ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1970s, a group of professional women met in Detroit one Saturday afternoon. Our agenda was to plan the next move in a campaign for achieving industry-supported daycare for children of employed mothers. We saw ourselves as an advanced guard in the service of women’s needs. Originally, we had been drawn to each other by common interests in life-span development that led us to try to improve community services for young children, first, and older people, second. I don’t know what precipitated it, but that Saturday afternoon as our talk turned to the problems of aging, we found ourselves turning to each other with something like astonishment. We too were growing old! Perhaps we were even old already. Our ages varied across the adult spectrum from the thirties to the fifties, but we discovered that we shared many concerns about our aging, about our aging as women. In these early years of the Women’s Movement, when just discovering that we shared concerns as women, this was a heady experience. We were taking a giant step forward — or was it backward?
