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Of Time and the Woman
Of Time and the Woman MARYA MANNES
• I feel very much like one of those figures do with it? Whose business is it, anyway?" on top of an operating table in television, To be honest, however, I must attribute surrounded by thirty-six doctors and the chief this feeling of relative agelessness to luck. I surgeon telling the interns, "You see before inherited from both my parents a strong and you the body of an aging woman." Well, here resilient constitution, a passion for ideas and it is. expression, and above all the living example But I still think that what time does to of people dedicated to something outside the woman depends less on time than on themselves. They were both professional muthe woman. What woman? Who is she? For sicians with a strenuous and facinating life of whom do you speak? their own. Nevertheless they never allowed it That is why this must be largely a sub- to diminish the love and attention bestowed jective account. Not because I consider my- on their two children. My mother was no self especially significant or especially typical, less a wife and mother because she was also but because it is the only subject on which I a concert pianist; and I have never since then am, of necessity, an authority. had any patience for the long-prevalent theory Oh, there are, of course, conditions of mind that a woman must choose between home and and heart and body which all of us share vocation. when we grow older. We lose our children beA third piece of luck, beyond inheriting this cause they no longer need us. We lose our husbands either through death or choice. We living example and a healthy body, was that lose physical beauty. We lose most of our as a little girl I would tell my father all of the things I wanted to do when I grew up. options. I wanted to be a great actress, a great sculpMost of us suffer the same kinds of pains tor, a great writer. He said "You can be anyand frustration, emotional and physical. And thing you want to be. Don't set any limitawe are now more than ever humiliated by a tions on yourself." society so oriented to the young that we are given no place in it. We know that we were How many parents say this to a girl, even born too early and possibly wiII die too late. now? Instead, how many mothers start to But beyond these common states, each wo- groom their daughters from the age of eight man responds to time in a diHerent way be- onwards for the marriage market and for a cause she has led a different life. And per- life clearly bounded by what is called "wohaps I have led a life more different than most. man's role?" And how many women bTfOW old At the outset, in any case, I must confess too soon precisely because of this pre-conthat I do not feel old. As my father did, I ditioning, this limitation of ceiling? resent the arbitrary measurements of time For I have been thinking a long time that (who invented it, anyway?) which is, in effect, the single greatest factor in aging is rigidity one more label by which to put the hapless -the resistance to change and growth in mind and helpless human into categories regardless as well as in body. Another word for this of individual diHerence. Some days I feel sixty is habit; the repetition of patterns which and some days I feel thirty-nine, and when, throttle the life of human beings; habit in for instance, I open a magazine like Time and thinking, habit in feeling (which ends in not see a quote attributed to me followed by the feeling), habit in eating, habit in the daily sum of my years, I cry "What has that got to confrontations of life. This goes for men, of course, as well as women. Thirty years in the same job atrophies a man, just as thirty years in the same house, doing the same tasks, atrophies a woman. I would also add that thirty Marya Mannes is an author and critic. 8
Volume IX
TIME AND WOMAN-MANNES
years with the same man or woman can produce, except in the very rare marriage, the same results. Habit, since it means the end of curiosity, of adventure, of change, is a killer. The tragedy is that the victim of habit is the victim of a society which imposes these patterns as the majority norm. And it is precisely this kind of social rigidity, this ceiling of limitations, which so many of the young are rejecting. They don't want to die young, either in the long death of social sterility or material goals or in wars which are imposed on them by rigid and outmoded patterns of power. They do not believe in the security of habit or the securitv of force. Neither did I, fn;m the age of eightet'n onward. I was too fascinated bv life to limit myself to one life. The result 'is that my biographv would not make acceptable fare for the Lldies Home Journal or Good Housekeeping. The ladies would cluck at the many errors of judgement made hy a woman committed to ideas as well as to love, to work as well as to home, and ahove all to new experiences in different places. The world was too big for me to restrict myself to anyone corner of it. Reading this, good women would say, with satisfaction and some justice, "\Vell, that's what comes of having a career." Maybe so. Maybe not. Kot all women, any more than all men, function best in the categories allotted to them by virtue of their sex alone. For myself, the price for freedom, for the integrity of choice, has been high-high in mistakes, high in pain, in insecurity, in torment, in disappointment. But the reward has been growth, another word for life. Ten years ago, I would have said that the reward was youth, greatly aided and ahetted by the biological and surgical advances made by scientific research and implemented by such corporations as the sponsor of this discussion. But the irony now is this. Just as women have been given the capacity to live longer and look younger than ever before in their later years, this youth and sex-saturated society enshrines the sixteen-year old girl as female incarnate. The goddess is not Ceres, not even Aphrodite. The Goddess is now a teen-ager sprawled across the p1ges of magazines and the consciousness of millions in a July-August, 1968, Section 2
