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 positi… - Alix Kates Shulman

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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").