No Use Crying For Mother

jane

Usually the big reveal’s at the end of the post, not at the start. Here it is. I admit it, I’ll be 50 later this year.

Such is my ingrained cultural conditioning that this is the first time I’ve had the courage to publicly admit to no longer being a perennial 42 (I had my children young so I could get away with it for quite a long time). When age discrimination against women starts at around 30, why would I? Having a much younger partner than you makes the pressure even more intense.

But dammit, I don’t want to be 42 any more: trying to keep up a front that insists on sagging and being its age despite your best, most time-consuming and expensive efforts is just too much damn work, and life’s too bloody short as it is. Who am I competing with anyway? Under-fifties? Teenagers? What for, exactly?

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t care any more, even though admitting to being 50 and someone’s mother, for a woman, is tantamount to declaring that you’re just another perimenopausal, invisible has-been. But I’m 50 – well, not quite, I’ll be 49 for a while yet – and to hell with it.

That said you’d think that this frivolous filler piece lauding the overfifties female from G2 would have struck a chord with me:

They blazed in like a hockey team: gung-ho, no-nonsense, determined to win. First came Joanna Lumley (63), campaigning for the Gurkhas; hot on her heels was Gloria Hunniford (69), lobbying for grandparents’ rights to see their grandchildren. And then came Esther Rantzen (68), speaking out about dry rot and corruption, and contemplating the idea of standing for parliament. Behind her stood Helen Alexander (52), the first female chair of the CBI.

Clearly, the opinions of women who have strayed over the age of 50 have been overlooked for too long. At a time when our TV shows are presented by silver foxes and buxom young blondes, when we’ve no Moira Stuart, no Anna Ford, when we don’t hear enough from Joan Bakewell or Kate Adie, there is something glorious about the arrival on the political scene of these women. They have caught the national mood, underlining the feeling that we have had quite enough of all those silly little boys running the show, ballsing up the banks and pratting about in politics. “Right!” they seem to say, rolling up their sleeves, getting out some elbow grease (and perhaps a bottle of gin). “Let’s do this properly, shall we?”

But no chord struck. For a start, Lumley, Hunniford and Rantzen, haven’t just strayed over fifty – they’re all well into their sixties. That’s not just straying, that’s invading and taking possession. I get the impression the author was in a hurry, Alexander’s name happened to be on the news and it fit. She’s just over 50, true, but she’s only the chair of the CBI, not the chief executive, and she’s female, which are distinctions much more likely to affect her potential power than her age might.

But that’s just sloppiness; more to the point, what utter crap. Or to put it more politely, I disagree with the author’s entire premise. You only have to look at prominent women who are actually over fifty to immediately refute the idea that women over fifty innately have more sense. Take politicians – Condoleeza Rice is 55; Hazel Blears, 53. They’re wise? Or political pundits – Maureen Dowd is 58 or thereabouts, Melanie Phillips is 59. We should listen to them more, just because they’re over 50? I don’t think so. Just because you’ve done a lot or seen a lot or have a platform to spout from doesn’t mean you learned anything at all from anything.

So many journalists recently seem to be unconsciously or even consciously wisting for 1940, when the Women’s Institute was the last redoubt against fascism and capable, strongarmed women in floury pinnies kept the nation going while simultaneously riveting, breastfeeding baby, stirring the porridge and aiming the antiaircraft batteries.

Maybe it’s just another facet of the general nostalgia for the war, this desire for someone capable to to take stern measures and lay down some rules and some discipline. The Americans call for the Cavalry, we want to give the reins of power to the Women’s Institute and have Ann Widdecombe for Speaker. Ooh, strict Nanny…

But even if they were willing, the women who survived the War are mostly now in their eighties and nineties and increasingly fewer in number, and they’d probably deny they were special anyway. The women named in the article grew up in the sixties; the mothers of this current generation of journalists will have been brought up the seventies. The mythical women they’re yearning for don’t exist any more, if they ever did. Sorry, guys – she’s not coming to make it all all right and kiss the nasty booboo better so it’s no use crying for Mummy. There are no eggy soldiers for tea.

We can argue all day about responsibility for the current political chaos and as conscience-relieving and satisfying as it might be for women to put the blame entirely on men, we all of us messed up, if only from inaction. Equally everyone, of whatever gender, whether under fifty or well over, must have input into the shape of any new economic and political realities that result.

Easy to say, but much harder to do. For the time being we women will have to muddle through, frowning at our wrinkles, being capable, making the best of things and finding what little scraps of peace and contentment wherever and however we can. None of us is getting any younger, after all.

The Audacity Of Hypocrisy

Peterr at Firedoglake:

Never Again? That’ll be Quite a Speech, Mr. President
By: Peterr Tuesday April 21, 2009 4:20 pm

How does Obama speak at the national Holocaust remembrance commemoration on the topic “Never Again: What You Do Matters” one week after releasing memos outlining torture as an official US policy, and after declaring that those who employed it will not be prosecuted? We’ll find out on Thursday.

Oh, he’ll manage it; he knows all about the uses of rhetoric.

The Past Isn’t A Foreign Country

And they don’t do things that much differently there either. Another fascinating recent google find I came across recently is this this Flickr gallery of 1930’s colour photographs of Amsterdam by colour wizard Bernard Eilers:

Visit of Queen Juliana
Amsterdam, Dam Square, Bijenkorf, 1937, Bernard Eiler

From the Stadsarchief Amsterdam:

Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) […] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.

Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.

Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack
Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack

That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.

At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d’ve been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?