leap of legs, hair and mini-fashions. With sullen lips and false eyelashes she consigns all women over thirty to the ash-heap and all over fifty to the morgue. Never in any age has any age been accorded this overwhelming idolatry, nor has age itself been accorded such contempt. So what happens now to the woman over thirty, forty, fifty? She wears her skirts shorter than she thinks she should, if she can find the skirt in the first place. It is a fact that anybody over size twelve is the untouchable of the dress industry. She is given no choice between thc infinitely dreary concoctions in the so-called Women's Section of the department stores, or the great expense of the private dressmaker. ~obody designs for us, nobody cares: it doesn't pay. So, again, what do we do? The last thing wc should do is to compete. \Ve should takc {'nOrnlOUS pride in being women-women of grace, of exp{'rience, of maturity. \Ve should develop a healthy {'go; an ego strong enough to applaud the color and dash the young hring into our lives, much of the music they make, and some of the sense. \Ve should understand that much of their rebellion and disgust is justified, much of their torment inevitahle. If they won't credit us with any sense, we must not make the same mistake in crediting them with none. The best of them may save this country yet, and we mustn't forget it. Bllt that doesn't mean that we should, God forhid, want to be their age-or like them. For one thing, we can't be and for another, who would want to be? The only thing we ask is equality. As older men and women we ask only this: that we be judged not according to our years but according to our individual human worth. The fact of youth deserves no more respect than the fact of age, and there are just as many stupid and evil as intelligent and good in both generations. To keep inwardly young, therefore, one must be secure in one's age, not in the sense of superiority, but, again, in the sense of equality. This is, I admit, not easy to do. And here again, I am among the fortunate. As a woman living only the life of a woman, age could mean to me the end of many things: the end o~ acth c motherhood, the end of physical 9
PSYCHOSOMATICS
passion and reciprocal desire, and the choice between loneliness or a shared life that is little more than a repetition, however agreeable, of small habits. But because I have also worked, as well as lived the life of a woman, the future still beckons. I am pulled along by the urge to write and to write better; to understand more, to encompass more, to express more clearly, this world we inhabit. I am lucky in that I still seem to have a market for what I write, although I am clearly and sometimes painfully aware that to an editor's ear the term "new talent" is automatically more desirable than the term, which is never used, "old talent." The two words are presumably incompatible. Beyond this sad note, however, my work leaves me less time for the loneliness that is, inevitably, the common lot of age. For it opens doors to people and places and actions which a purely domestic, person-oriented life would never provide. I have never said or thought all women should have a life outside their home. But I will say that the woman who has never had a life outside her home has the most to fear from age. Perhaps that is why I fear it less. I am continually exhilarated by the prospect (if not always the fact) of new encounters, human as weB as professional, of new assignments, of new environments. Yet as time goes on, these can be very taxing, too, to a professional person. Because of this I have tried to devise certain measures of self-preservation which I have found essential. At all times of my life I have always needed at least three or four hours a day alone-by choice. For a woman this is often difficult if not impossible to achieve-yet it is impossible to think, to breathe, to grow without thislet alone work. It is the only way towards an inward balance carved, very often, out of agonized doubt. Ideally, this balance should be the crown of age, the purpose of wisdom. It is also the companion of grace and dignity, a much ignored essential of life, especially in contemporary society. In truth, the three dirty words in our vocabulary now are grace, discipline, and dignity without which no civilization is worth saving, no life worth living. A second essential to preservation is to jet10
tison the irrelevant. A mind continually worried with small things, such as clothes, furniture, social involvements and above all, being "With It," destroys itself through fragmentation. Fussiness is an aging process. So is preoccupation with material possessions. The mind and body must be kept free for new sensations, open to change. More colloquially, you have to roll with the punches. As for the body, it should be treated with the greatest respect, not by being afraid of using it but by using it as much as possible. Few of us, and certainly I am not one, can afford in money or time the kind of extensive care that famous actresses and society beauties indulge in to keep themselves young. But there is nothing to stop us from keeping our bodies as flexible and our tissues as resilient as exercise and air can make them. Swimming happens to be my passion and salvation, but