In Praise of Older Women

By LANCE MORROW

Perhaps it is a sign of cultural maturity; in any case, it is a welcome, and slightly amazing, development. In an almost measurable way, the average age of desirability in American women seems to have risen by a dozen years or more. Women who might have been inclined to sigh ruefully at the inanity of a shampoo ad telling them, "You're not getting older, you're getting better," are starting to believe that it may actually be true. As for men, many of whom are still afflicted by a kind of sandbox nympholepsy--the women desired being a procession of "playmates"--more of them are now inclined to credit the experience of the Hungarian-born writer Stephen Vizinczey. In his 1965 novel, In Praise of Older Women, he wrote: "No girl, however intelligent and warmhearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at 20 as she will at 35."

Anyone watching the popular iconography has been able to see the change. In movies, it may have started two years ago in Robin and Marian; at 46, Audrey Hepburn played an exquisite and sexy Marian to Sean Connery's aging Robin Hood. This year, in An Unmarried Woman, Actress Jill Clayburgh portrays a wonderful 37-year-old whose husband leaves her for a much younger woman; a character in the movie accurately remarks that the husband was crazy to make the exchange. After a decade of tending barricades, Jane Fonda, now 40, has emerged as a fascinating actress and a forceful, attractive woman. Harper's Bazaar, which ought to know about such matters, this month published its list of the nation's ten most beautiful women; none is under 30.* It is painful to remember that 16 years ago Marilyn Monroe killed herself perhaps because, among other things, she could not bear turning 36.

Men did not initiate this interest in women who are old enough to remember Eisenhower and Stevenson, or who still savor the image of Simone Signoret, everywoman's Bogart, in a trenchcoat, dangling a cigarette, in Room at the Top. Rather, a series of changes in women themselves--the way they run their lives, the way they see themselves--seems to have caused the response in men. Feminism has had much to do with it, though not always directly. All kinds of eddies and crosscurrents have swirled around the practice and politics of sex in the past ten years. A feminist leader was once playfully asked if there would be sex after women's liberation. "Yes," she replied, "only it will be better." That seems, for many, to have come true. Women, especially those well past the stage of reading Tolkien, seem smarter, funnier, sexier and more self-sufficient than before.

As the framework of the sexual drama has changed, age has lost its determining relevance. Older women are no longer quite so afraid of becoming involved with younger men. With feminism and exposure to the brittle fragility of so many marriages in the '70s, women of almost all ages have developed a certain independence. In the past, as a matter of sociobiological order, desirable women (especially in youth-worshiping America) tended to be those of the courting age, from 17 or so to 25 or 28. Because married women were usually considered off limits, the focus of male desire was officially rather narrow. In a film like All About Eve, a bitter, bitchy Darwinism could drive the Bette Davis character to despair as she hit 40, looked over her shoulder, and saw her youthful doppelganger clawing to replace her. Girls reaching 25 would start to panic about finding a husband, and many, two or three years later, would marry slobs just to change their sexual prefixes.

An entire cathedral of customs and fashions was constructed around the rites of mating, which, especially for women, carried certain age regulations, or at least probabilities. The edifice has by no means been dismantled, but it is greatly altered. What women wear, for example, has had psychological impact upon how they thought of themselves, and what they believed to be possible. In the past, women after 25 started to dress like matrons. But the vivid costume party of the '60s taught women of all ages to wear almost any damn thing they pleased. Fashions are more subdued now, but many women, of all generations, have escaped the typecasting of dress.

Fashions have changed in part because women's roles are different. Women of 30 or 35 or 40 or older are apt to be juggling a career and the care of children, often without a husband. They have figured out their lives for themselves. They have style. They are grownups, and they don't conceal their ages; if their lives are tougher, they frequently possess a certain centeredness and strength that is unavailable to those much younger, who seem somehow unformed, incomplete, far less interesting--and sometimes unbelievably ignorant. Not long ago, a Radcliffe senior confessed that she did not know what the Holocaust was. Oh my, oh my.

Age and experience do not merely ravage. They can give a high mellow patina to a woman's face and character--or a man's. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote: "Age removes the confusion, only possible in youth, between physical and moral characteristics." Women have often thought somewhat older men more interesting company; now men seem to be finding out the same thing about older women. It might be merely neurotic to cultivate a great age disparity on purpose. But Balzac, for example, discovered in Madame de Berny, who was twice as old as he, a supple and sumptuous intelligence that would have been impossible in a woman his own age. (Indeed, the French have a rich tradition of appreciating older women.) Physical conditioning has made a difference, of course. Americans, both men and women, are staying in better shape than in the past. Samuel Johnson, who was married to a woman 20 years his senior, once wrote forebodingly: For howe'er we boast and strive,/ Life declines from thirty-five. But nutrition and jogging shoes have improved since the 18th century. Feminism has taught women to enjoy being athletes. In all of this, alas, there are exceptions. A visit to a suburban shopping mall will disclose women who, at only 25, with pink gauze kerchiefs bandaging their plastic curlers, with fat melting down below their Bermuda shorts (it is one of the enduring mysteries of life why heavier woman wear them), disprove the thesis. And many women simply be come worse fools as the years pass. It would be silly to sentimentalize.

One factor involved in the attraction of somewhat older women is what might be called the narcissism of the demographic bulge. The postwar baby-boom generation causes distensions and exaggerations in society in whatever epoch it hits. The fervent cry of many of the boom babies in the '60s was "Don't trust anyone over 30." Now that so many of them have crossed that barrier, into the golden twilight of their 30s, they are apt to glamorize their new estate just as they did their former.

In the '60s, the very fact of youth carried pretenses to ideological meaning--and a certain menace. Today, in the age of Donny and Marie, one thinks (unfairly perhaps) of so many young women more as the merely immature. Their eyes tend to jiggle in blankish faces, to perform small discos of incomprehension. Too often, they seem to be kittens, babysitters, the vestals of Shaun Cassidy. How much better to look across at that frank loveliness and steady gaze that some women acquire, some time after their twenties, when they seem finally to have taken permanent possession of them selves.

*The list: Lena Home, 60; Candice Bergen, 31; Diahann Carroll, 42; Faye Dunaway, 37; Princess Grace, 48; Lauren Hutton, 32; Farrah Fawcett-Majors, 31; Ali MacGraw, 37; Elizabeth Taylor, 46; and Cheryl Tiegs, 30.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.