Older Women Out of the Rocking Chair, Into a Golden Age of Freedom : Aging: This new version of the senior generation is bucking tradition. In the vacuum of expectations, they fill in their own lifestyle.

By LESLIE DREYFOUS

May 31, 1992 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stereotypes suggest that they should be bent, wrapped in a shawl and passivity, quietly waiting for their grandchildren to come. But listen:

It’s like your dreams come true. You can do whatever the hell you want.

--Caroline Bird, 76.

I said to myself, “You’ve got to do something different, lady.” And that’s what I did.

--Priscilla Sherwood, 62.

We have lots of energy--and nothing to lose.

--Ruth Harriet Jacobs, 67.

It’s about finding your own truth . . . and that’s exciting.

--Sandra Martz, 47.

Far from the crotchety image etched so firmly on the American consciousness, these women are tackling aging and old age with a zeal that might tire a teen-ager.

Their “twilight years” are about second or even third careers, traveling, studying, working on behalf of social and political causes. They are mentors to women half their age, examples of vigorous mental and physical health.

“We need to feel our lives are worth living until the very end,” said Ruth Harriet Jacobs, author of “Be an Outrageous Older Woman.” “I don’t want to sound bizarre, but I have a dream of unleashing older-woman power.”

It’s a notion on the minds of many among the nation’s 18.6 million women over 65, a growing number of whom are gambling at last on long-deferred dreams.

“I just finished a new book, so I went out and bought myself something special: an outrageous $45 shawl,” said Jacobs, a researcher at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. “It’s colorful and loud and takes a lot of courage to wear.”

But wear it she does--with pride. She’s earned this blessed time of no-holds-barred living and liberation. She is a woman aging in style.

In the geriatric lingo, such women are walking advertisements for “compression of morbidity,” the notion of minimizing the physical, and sometimes mental, decline that can accompany aging.

“There’s not a lot we can do to help people live longer, but there’s a lot we can do to make those last years the highest quality possible,” said Dr. Mark H. Beers, author of the new guide “Aging in Good Health.”

It’s an activist approach to aging that Beers says is changing the face of geriatrics. The group entering their “golden years” are perhaps the healthiest and best educated the nation has ever had.

Certainly, their projected life span is longer. In 1990, the average man lived to be 72. The average woman, meanwhile, lived on eight more years. And those who aren’t widowed may find themselves divorced.

Either way, women are statistically likely to end up alone. It is for many a terrifying probability--until they get beyond it.

Priscilla Sherwood was a mainline New England WASP. A mother, a wife, a woman who played by the rules, married at the right time and knew she was destined to retire with her husband in genteel, snapshot style.

How far wrong she was, living as she does at 62 in a new Vermont hometown. She has divorced, gone back to school, taken to traveling and solitude and risks she never contemplated before.

“No one has come into my home without exclaiming how much like me it is,” said Sherwood, who lives in Burlington. “It’s warm, with touches of color and style. I’ve always shared places. But this is just mine.”

After decades first of nurturing their children, then nurturing their parents, then in some cases nurturing their grown children again, old age comes as a blessing to many women.

They finally have permission to stop putting the needs of others before their own. At last, a chance to retire the good-girl persona.

“You’re released!” said Caroline Bird, a feisty septuagenarian who lives alone in Upstate New York. “Because our culture has dismissed older women, there are no expectations. You can make your own role.”

Thousands have chosen to play the role of working woman, according to Bird’s new book “Second Careers.” They are exercising their life’s experience as business consultants, educators, entrepreneurs or political activists.

“They simply like to work. They like being with people, getting out of the house, being engaged,” said Bird, whose book was based on a survey taken for Modern Maturity magazine.

“The folklore is that old people decline, can’t do a job as well as young people, aren’t as well-educated and can’t keep up in the workplace. But age is a very poor way of dividing people,” Bird said.

Nonetheless, no less than race and sex, age frequently determines the way people are regarded in the world. America’s is a youth-oriented culture that accords limited respect to the wisdom of years. Older citizens are too often treated as vaguely disabled or--worse, many say--as children.

It’s known as ageism, a prejudice many in the over-65 set are battling either as individual activists or through membership in such powerful groups as the American Assn. of Retired Persons.

“The idea is to promote independence and protect the rights of older Americans,” said Dianna Porter, a director of the Older Women’s League in Washington. “We have to make growing older a positive thing.”

That means monitoring Social Security and pushing for better, more affordable health care, promoting geriatric research, improving women’s retirement benefits and supporting the Older American’s Act when it comes up for reauthorization, as it is this year.

“Women in particular need to watch these things,” Porter said. “They suffer the double whammy of age and sex discrimination. The stereotypes are still with us. The inequities haven’t been corrected.”

Travel and leisure belong to those who are fiscally secure. Only one in 12 women over 65 had an income of more than $25,000 in 1990, according to the Census Bureau.

Some 2.7 million, or about 15%, of women over 65 live in poverty, and nearly a quarter hover in the purgatory of near-poverty. The percentages are nearly double among minority women.

“You have to ask yourself how much fun you’d be having,” said Jessie Allen, director of the project on women and aging at the Southport Institute for Policy Analysis in Connecticut.

“The golden years aren’t very golden for many older women,” she said. “But that’s not carved in stone. Policies can change.”

There is already a vanguard, a growing cadre of older women who are redefining old age. They are breaking bounds and inspiring their younger sisters to prepare for the adventure of aging.

At 47, Sandra Martz is at the head of the baby boom generation’s long march toward old age. She’s human, so there are mornings when she’s slightly frightened by the aging woman in her mirror.

“Society has had a way of treating older women as invisible, and we all can fall prey to it. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Martz, a publisher in Watsonville, Calif. She recently edited a collection of poems and stories called “When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.”

“There are so many older women out there who are making a difference in the way we all see ourselves,” she said. “They are speaking up, speaking out. We should listen. They can teach us about creating a full life.”