Free Out of Time by Lynne Segal Page A

grief and widowhood memoirs by Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. We even have records and meditations on feminism and dying from Eve Sedgwick and Ruth Picardie; rages against the night from Susan Sontag; and graceful goodbyes from Wendy Wasserstein and Nora Ephron.
    Lynne Segal has lived through every phase, literary and political, of the women’s movement as an activist, a scholar, a teacher, and a writer. In 2007, in her autobiography Making Trouble (2007), Segal described herself as ‘a reluctantly ageing woman’, and mused about the need for ‘a feminist sexual politics of ageing’. But the timing was wrong. She was cautioned by some of her friends ‘to avoid thinking, let alone writing, of my generation … as “old.” ’ Now in Out of Time , she has written the big book we have been waiting for on the psychology and politics of ageing, for both women and men. The subjects that used to be unmentionable are now urgent and essential to discuss, and ‘we can be fairly certain that old taboos are already collapsing, often indeed that the floodgates are opening.’ In Segal’sphilosophical take on old age, ‘the self never ages’, although the body changes and the culture evolves. Ageing is also timeless, ‘not simply linear, nor … any simple discrete process when, in our minds we race around, moving seamlessly between childhood, old age, and back again.’ What really matters, she argues, is ‘neither the sociology nor the biology of ageing’, but the narrative of the self, ‘the stories we tell ourselves’ of how to ‘ be our age as we age’. Ultimately, as we age, the central question is still ‘How are we to live our lives?’
    Segal brings to her book a lifetime of personal, intellectual, and political experience of the changing roles of men and women. An Australian by birth, she received her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Sydney in the late ’60s at the height of the radical arts movement called ‘The Push’. When she came to London in 1970, Segal immediately became involved in leftwing politics in Islington, and helped set up the Islington Women’s Centre. Living in a communal household, raising a child along with other mothers and children, she experienced the feminist axiom that ‘the personal is political’. During that decade of idealistic and exhilarating action, she now observes, what was most needed was ‘courage – at times little more than bravado’. In 1979, along with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright, Segal wrote Beyond the Fragments , calling for alliances between leftwing groups, feminists, and trade unions.
    Indeed, Segal’s work has continued to advocate inclusion, negotiation, and alliances, rather than separation and rigid ideological boundaries between the sexes, the classes, or the generations. From the beginning she has courageously questioned easy assumptions or sloganeering stereotypes of gender, whether of violent men or benign motherly women, and has emphasized the possibilities for change and progressin domestic and political life. In 1984, she joined the Advisory Board of Virago Press, and wrote her first speculative book, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (1987), questioning the myths of female superiority then being offered in feminist circles. In 1990, she followed up with Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men . In Making Trouble , Segal recalls how the ‘newly born feminist’, despite her bravado, was ‘frequently unsure and insecure’, while ‘men were entangled with feminism from the start’. Within feminism, as well as between women and men, there were skirmishes over housework, childcare, monogamy, sexual freedom, sexual orientation. The newly born feminists of the 1970s lived through love affairs, long-term relationships that ended painfully, the stresses of parenting, alongside bruising encounters with the enormous difficulties of effecting political change.
    In her position as