Amazon.com Review
When they got together in the late 1970s, Barbara Macdonald, a 60-something lesbian, and her lover, Cynthia Rich, who is 20 years younger, learned that old women and young women are treated very differently, even within the women's movement. In response to this inequity, Macdonald wrote essays and open letters to feminist and social service organizations comparing ageism to racism. Her autobiographical essays describe an amazing lesbian childhood lived before the publication of
The Well of Loneliness, a college career threatened by the revelation of a love affair with a woman, and frustration with young women's patronizing older women. Rich's essays examine how words and visual images in popular and feminist texts contribute to demonizing and demeaning older women.
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Review
These thought-provoking essays - written primarily by Barbara Macdonald, with contributions by her lover/partner Cynthia Rich - challenge readers to consider society's and their own attitudes towards older women. Barbara Macdonald has "always been a lesbian - always loved women, gotten my strength and my sense of self from women." Because of her sexuality, her life has been that of an "other;" now in her sixties, she finds she has joined a second "other" in United States culture - that of being an old woman. In the title piece, at a "March to Take Back the Night," she discovers people are questioning whether she, at sixty-five, will slow down the march. Barbara Macdonald is enraged; not only was she not personally addressed, but she is sure people are judging her solely because of her grey hair and wrinkled skin. In the essay "An Open Letter to the Women's Movement," she challenges the notion that older people talk too much about their health: younger women endlessly discuss "..abortion, contraception, pre-menstrual syndromes, toxic shock or turkey basters." Each essay puts in front of the reader's eyes the existence of older women: many invisible, silenced by economic conditions, ignored by the women's movement, and too often not considered contributing members of society. These essays will make you question your own role in reinforcing or rebuking these ingrained attitudes towards older women.
-- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
