Free Out of Time by Lynne Segal

Introduction
by Elaine Showalter
    It’s not easy to come out as an old person, especially as an old woman. While the coming-out process is usually seen as the public acknowledgment of an attribute that might otherwise stay invisible, such as being gay, and promises acceptance into a welcoming community, identifying yourself as old is to admit something everyone can see, and is thus somehow more shaming, carrying more of a stigma. We’re supposed to deny being old; it is seen as an insulting, or at least unwelcome, self-description, unless jocular and well padded with euphemisms: senior citizen, oldie. Ageing is a process, a matter of degree rather than a fixed identity.
    Like being fat, being old also has its own kind of secret closet. The late literary critic and gay theorist Eve Sedgwick gave a famous conference talk in which she came out as fat, and described her fat dream of entering a closet full of luscious clothes, all in her size, and then seeing that their label was a pink triangle. Old people have age dreams as well. In her study La Vieillesse ( The Coming of Age , 1970), written when she was only fifty-four, Simone de Beauvoir confessed that ‘often in my sleep I dream that I’m fifty-four, I awake, and find I’m only thirty. “What a terrible nightmare I had,” says the woman whothinks she’s awake.’ ‘In a dream you are never eighty,’ wrote Anne Sexton.
    Beauvoir quickly discovered that old age was a forbidden subject. ‘What a furious outcry I raised when I offended against this taboo … great numbers of people, particularly old people, told me kindly or angrily, but always at great length … that old age simply does not exist.’ There are a hundred ways to deny, defy, or avoid the fact of ageing, from strenuous exercise and cosmetic surgery to relentless workaholism and maniacal activity. For some, there’s the philosophy of agelessness, which Catherine Mayer calls ‘amortality’ or ‘living agelessly’. Recent polls find that most adults over fifty feel at least ten years younger, while those over sixty-five feel twenty years younger. ‘How can a seventeen-year-old like me suddenly be eighty-one?’ the scientist Lewis Wolpert asks ruefully in his book You’re Looking Very Well .
    Since the second wave of the women’s movement began in the late 1960s and 1970s, feminists have re-examined the myths and stereotypes, the stigmas and truisms of every phase of the life cycle. Our generation did not grow up with feminism, but came to it when we were already in our twenties and thirties, and our first bulletins were about issues facing young women – menstruation, sexuality, the body, lifestyles. Germaine Greer famously challenged the ancient taboo about menstruation by asking women if they had tasted their own menstrual blood. If not, baby, she taunted, you haven’t come a very long way. Kate Millett raised consciousness about the sexual politics of literature and life. The poet Adrienne Rich placed motherhood, with all its ambivalence and conflict, in a feminist context. Books about maternity and infants were followed by books about parenting teenagers, then about living with empty nests. Booksabout marriage were followed by books about divorce, changes in sexual identity, or living alone. Many of our icons died young, and did not or would not face the problem of time. Sylvia Plath died at thirty, Anne Sexton at forty-six, Angela Carter at fifty-two. As a young woman in 1972, Susan Sontag maintained that ‘growing old is mainly an ordeal of the imagination’.
    But those who lived longer moved on to darker subjects. There were feminist studies of the experience of menopause; and, inexorably, memoirs of caretaking, loss, and death. The feminist bookshelf has expanded to hold books on feminists getting older by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Carolyn Heilbrun, Jane Miller, May Sarton, and Irma Kurtz; poems of mourning in old age by Elaine Feinstein and Ruth Fainlight;