since that is hard to come by in winter and in a city, I depend on a great deal of walking and one daily, very short, regime of exercises which leaves me limber and free from that stiffness and rigidity which are, as I have said, the mental as well as the physical harbingers of age. (Unfortunately, I can't give you a demonstration of these exercises since one of them closely resembles the routine of a strip-teaser!) As for face and skin and general metabolism, the doctors and the cosmeticians are very much on our side, and we should use whatever they choose to give us. The only limit I would put upon their aid is simply this: beyond a certain point you can't fool anybody, nor should you want to. The woman who seems to be thirty-five but whom I know to be sixty is, to me, disquieting. A life should leave its traces, and the total lack of them is a negation of experience. Finally, and by far the most important, the ennobling distinction of age is to give rather than to take. The capacity to love is timeless, and if anything, time should increase it rather than diminish it. When you are young and expect to receive, you think it is your divine right. But the older you grow you learn that you get very little if you give very little. As one who has always loved men, well if not too wisely, I have long been aware that the cards are stacked in our society, and particularly at this time, against the older woman. Men of sixty and even seventy find Volume IX
TIME AND WOMAN-MANNES
themselves much younger women to love and marry, but the opposite is clearly not the case. I think I can speak for all women when I say that this is the hardest thing we have to bear in later life: the end of desirability as a woman-desirability, not capacity. This can happen as well in a long marriage as in a single state: the result of widowhood, divorce, or rejection by a particular man. And here the vicious circle begins. The feeling of undesirability actually produces it. If you no longer feel attractive you cannot attract. The aura of negation and indifference surrounds you and repels others. This is the time when so many women cease to hold themselves straight, to walk with grace, to emanate a sense of pleasure. Other things begin to happen too, and I am sure the doctors in this audience must be aware of it. For it goes beyond the effects of menopause, now, thanks to them, so greatly relieved. The psychosomatic effects of sexual rejection, of the loss of love, can include a wide range of ailments from loss of teeth to the distortion of feet; from muscle spasms to tachycardia; from aches to pains of a wide variety. Some, of course, may be symptoms of far deeper trouble. But it has heen my observation of others, as well as of myself, that many of them stem from the specific anguish of sexual neutralization, from the sudden withdrawal of the power and joy that has until now sustained them. I would like to be a little more specific about this progressive aging of women by throwing out some observations which are purely speculative and, since I am not a doctor, clearly none of my business. Yet decades ago I could not help but see psychosomatic bases for so manv afflictions that used to be considered purely physical. And when I spoke, as I just have, of stiffness in older women so frighteningly prevalent in the way they walk and sit and stand. I remain convinced that whether it is called arthritis or rheumatism it is the result of emotional resistance. They are actually set in their ways, stuck in their tracks. imprisoned in their mental and emotional rigidity. And the basis of this is fear: fear of loss, fear of change, fear of July-August, 1968, Section 2
the dreadful inhumanity and insecurity accorded age now. It is fear, too, that contracts the muscles of the feet and hands, so that the toes are distorted and the fingers misshapen. It is resignation, the mark of defeat, that bows the back and raises the hump on the back of the neck. As for cancer, still basically a mystery, I cannot help but feel that since it is a form of inverted life, of growth turned inward instead of outward, part of its origin in man or woman may lie in long term frustration of the creative impulse. More simply, what eats away the body is the denial of the dream. The life of the cancer victim may have been outwardly successful; inwardly it may have been stillborn. But these, I know, are the speculations of an amateur, and I should return to time and the woman, and the loss of those functions that used to sustain us, the loss of those social forms that used to give us meaning and usefulness in the family structure. Only in one area have we come out ahead. Largely thanks to hormone therapy, as I said, we remain female for a much longer span than hefore, endowed with the confidence and vitality which this implies. The irony here, again, is that the chances of literally enjoying our biological youth are slim. It is the rare man, young or old, who prefers the older to the younger woman, and we cannot delude ourselves otherwise. Yet this by no means precludes the exchange of affection and mutual need without the bonds that so often constrict both. As one grows older, love must go wider rather than deeper. It must embrace friends as well as lovers, strangers as well as acquaintances, young as well as old. It must be, in essence, a love of life itself. The transmutation here is from specific passion to general compassion. Compassion has no age. It is the immortal bond between time and man, time and the woman. It is the healing agent of humanity. In these later years, the more we are able to feel and do for others in this world of torment and division, the less can we pity ourselves for the loss of youth. Our time has not gone. Indeed, our time may have come. 11
