Of Time and the Woman

Abstract

• I feel very much like one of those figures on top of an operating table in television, surrounded by thirty-six doctors and the chief surgeon telling the interns, You see before you the body of an aging Well, here it is. But I still think that what time does to the woman depends less on time than on the woman. woman? Who is she? For whom do you speak? That is why this must be largely a subjective account. Not because I consider myself especially significant or especially typical, but because it is the only subject on which I am, of necessity, an authority. Oh, there are, of course, conditions of mind and heart and body which all of us share when we grow older. We lose our children because they no longer need us. We lose our husbands either through death or choice. We lose physical beauty. We lose most of our options. Most of us suffer the same kinds of pains and frustration, emotional and physical. And we are now more than ever humiliated by a society so oriented to the young that we are given no place in it. We know that we were born too early and possibly wiII die too late. But beyond these common states, each woman responds to time in a diHerent way because she has led a different life. And perhaps I have led a life more different than most. At the outset, in any case, I must confess that I do not feel old. As my father did, I resent the arbitrary measurements of time (who invented it, anyway?) which is, in effect, one more label by which to put the hapless and helpless human into categories regardless of individual diHerence. Some days I feel sixty and some days I feel thirty-nine, and when, for instance, I open a magazine like Time and see a quote attributed to me followed by the sum of my years, I cry What has that got to