Sometimes things seem to align. Right now the writings of several people I read, the comments on my posts, and just knowing and having met many of these women writers in the last year or so convinces me that there is a wisdom brewing.
Many of us write from monikers real, imagined, or somewhere in between out in cyberspace, that suggest midpoints in midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brings the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.
Boom-X BoomHer Bloggers
The Majority of Boomers have more in common with Gen-Xers than Stereotypical Boomers. Why? Because the last half of the Post World War II Baby Boom, temporally speaking, contains more members than the first group. I spent years writing about this. Just search the term Late Boomer and you will find my stuff, because as far as I can tell, I coined the term and due partially to my multiyear campaign to let marketers and advertisers understand the real cohorts within the Boom, I – along with a few other dedicated souls – managed to inject the term Late Boomer into the vocabulary of American demographers and the people who use demographic info to make money.
The original Generation X was a book written about the last half of the Baby Boom. So kids of the 60s and 70s have as much in common as the supposed “generation” of Boomers. Beats, Hippies, and New Waving Punks are the sort of overlapping stereotypes of groups that are more cohesive than groups created by the statistical artifact of annual birth rates.
But, anyway, the women of Boom X are coming into their own in so many ways at this very moment. BlogHer12 finally had a session about mid-life and blogging. I’m launching a site that should appeal to women who are Done Nesting. It is in heavy development heavy development as we speak. There are scads of other sites that are new or will soon launch that are also intended to appeal to the Boom X women.
So in the name of information exchange I’m linking to some of my recent discoveries of sites related to what seems to be developing as a 45+ women’s online movement.
There is a 45 plus women’s Facebook group for bloggers called, reasonably enough, Bloggers Over 45.
I mentioned Second Lives Club a few posts back as a spiff online magazine featuring women who have reinvented themselves.
Of course, Done Nesting, will have a directory of “empty nest,” and late boomer sites of interest to women who have already or are looking forward to having adult children and are no longer actively creating a “nest” for children.
I’ve also found many similar minds from similar life stages to mine on another Facebook Group, GBE 2.
Culturally we are at a pivot or tipping point for both women’s culture and global digital culture with both of these systems interacting and transforming human culture. I’m so excited!