• I feel very much like one of those figures do with it? Whose business is it, anyway?" on top of an operating table in television, To be honest, however, I must attribute surrounded by thirty-six doctors and the chief this feeling of relative agelessness to luck. I surgeon telling the interns, "You see before inherited from both my parents a strong and you the body of an aging woman." Well, here resilient constitution, a passion for ideas and it is. expression, and above all the living example But I still think that what time does to of people dedicated to something outside the woman depends less on time than on themselves. They were both professional muthe woman. What woman? Who is she? For sicians with a strenuous and facinating life of whom do you speak? their own. Nevertheless they never allowed it That is why this must be largely a sub- to diminish the love and attention bestowed jective account. Not because I consider my- on their two children. My mother was no self especially significant or especially typical, less a wife and mother because she was also but because it is the only subject on which I a concert pianist; and I have never since then am, of necessity, an authority. had any patience for the long-prevalent theory Oh, there are, of course, conditions of mind that a woman must choose between home and and heart and body which all of us share vocation. when we grow older. We lose our children beA third piece of luck, beyond inheriting this cause they no longer need us. We lose our husbands either through death or choice. We living example and a healthy body, was that lose physical beauty. We lose most of our as a little girl I would tell my father all of the things I wanted to do when I grew up. options. I wanted to be a great actress, a great sculpMost of us suffer the same kinds of pains tor, a great writer. He said "You can be anyand frustration, emotional and physical. And thing you want to be. Don't set any limitawe are now more than ever humiliated by a tions on yourself." society so oriented to the young that we are given no place in it. We know that we were How many parents say this to a girl, even born too early and possibly wiII die too late. now? Instead, how many mothers start to But beyond these common states, each wo- groom their daughters from the age of eight man responds to time in a diHerent way be- onwards for the marriage market and for a cause she has led a different life. And per- life clearly bounded by what is called "wohaps I have led a life more different than most. man's role?" And how many women bTfOW old At the outset, in any case, I must confess too soon precisely because of this pre-conthat I do not feel old. As my father did, I ditioning, this limitation of ceiling? resent the arbitrary measurements of time For I have been thinking a long time that (who invented it, anyway?) which is, in effect, the single greatest factor in aging is rigidity one more label by which to put the hapless -the resistance to change and growth in mind and helpless human into categories regardless as well as in body. Another word for this of individual diHerence. Some days I feel sixty is habit; the repetition of patterns which and some days I feel thirty-nine, and when, throttle the life of human beings; habit in for instance, I open a magazine like Time and thinking, habit in feeling (which ends in not see a quote attributed to me followed by the feeling), habit in eating, habit in the daily sum of my years, I cry "What has that got to confrontations of life. This goes for men, of course, as well as women. Thirty years in the same job atrophies a man, just as thirty years in the same house, doing the same tasks, atrophies a woman. I would also add that thirty Marya Mannes is an author and critic. 8
Volume IX
TIME AND WOMAN-MANNES
years with the same man or woman can produce, except in the very rare marriage, the same results. Habit, since it means the end of curiosity, of adventure, of change, is a killer. The tragedy is that the victim of habit is the victim of a society which imposes these patterns as the majority norm. And it is precisely this kind of social rigidity, this ceiling of limitations, which so many of the young are rejecting. They don't want to die young, either in the long death of social sterility or material goals or in wars which are imposed on them by rigid and outmoded patterns of power. They do not believe in the security of habit or the securitv of force. Neither did I, fn;m the age of eightet'n onward. I was too fascinated bv life to limit myself to one life. The result 'is that my biographv would not make acceptable fare for the Lldies Home Journal or Good Housekeeping. The ladies would cluck at the many errors of judgement made hy a woman committed to ideas as well as to love, to work as well as to home, and ahove all to new experiences in different places. The world was too big for me to restrict myself to anyone corner of it. Reading this, good women would say, with satisfaction and some justice, "\Vell, that's what comes of having a career." Maybe so. Maybe not. Kot all women, any more than all men, function best in the categories allotted to them by virtue of their sex alone. For myself, the price for freedom, for the integrity of choice, has been high-high in mistakes, high in pain, in insecurity, in torment, in disappointment. But the reward has been growth, another word for life. Ten years ago, I would have said that the reward was youth, greatly aided and ahetted by the biological and surgical advances made by scientific research and implemented by such corporations as the sponsor of this discussion. But the irony now is this. Just as women have been given the capacity to live longer and look younger than ever before in their later years, this youth and sex-saturated society enshrines the sixteen-year old girl as female incarnate. The goddess is not Ceres, not even Aphrodite. The Goddess is now a teen-ager sprawled across the p1ges of magazines and the consciousness of millions in a July-August, 1968, Section 2
