I “team taught” a course in the Women’s Studies Program recently and while it was not the most pleasant of experiences it did strengthen my collegial relationship with my “team mate” and forge some new student/instructor relationships. The latter connection produced an invitation to attend a showing of a video – available as a DVD – focused on a 3-person activist group in San Diego CA who are the “Old Women’s Project.” The producer of the film is Jennifer Abod, a resident of Long Beach CA – the same city as the location of the showing – and her website is www.jenniferabod.com.

About 50 of us were gathered – more accurately “stuffed” – into a neighborhood coffee house cum art gallery which also features live music from time to time. “Look Us In The Eye” – the video – reframed for programmatic purposes as an evening featuring the theme “Old Women Are Your Future” – attracted an almost 100% female audience – no surprise – but an intergenerational one as well. In part the age range was supported by the involvement of people from Women’s Studies at CalState/Long Beach as well as the very active Long Beach Chapter of NOW.

If you visit Ms. Abod’s website you can obtain greater details about not only her work but the San Diego trio as well. Essentially, these three women – each of whom is at least 60, (more about that in a moment), are engaged in a self-perpetuating effort to keep alive the refusal by women to “put up, shut up”/be invisible/go away – especially quietly, etc.
(Check out their “puppet” – POWER – short for Pissed Old Woman Engaged in Revolution - which they tote to every demonstration.) In addition to the decades-long conversation and issues effecting women, the trio has added issues of aging/ageism and access to supports such as Medicare. In other words, the conversation has broadened as the population has gotten older.

One of the interesting aspects of the Old Women’s’ Project is its fully “grass roots” nature: There is little funding, there is no massive organization, much of the work of demonstrating is conducted by “word of mouth,” and no one is outright “profiting” from it. For me, however, the more intriguing – and compelling – texture is that we are having the same conversation now as 40 years ago, when I was a very young woman; only now the same voices have gotten older, have lengthened the list of issues. I think it’s important to keep this “noise” alive and loud; I think it’s unspeakably sad that we’re [still] having this conversation.

While I was seated in the coffee house I was very much reminded of places and times in my life, especially in the mid-1960s. (Enforcing this reflection was a small piece in Business Week not long ago reporting – again, still – the approximately 25-cent disparity between men’s and women’s wages. As our population ages – and while women continue to outlive and under-earn men – this issue becomes more disconcerting and more of a concern. It’s lovely to be talking with more seriousness than previously about the possibility of electing a woman President of the United States; it’s nice that car manufacturers have become more aware of the influence of women on the market; but when are women going to achieve – for example – something as fundamental as pay equity?)

The other matter I would touch on gently but firmly is the issue of when are we “old.”
As a member of the faculty of a mostly traditional commuter campus I am keenly aware of the long-lived tendency for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30 to think that anyone older than they is really old. By that “measure” I’ve been “old” for a very long time. In my courses I don’t specifically state my chronological age but I do present myself as “older than dirt” so that students can begin to think, “How old can she be if she’s still walking and talking?” Ageism is something I present and hope to debunk in all my classes, but particularly those focused on either women’s issues or lifespan development.

That said, that these women label themselves and others in the Old Women's Project as "old" at age 60 takes me aback... strikes me as "inaccurate," but this could be my bias butting against their opinion. I don’t consider myself “old” - and I don’t think it’s because I’m delusional.

Check out Jennifer Abod’s website; check out the work of the San Diego trio; think about their puppet POWER, and let me know: when do you think “old” clicks in?