OLDER WOMEN’S ATTRIBUTES | SOCIETY’S VIEW OF OLDER WOMEN
“I suppose I’ve been surprised that at this age I find myself feeling so comfortable. If people are attracted to you in whatever way, I really just think it’s because you are yourself. It’s like having permission, finally at this age, to be yourself and not apologize for it. I think the inside me is finally catching up with the me who’s a woman of a certain age with the white hair. And my older self is still there, but I have another way to work with her. ‘You can come with me, but you’re not driving.’”
“A wise friend told me that your fifties can be a time you discover what freedom means for you. And she was right.”
“In some indigenous cultures women are moved into leadership positions after menopause and they don't have menopausal symptoms because they so look forward to this time as their time. I always felt kind of sorry that it takes so long to learn who you are and how to live and no one else asks you anything about that in this culture after a certain age. I always thought being older is a magnificent time where you're actually able to integrate a lot of information and synthesize it into something new. We're waiting for them to believe in this, but we have to believe in it. We want everybody to understand something, but they're not going to until we do it."
"It's a very product-oriented business, Wall Street, if you're doing the work. I don't think age comes into it so much, and in fact, in my particular part of the business, which is dealing with clients of all kinds, managing portfolios, you get a certain amount of substance by being older. You've been there a long time, you have history. It was never a hindrance being gray."
"It's astonishing to learn things at this age and to think that I've only got 30 more years ... 30 years? That's quite a while. Some of these you can enjoy sitting down!"