Friedan versus De Beauvoir continued+

   In my last blog I pointed out that Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan didn't agree on whether old age was a nice stage of life. De Beauvoir didn't like old age. Betty Friedan did.
   Betty Friedan knew de Beauvoir and had read her book  'The Second Sex'. "She carefully followed the arguments in de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex'," writes historian Daniel Horowitz, "but mentioned only'its insights into French women."
    She must have read 'Old Age' when it was published in English in the 1970's. So Betty Friedan wrote her book about old age. And it was called 'The Fountain of Age', obviously a play on the expression 'The Fountain of Youth'. It came out in 1993.
     When the young Friedan wrote 'The Feminine Mystique' back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, she was a mother of three, living in an 11-room house, an hour's drive from New York City. By the time she worked on 'The Fountain of Age', she'd moved onward and upward.
   Now she was on a first name basis with some of the world's movers and shakers.
   And the 'Fountain of Age' reflects this change.
   It's chockful of brilliant old men and women who seem to love being old. They're nearly all rich, successful people,who have lived rich, successful lives. In short, they're a lot like Betty Friedan.
    "That is no country for old men' wrote W.B. Yeats. "The young in one another's arms/ Birds in the trees/ Those dying generations at their song."
      Yeats saw the anguish of ageing. Friedan doesn't seem to. Nor does she see many older Americans who're living on small pensions in poor places. Just like in 'The Feminine Mystique', Friedan leaves out working people and poor Americans.
    For her old age is just great. "Awesome," she might have said, if she was alive to-day.
    But unmentioned in most of the book was that old age wasn't so great for Friedan. She couldn't find a man to live with, though she wanted to find one. She had a part-time lover but that left her feeling dissatisfied. Her health was poor and often she was confined to a wheelchair. By the 1990's, Friedan was a legend, but an ageing one.
   And in 'The Fountain of Age' she rarely mentioned death. In fact, many writers on old age don't talk about it. But it's the elephant in the room, for us old people. It didn't seem to bother Friedan.
   So there you have two great women. Two great people - de Beauvoir and Friedan. They both wrote on women and ageing. But they're outlooks on growing old differ sharply.
    I prefer de Beauvoir's take on aging. It's the last stage of life before we die. As Woody Allen said, "I don't want my works to be immortal. I want to be immortal." You can't blame him.+