Composing a Further Life

older by almost fifteen years, who had eagerly pursued me when I came back to the States. That was another reason why it was easy to say good-bye to Joseph, because there was another player. I moved to the West Coast with him, but along came this same strand of authoritarian stuff that I had seen before, and I was not prepared to see it again. I said, ‘What’s with you guys? What message am I giving that suggests that you can tell me what to do and that I’m going to pay attention?’ So that relationship ended. And meanwhile I started to build myself a career.”
    I asked whether she and Joseph had lost touch. “I went to Mozambique after Irv graduated college. He went to South Africa to teach for a year, and I went to Africa to visit him, to South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique, just before the elections in South Africa. So I got there thirty years later. And Joseph was at Irv’s wedding.”
    When I went to stay with Ruth in Seattle in 2006 to interview her for this book, she was busy with plans to remodel her apartment to make it more comfortable for guests, especially for her son, Irving, and her grandchildren.
    By that time, our group had met some seven or eight times, and I had persuaded them to undertake a first venture into activism. I had kept insisting that we were a part, through our combination of life experience and continuing health, of something new in history, a change in the balance of generations living at the same time. It is no wonder that, one after another, the pioneers of new-wave feminism have written books about aging. And no wonder that we should feel newly challenged by the questions Who am I? and What do I want in my life?
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the original editors of
Ms. Magazine
and a successful novelist, had reminded us of the pattern of women’s consciousness-raising groups a generation before. In our conversations (as in the books coming out about aging), I had heard references to Jung’s “wise woman archetype,” the crone whose gnomic utterances and knowledge of healing often made her suspected of witchcraft. And like women and blacks in the sixties and gays in the seventies, we had to free ourselves from looking at ourselves and each other in terms of obsolete stereotypes, to question the emphasis on youthfulness that we had shared, and to embrace the strengths as well as the stresses of a new stage of life. The word
wisdom
came up often—but it was not until three years after we first met that I put two words together and realized that we were exploring the nature of
active wisdom
—an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. It was the novelty of this situation that convinced me that a new consciousness should lead to a new social activism.
    I have always been out of sync with the activisms of my generation, occasionally ahead but often far behind. Out of a sense of the dissonance between what I heard at home and the largely Republican background of most of my schoolmates, I had volunteered at the age of twelve for the first Adlai Stevenson campaign. I arrived at college with a fine disdain for the conformity and political lethargy of my contemporaries, a disdain that came from spending my senior year of high school in Israel, where the idealism of the early years of that nation’s independence and agrarian socialism still burned brightly. Then, instead of catching fire with my peers during the civil rights movement, I had already gotten involved in the much smaller antinuclear movement in 1959, before it was swallowed up in the anti–Vietnam war movement. I really did not begin to understand what feminism was about until the eighties, when I encountered blatant misogyny, which I had somehow failed to notice. Wiser than I, the other women in the group insisted that they were already overloaded with political commitments and public activity, and that they wanted to use our conversations to grow in understanding of who we were and where we were going. We continued to meet at six-month intervals in different locations and added some more members. We began to refer to ourselves as Next Step Women.
    In March 2004, we did agree on an activist project, looking ahead to the fall presidential election and motivated by our distaste for the assumptions of politicians that people over fifty are only concerned with their own entitlements. We had been discussing the shortening time perspective of