leap of legs, hair and mini-fashions. With sullen lips and false eyelashes she consigns all women over thirty to the ash-heap and all over fifty to the morgue. Never in any age has any age been accorded this overwhelming idolatry, nor has age itself been accorded such contempt. So what happens now to the woman over thirty, forty, fifty? She wears her skirts shorter than she thinks she should, if she can find the skirt in the first place. It is a fact that anybody over size twelve is the untouchable of the dress industry. She is given no choice between thc infinitely dreary concoctions in the so-called Women's Section of the department stores, or the great expense of the private dressmaker. ~obody designs for us, nobody cares: it doesn't pay. So, again, what do we do? The last thing wc should do is to compete. \Ve should takc {'nOrnlOUS pride in being women-women of grace, of exp{'rience, of maturity. \Ve should develop a healthy {'go; an ego strong enough to applaud the color and dash the young hring into our lives, much of the music they make, and some of the sense. \Ve should understand that much of their rebellion and disgust is justified, much of their torment inevitahle. If they won't credit us with any sense, we must not make the same mistake in crediting them with none. The best of them may save this country yet, and we mustn't forget it. Bllt that doesn't mean that we should, God forhid, want to be their age-or like them. For one thing, we can't be and for another, who would want to be? The only thing we ask is equality. As older men and women we ask only this: that we be judged not according to our years but according to our individual human worth. The fact of youth deserves no more respect than the fact of age, and there are just as many stupid and evil as intelligent and good in both generations. To keep inwardly young, therefore, one must be secure in one's age, not in the sense of superiority, but, again, in the sense of equality. This is, I admit, not easy to do. And here again, I am among the fortunate. As a woman living only the life of a woman, age could mean to me the end of many things: the end o~ acth c motherhood, the end of physical 9
PSYCHOSOMATICS
passion and reciprocal desire, and the choice between loneliness or a shared life that is little more than a repetition, however agreeable, of small habits. But because I have also worked, as well as lived the life of a woman, the future still beckons. I am pulled along by the urge to write and to write better; to understand more, to encompass more, to express more clearly, this world we inhabit. I am lucky in that I still seem to have a market for what I write, although I am clearly and sometimes painfully aware that to an editor's ear the term "new talent" is automatically more desirable than the term, which is never used, "old talent." The two words are presumably incompatible. Beyond this sad note, however, my work leaves me less time for the loneliness that is, inevitably, the common lot of age. For it opens doors to people and places and actions which a purely domestic, person-oriented life would never provide. I have never said or thought all women should have a life outside their home. But I will say that the woman who has never had a life outside her home has the most to fear from age. Perhaps that is why I fear it less. I am continually exhilarated by the prospect (if not always the fact) of new encounters, human as weB as professional, of new assignments, of new environments. Yet as time goes on, these can be very taxing, too, to a professional person. Because of this I have tried to devise certain measures of self-preservation which I have found essential. At all times of my life I have always needed at least three or four hours a day alone-by choice. For a woman this is often difficult if not impossible to achieve-yet it is impossible to think, to breathe, to grow without thislet alone work. It is the only way towards an inward balance carved, very often, out of agonized doubt. Ideally, this balance should be the crown of age, the purpose of wisdom. It is also the companion of grace and dignity, a much ignored essential of life, especially in contemporary society. In truth, the three dirty words in our vocabulary now are grace, discipline, and dignity without which no civilization is worth saving, no life worth living. A second essential to preservation is to jet10
tison the irrelevant. A mind continually worried with small things, such as clothes, furniture, social involvements and above all, being "With It," destroys itself through fragmentation. Fussiness is an aging process. So is preoccupation with material possessions. The mind and body must be kept free for new sensations, open to change. More colloquially, you have to roll with the punches. As for the body, it should be treated with the greatest respect, not by being afraid of using it but by using it as much as possible. Few of us, and certainly I am not one, can afford in money or time the kind of extensive care that famous actresses and society beauties indulge in to keep themselves young. But there is nothing to stop us from keeping our bodies as flexible and our tissues as resilient as exercise and air can make them. Swimming happens to be my passion and salvation, but since that is hard to come by in winter and in a city, I