Literature: The Fountain of Age

 

"Half old chicken" at Asian market. Toronto, Canada. June 2016. Credit: Mzuriana.

Betty Friedan is best known for The Feminine Mystique (1963), published when she was 42 years old.

Three decades later, at age 72, she birthed another pivotal book: The Fountain of Age. She proposed that we replace the view of aging as a process of decline with a view that aging "opens the way to a further dimension of 'personhood.'" 

p. 20

"In the months that followed my sixtieth birthday, I grimly forced myself to study age, head on. .... I took a fellowship at Harvard ... I would immerse myself in state-of-the-aging art: medical, clinical, physiological, psychological, social policy. .... 

"Looking around the paneled room at my first Harvard meeting on 'Ethical Issues in the Care of the Aged,' I realized that, aside from my own, there was only one white head of hair. It belonged to a man who was a pioneer in the study of age and was about to retire (it seemed gerontologists must also retire at age sixty-five). These bright young turks of the new aging field were mostly men who maybe started out in psychiatry, doing post-docs in 'geropsychiatry' ..., and a few women staking out new turf as legal-medical 'ethicists.'" ....

 

"I grimly forced myself to study age, head on ..." 

Well, I feel neither grim nor forced, but otherwise, I'm with Betty on an exploration of the Land of Age. 

It's my big new country of residence, after all, and I want to see what's what.