Each generation must define the problems anew, from their own observations and experience. - Alix Kates Shulman

It was in 1967, in the midst of that decade of emotional upheaval and political dissent, that I heard the first rumblings of the women's liberation movement. News reached me in my Greenwich Village apartment via the radio, while I was washing the dinner dishes. I was in my thirties, raising two small children and beginning to write. On the air, several fervent young women were discussing the injustice of women's situation in words that spoke directly to me. When they invited their listeners to attend an upcoming meeting of the fledgling movement, I put down my sponge and picked up my pen. Jotting down the telephone number and date of the meeting, in that moment I launched myself into one of the great liberation movements of our time, which profoundly transformed the lives of women worldwide, mine included.

Compared to the heavy burden of age I felt in my early thirties-panicked over the impending loss of youth about to finish me off-seventy feels positively young. Remember the 1960s slogan, "don't trust anyone over thirty"? Remember the thirty-year-old admission age to Older Women's Liberation (OWL)? Never have I felt older or more irrelevant than before feminism's Second Wave, when thirty was considered over-the-hill (for women) and the last safe age to begin a family, and your life was supposed to be fulfilled by having babies. Still feeling then like a 1950s middle class Midwestern girl, though living in New York, I retired from full-time work to become a mother; and by the time my youngest started school I was a disillusioned wife with a wandering husband, no savings, no prospects, no future. A has-been at thirty-four! Then the women's liberation movement hit New York and quickly restored my youthful ardor. Suddenly I had a compelling purpose and important work. Far from being a has-been, I knew life had not, would not pass me by. Fired by movement passion, in quick succession I defied my husband, began organizing women's groups, gave my first speech, wrote my first essay and before long first novel. Though that early movement euphoria couldn't last, I never again felt as impotent or "old" as I had before it touched me. In an instant I switched from a woman with a past ("old") to one with a future ("young").

Advocates, no matter how old, face forward and upward toward the light; funerals can only momentarily divert them.