On Women Turning Fifty: Celebrating Mid-Life Discoveries

I just happened to notice this book on the shelf at a bookstore, flipped it open to one of the brief interviews, and began to read about a breast cancer survivor who had turned her experience into a career helping other women find their own individually appropriate breast prosthetics. Isn't this inspiring? I thought. This book is filled with the experiences and thoughts of women who've entered their fifties, stepped back from their lives for a moment of introspection, and agreed to share their insights and personal opinions on the process of maturing as part of the "baby-boomer" generation. I have learned so many little details about what can happen physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to women of a "certain age", and how to spin straw into gold. At times humorous, poignant, radical, thought provoking, but always articulated with sincerity, sometimes with poetry. This is one of those golden books that shares promises fulfilled and achievements that go outside the standard definition of the word "success". Like sitting down with a really inspiring friend who encourages me to remember, as the saying goes in Zimbabwe, "If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing."

The author of On Women Turning 50, Cathleen Rountree, is an artist, wrier and lecturer specializing in women's issues. Her book is made up of photos of and interviews with 18 women in their 50's and above. Some of these women are famous, some not, but all of them are fascinating.I really enjoyed the portraits in this book because they do not aim at a Vogue-model, fake-beauty effect. Instead, they artistically reveal each woman's character, personality and wisdom. The prose narration is also excellent, because Rountree presents each woman's experience with growing older in her own words. The result is that this book reads like 18 short, interrelated autobiographies.There aren't a lot of good books out there geared at encouraging women over 50 in a sexist society that tells women they are worthless without youth and beauty. Of those I've seen so far, this is the best written and most respectful of older women. As such, I recommend it not just to women over 50, but to the men and younger women in their lives who love them.

This is a collection of interviews of famous and not-so-famous women who have navigated their fiftieth birthdays. The women as individuals may be described as admirable, fascinating, witty, and even awesome (check out Dolores Huerta who has spent most of her adult life as a full-time human rights activist, living in poverty or near-poverty, while giving birth to 11 children--most of whom are now college graduates--and periodically catering to the demands of one of her three husbands). A more interesting aspect of this collection is what these women have in common. They each find this time in their lives more free, more focused on making a contribution to society, less focused on physical appearance and pleasing others, and less concerned (if not unconcerned) with having men in their lives. Tabra Tunoa, a jewelry designer and manufacturer, said, "You waste a lot of time in your thirties trying to look twenty and in your forties trying to look thirty"--one comment from among several in the interviews which imply that the forties are for clearning up the vestiges of denial of age, and the fifties are for embracing its gifts. Said Gloria Steinem, "I learned that to be defiant about age may be better than despair--it's energizing--but it is not progress." Rountree has done a fine job of asking the right questions, eliciting illuminating answers, and photographing 18 women who are worth hearing from.