The Fountain of Age - Softcover

Friedan, Professor Betty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743299876 ISBN 13: 9780743299879

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006

Synopsis

In 1963, Betty Friedan's transcendent work, The Feminine Mystique, changed forever the way women thought about themselves and the way society thought about women. In 1993, with The Fountain of Age, Friedan changes forever the way all of us, men and women, think about ourselves as we grow older and the way society thinks about aging. Struggling to hold on to the illusion of youth, we have denied the reality and evaded the new triumphs of growing older. We have seen age only as decline. In this powerful and very personal book, which may prove even more liberating than The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan charts her own voyage of discovery, and that of others, into a different kind of aging. She finds ordinary men and women, moving into their fifties, sixties, seventies, discovering extraordinary new possibilities of intimacy and purpose. In their surprising experiences, Friedan first glimpsed, then embraced, the idea that one can grow and evolve throughout life in a style that dramatically mitigates the expectation of decline and opens the way to a further dimension of "personhood." The Fountain of Age suggests new possibilities for every one of us, all founded on a solid body of startling but little-known scientific evidence. It demolishes those myths that have constrained us for too long and offers compelling alternatives for living one's age as a unique, exuberant time of life, on its own authentic terms. Age as adventure! In these pages, film producers and beauticians, salespersons and college professors, union veterans and business tycoons, former (and forever) housewives, male and female empty-nesters and retirees, have crossed the chasm of age... and kept going. They have foundfulfillment beyond career, bonding that transcends youthful dreams of happily-ever-after, and a richer, sweeter intimacy not tied to mechanical measures of sexual activity, but to deep and honest sharing. While gerontologists focus on care, illness, and the concept of age as deterio

About this title

Review:

"Important and inspiring.... Anyone troubled by fears of aging, of disease, of deteriorating faculties -- or anyone who is trapped in a futile denial of mortality -- will find solace in Friedan's monumental exposure of the 'mystique of aging, ' and will perhaps share her sense of liberation in meeting the challenge of the 'third age.'...Encouraging as well as provocative, The Fountain of Age is a groundbreaking book to be read slowly and pondered deeply."
-- Detroit News

"With her usual methodical research and forthright insights, author and feminist Betty Friedan brilliantly challenges the unspeakable.... Friedan dissects the clichés of senility and impairment to reveal a multitude of joys and options that actually exist in the continuum of life she calls the 'Third Age.'"
-- Chicago Tribune

About the Author:

A founder of NOW and a vanguard leader of the Women's Movement, Betty Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique, It Changed My Life, The Second Stage, Beyond Gender, and The Fountain of Age. She taught at Northwestern University, Yale, Temple, Harvard, and USC. She died in 2006.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743299876
• ISBN 13: 9780743299879
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 672