“One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth.” – Gloria Steinem
Aging My Way
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which started a wave of feminist upheavals, came out in 1963. It’s the first book being read by the four women protagonists in Marie Bostwick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women published in 2025, which I’m currently reading – and rediscovering lost parts of me through each of the characters.
I was 24, with four children in 1963, and didn’t have the time, or the inclination back then, to read Friedan’s book. My upheaval took a bit longer – coming through the voices of women like Gloria Steniem, the founder of Ms Magazine; tennis player Billie Jean King; The Women’s Room author Marilyn French; Black congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan; and many others.
When I was born in 1939, women had only been able to vote for less than 20 years; as a married woman, I couldn’t open a bank account in my own name or get a credit card without a cosigner until 1974. High school teachers and counselors rarely encouraged girls to go to college and there was a proliferation of magazines for women on how to support their husbands, but no magazine for how husbands could support their wives.
Our work as full-time child carers, cooks, housecleaners, washerwomen, errand runners, chauffers, hostesses and a host of other things to keep a household running smoothly simply didn’t count.
For example, one of The Book Club’s characters finds a part-time job she loves and which pays writing a magazine column from home. In public, public her husband puts her down calling it a job-ette, and just something she could do as long as it didn’t interfere with her more-womanly duties.
That one brought a flashback, as I had been told the same thing when I went to work full time at a newspaper after 12 years of marriage. But the flashback went even further back, to a time when my mother, who had to give up her secretary job when she got married, went back to work after all her children were grown.
I heard my father joke that her job, which was actually supporting the household at the time, just meant that he had to pay higher taxes.
As an adult woman at the time, one who was fighting for equal pay for equal work, my dad’s words hurt.
Women my age probably don’t need to read this book, well unless they want to refresh their memories. But it would be nice if our granddaughters and great-granddaughters read it. It just might help them to get to know us old broads better.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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