Lynne Segal offers a powerful manifesto for dealing with the march of time
The mighty Simone de Beauvoir published Old Age in 1970, when she was in her early 60s. A troubled, anguished and angry testimony, it detailed her profound dismay at the sagging of the body; the loss of looks (her own and the admiring glances of others), the absence of desire and the unwilling and uncomfortable contemplation of mortality. Not for her the basic philosophy of Woody Allen: "Old age isn't so bad, when you consider the alternative."
In contrast, Lynne Segal's thoughtful analysis of ageing offers a far more combative, zestful approach. It asks: when suffering from "temporal vertigo", absorbing at once all the ages you have ever been, and dealing with the inevitable loss of loved ones, how do you accept the physical ravages and build on the experiences of the past, to live fully in the present? What does it mean to age well?
Segal, now in her 60s, is a socialist feminist and anniversary professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. For the past 30 years, she has fearlessly taken on some of the loopier ideas of feminism and contributed significantly to a more optimistic agenda for sexual politics. In books such as Is the Future Female?, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men and Straight Sex: The Politics of Desire, she challenged the kind of essentialism that believes that women are somehow "nicer" than men and that, as sections of the sisterhood argued, men are incapable of change.
Social conditioning is, obviously, particularly potent when it comes to the business of growing old. And here is Segal's first challenge. Whom does she define as old? "Late midlifers"? "Early elderly"? At what point does an individual cease being surprised at the wrinkled, chipmunked face in the mirror and begin the period of critical self-reflection that surely must be one of the perks of ageing? What's certain is that the number of years that have passed is no guide in itself; as the writer Penelope Lively says in Moon Tiger : "Chronology irritates me."
Madonna wearily refuses to age, while women are now bearing children in a decade when their mothers were ploughing through the menopause. Old age for Dante began at 45; for Hippocrates, it meant the 50s. Now, 10 million Britons are over 65 and soon centurions will be the norm.
How we age is influenced by society's attitudes and currently "youthism" reigns, but it is also dictated by events in the shape of disease, desertion and unexpected isolation and deprivation. A fifth of those over 65 live in poverty, the majority of them women.
Segal's book is worth buying alone for the vim with which she sees off the "dim-witted" arguments of coalition minister David Willetts and historian Francis Beckett, among others, who insist that the baby-boomers have stolen all the booty and forfeited their children's future. Neoliberals, not the baby-boomers, have done the damage, Segal argues, and there are better ways to share the diminished spoils – a tax on corporate wealth, for one.
To help construct her guide for a "good" old age, Segal calls on an army of poets, writers, academics and activists, perhaps too many, when it's her voice the reader may seek. Her recommendations include remaining politically active (she quotes the inestimable John Berger, in his 80s: "…one protests… in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds"); valuing interdependency; treasuring connections with those who are younger; seeking out joy and ignoring all instructions to opt for invisibility and celibacy.
Until her 40s, Segal and her son lived in a collective in her large house in north London. Then she cohabited more conventionally with her male partner; she was 15 years older and he left her for a younger woman. Now, she has a female partner. Segal quotes from June Arnold's novel, Sister Gin, in which Su, in her 50s, falls for Mamie, a woman in her 80s. "My darling's face has been walked on by life," Su says, as a valediction, not a complaint.
Most of the cast that Segal rallies to explore her theme share an experience of beauty and/or fame, among them the poet Robert Frost ("No memory having starred/ Atones for later disregard/ or keeps the end from being hard"). The majority of those growing older will face other challenges. For millions, especially, perhaps, feminists, paid work, a career, has played a significant part in providing motivation and in forging an identity. Will retirement mean an erosion of a core sense of self? Or, looking back, is it possible to build on aspects of yourself you were never encouraged to value?
Segal quotes the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé, who, among her many achievements, became a psychoanalyst after the age of 60. "All my life I have done nothing but work," she said, near death. "And really, when you come to think of it… why?"
A question that could revolutionise ageing and that deserves an answer long before one runs out of time.
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