When I am an Old Woman I Shall Dye My Hair Purple In early 2000 I flew to San Francisco with my newly adopted baby. At 46 and still jet lagged, I pushed her stroller through our Oakland neighborhood. “Your granddaughter is beautiful,” said a woman on a park bench. Granddaughter. Right. I went home and dyed my gray hair red. It was my first experience, not of trying to look younger, but of trying
Awaken the Power of Older Women. I am in several online groups for older women where the prevailing content is jokes at our expense. Incontinence is a recurring theme, along with making fun of older women’s looks and desires. Self-deprecating humor is great, up to a point. But too much of it degrades our self-image. Why is an advocate for older women’s empowerment on those groups? For one thing, I was naïve enough to think
That Great Retirement Not So Fast At the start of the Industrial Revolution, early labor theorists saw the transition from small business owner to employee as a kind of limited servitude. When I read about that years ago it made a big impression, because it was clear that even as a professional, I gave up much of my agency when I accepted a job. My career was spent in the maw of American work culture; a
How I Made A Huge Mess of My Life Billie Best has been a music producer, a marketing executive, a farmer and a writer. Her memoir, How I Made a Huge Mess of My Life (or Couples Therapy with a Dead Man), is a witty, unblinking look at success, failure, bliss, infidelity, life, and death. I loved it and was lucky to catch up with this busy author for an interview. Stella: Your memoir How I
The Active Grandmother Theory We women, unique among female primates, live long past our childbearing years. There are good reasons why. I’ve written before about the Grandmother Hypothesis, the brainchild of Kristin Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. Hawkes and her colleagues published the seminal article on grandmother theory in 1998. They showed that in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, healthy grandmothers support their grandchildren by foraging for food (or by providing childcare
The Big Boom Theory – Baby Boomers Explode Paradigms A guest post from the audacious and extraordinary Isabel Alexander I’m not a physicist but I enjoyed high school chemistry. However, I was more intrigued by biology, and specifically, anatomy. Ultimately my independent research and extra-curricular experimentation proved another theory: that hormones + heat – caution = pregnancy. BOOM! I was a teen mother and that set off a Big Bang reaction that rocked my personal universe.
