wanted to foster greater generational dialogue. We began by stressing our difference from our mothers, those housewives of the 1950s, who appeared to have sacrificed so much to recreate the brittle ‘happy families’ of the post-war period into which we were born. They were women often barely able to conceal their bitterness over their own diminished lives or, perhaps like my own mother, their resentment over the domestic tyranny of their husbands.
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However, along with Adrienne Rich and others, some feminists soon came to celebrate the practices of motherhood and maternal legacies as part of the rich texture of women’s experience and the feminist imagination.
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Feminist texts began highlighting the extent of mother blaming, whether in the classic Freudian case study, or standard Hollywood productions of bad mothers and ‘hen-pecked’ husbands.
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Thinking back through our mothers and grandmothers thus became, for some, one way of asserting generational ties. This could mean writing our way back to valuing older women, while rethinking what some feminists today highlight as the complexities of a ‘maternal ethics’ of care and commitment: the inevitable strains in the shifting needs for holding close, and letting go, within the mother-daughter bond.
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Thus Kathleen Woodward has stressed the familial ways in which we are not so much divided as connected across generations, recalling the lure her own grandparents held for her as a child:

In terms of age we were separated by more than fifty years and a generation, but I did not feel either then or now that we were separated by generations. Rather I felt connected by them. I felt … an emotional attunement and mutual recognition that stretched across a continuity established by three generations … Missing were the stormy emotions of envy, fear, hostility, guilt and jealousy intrinsic to the nuclear family of Freudian psychoanalysis.
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As Woodward points out, she is not alone in idealizing older figures such as her grandparents. Sometimes, indeed, a young person might even adopt older ‘fictive kin’, perhaps individuals who have been their mentors, or served in other ways to inspire them with the resilience and commitments maintained throughout long lives. Woodward draws upon the writing and film work of the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, who in her early forties lovingly portrayed the community life of elderly Californian East European Jews, in the documentary
In Her Time
, suggesting: ‘In contacting them, I have found not only my childhood (I was raised by an Eastern European grandmother), but also my future, as an old lady … We are dehumanized and impoverished without our old people, for only by contact with them can we come to know ourselves, and only thus can we stop looking at them as an alien remote people unconnected with ourselves.’
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Sadly, as Myerhoff knew when making this film, she would not live to enjoy the fruits of her own lessons, dying of lung cancer at fifty.

Elsewhere, in Woodward’s significant collection
Figuring Age
, the American literature scholar, Mary Russo, writes of other examples of cross-generational female bonding, seeing it as challenging the ways in which, for ageing women, ‘loss is too often accompanied by shame and abjection’.
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Russo quotes from Gillian Rose’s memoir
Love’s Work
, written in her late
forties when this incisive British philosopher was already dying of ovarian cancer, recalling an earlier visit to New York when she was well. There she had observed the deep understanding between her friend Jim, a young man dying of AIDS, and Edna, an extraordinarily vibrant ninety-three-year-old woman, seeing their relationship as representing a new form of sociality, reflecting: ‘She is an annunciation, a message, very old and very new.’ What Rose embraces, and Russo also celebrates in her essay, ‘Aging and the Scandal of Anachronism’, is the determination of some older women, at whatever cost of rejection, loss or humiliation, to keep on seeking out new friends and new lovers, to the very end of life.
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Vaulting over, without disowning, traditional age barriers is certainly possible and I suggest that some feminists in particular have begun to value such moves. The feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, for instance, has written of what she sees as both the psychic strength and political importance of understanding and acknowledging the significance of specifically feminist genealogies, as a ‘discursive and political exercise in cross-generational female bonding’.
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However, any such genealogical mapping would surely be hugely contentious, when feminists at any one time have never shared a unified political outlook. Indeed, feminists have disagreed over how to view women and their relationship to their bodies, the issue of sexual risk, the forms of relationship women should have, and the work they should do, or should value. We have even disputed how best to pursue the basic goal of tackling women’s subordination as a sex, whether within the symbolic realm of language, or in seeking or eschewing juridical and social reform. As I have written before in
Making Trouble
, and many others have noted, every retelling of feminism’s past reconstructs a political story from the
present, eclipsing much of its earlier contextual nuance. Thus, as Dana Heller summarizes, the ‘defining moments of feminism’s generational identities, and the key debates associated with generational shifts in feminist thought are themselves constantly shifting constructions that are reworked by feminists, non feminists and antifeminists’.
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Worse, however, at least within the competitive sphere of academia, we surely must acknowledge that adversarial generational tension often set the tone for much feminist writing, especially during the fierce theoretical debates of the 1990s. Somewhat depressingly, this is the theme of many of the essays in Ann Kaplan and Devoney Looser’s anthology
Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue
, published in 1997. Most of them highlight the high degree of conflict between feminist ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’, with blame seeming to come from both younger and older feminists alike.
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It was clearly younger feminist scholars, as much as her peers, whom Carolyn Heilbrun had in mind when she wrote in her memoir of her closing years,
The Last Gift of Time
, that she was glad to escape from what she felt as the ‘poisonous atmosphere’ of her work in feminist studies.
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Such tensions between women make me suspect that the familial metaphor may not be helpful, especially when it marginalizes the significance of economic and other cultural shifts that impact upon the confrontations between younger and older feminists. Generational friction between women is not only evident in intellectual debate, but as ever amplified in the popular press and its now ever-diversifying cyber infrastructures for creating and maintaining distinct identities.

Not long ago I noticed the insightful investigative feminist journalist Susan Faludi commenting on problems caused by the enduring tensions between feminists in the USA: ‘A
generational breakdown underlies so many of the pathologies that have long disturbed American feminism – its fleeting mobilizations followed by long hibernations; its bitter divisions over sex; and its reflexive renunciation of its prior incarnations … The contemporary women’s movement seems fated to fight a war on two fronts: alongside the battle of the sexes rages the battle of the ages.’ Moreover, she reports that not only does much ‘new’ feminist activism and scholarship spurn the work of older feminists, but that surveys in 2008 reported young women overall neither wanted, nor trusted, female bosses, while many young women opposed Hillary Clinton, apparently, precisely because she reminded them of their mother. ‘I’ve been to a feminist “mother–daughter dinner party” ’, Faludi comments, ‘where the feel-good bonding degenerated into a cross fire of complaint and recrimination, with younger women declaring themselves sick to death of hearing about the glory days of seventies feminism and older women declaring themselves sick to death of being swept into the dustbin of history.’
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