depend on a great deal of walking and one daily, very short, regime of exercises which leaves me limber and free from that stiffness and rigidity which are, as I have said, the mental as well as the physical harbingers of age. (Unfortunately, I can't give you a demonstration of these exercises since one of them closely resembles the routine of a strip-teaser!) As for face and skin and general metabolism, the doctors and the cosmeticians are very much on our side, and we should use whatever they choose to give us. The only limit I would put upon their aid is simply this: beyond a certain point you can't fool anybody, nor should you want to. The woman who seems to be thirty-five but whom I know to be sixty is, to me, disquieting. A life should leave its traces, and the total lack of them is a negation of experience. Finally, and by far the most important, the ennobling distinction of age is to give rather than to take. The capacity to love is timeless, and if anything, time should increase it rather than diminish it. When you are young and expect to receive, you think it is your divine right. But the older you grow you learn that you get very little if you give very little. As one who has always loved men, well if not too wisely, I have long been aware that the cards are stacked in our society, and particularly at this time, against the older woman. Men of sixty and even seventy find Volume IX
TIME AND WOMAN-MANNES
themselves much younger women to love and marry, but the opposite is clearly not the case. I think I can speak for all women when I say that this is the hardest thing we have to bear in later life: the end of desirability as a woman-desirability, not capacity. This can happen as well in a long marriage as in a single state: the result of widowhood, divorce, or rejection by a particular man. And here the vicious circle begins. The feeling of undesirability actually produces it. If you no longer feel attractive you cannot attract. The aura of negation and indifference surrounds you and repels others. This is the time when so many women cease to hold themselves straight, to walk with grace, to emanate a sense of pleasure. Other things begin to happen too, and I am sure the doctors in this audience must be aware of it. For it goes beyond the effects of menopause, now, thanks to them, so greatly relieved. The psychosomatic effects of sexual rejection, of the loss of love, can include a wide range of ailments from loss of teeth to the distortion of feet; from muscle spasms to tachycardia; from aches to pains of a wide variety. Some, of course, may be symptoms of far deeper trouble. But it has heen my observation of others, as well as of myself, that many of them stem from the specific anguish of sexual neutralization, from the sudden withdrawal of the power and joy that has until now sustained them. I would like to be a little more specific about this progressive aging of women by throwing out some observations which are purely speculative and, since I am not a doctor, clearly none of my business. Yet decades ago I could not help but see psychosomatic bases for so manv afflictions that used to be considered purely physical. And when I spoke, as I just have, of stiffness in older women so frighteningly prevalent in the way they walk and sit and stand. I remain convinced that whether it is called arthritis or rheumatism it is the result of emotional resistance. They are actually set in their ways, stuck in their tracks. imprisoned in their mental and emotional rigidity. And the basis of this is fear: fear of loss, fear of change, fear of July-August, 1968, Section 2
the dreadful inhumanity and insecurity accorded age now. It is fear, too, that contracts the muscles of the feet and hands, so that the toes are distorted and the fingers misshapen. It is resignation, the mark of defeat, that bows the back and raises the hump on the back of the neck. As for cancer, still basically a mystery, I cannot help but feel that since it is a form of inverted life, of growth turned inward instead of outward, part of its origin in man or woman may lie in long term frustration of the creative impulse. More simply, what eats away the body is the denial of the dream. The life of the cancer victim may have been outwardly successful; inwardly it may have been stillborn. But these, I know, are the speculations of an amateur, and I should return to time and the woman, and the loss of those functions that used to sustain us, the loss of those social forms that used to give us meaning and usefulness in the family structure. Only in one area have we come out ahead. Largely thanks to hormone therapy, as I said, we remain female for a much longer span than hefore, endowed with the confidence and vitality which this implies. The irony here, again, is that the chances of literally enjoying our biological youth are slim. It is the rare man, young or old, who prefers the older to the younger woman, and we cannot delude ourselves otherwise. Yet this by no means precludes the exchange of affection and mutual need without the bonds that so often constrict both. As one grows older, love must go wider rather than deeper. It must embrace friends as well as lovers, strangers as well as acquaintances, young as well as old. It must be, in essence, a love of life itself. The transmutation here is from specific passion to general compassion. Compassion has no age. It is the immortal bond between time and man, time and the woman. It is the healing agent of humanity. In these later years, the more we are able to feel and do for others in this world of torment and division, the less can we pity ourselves for the loss of youth. Our time has not gone. Indeed, our time may have come. 11