Women Of a Certain Age

WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

I was recently offered the opportunity to be considered for a feature in a National Newspaper or a feature within a range of magazines. But at the same time, I was also told, that I may be too old for some of the popular magazines I had always admired. Believe it or not some of the top women’s magazines are no longer interested in features about women over the age of 45! Why not I hear you ask, surely we are in our prime, we certainly by no means old or ready for the social scrap heap! How true this is, I don’t really know because I certainly didn’t check the facts but it could be true?

There seems to be a lot of focus in the media over the past few years about women who have their career and become mothers later on in life. They start their career path by going to University, and then begin in a relevant job which they are dedicated to for many years and then they gradually climb the career ladder sometimes becoming very successful. It could be that these women’s career prospects improve throughout their middle twenties and by their late thirties to early forties they have become very successful business women.

Women generally are having children later in life not that it is recommended by the medical profession, with the fertility rate dropping rapidly after the age of 25 but nevertheless, for some career women it is no doubt the first time they have even given real thought to the matter of having children. I know when I was pregnant in my twenties I was horrified to discover that my boss was also pregnant at the age of 38 and when you are 24, you certainly can view a woman of that age too old to have a baby. This seems ridiculous to me now as to know as undoubtedly .what is right for one person is certainly not right for the next. Free will and the importance of personal choice are paramount to any situation.

So despite the fact that ageism is one of the” isms” that we generally get all fired up about and certainly is not considered to be “pc” in today’s world, it still exists. Attitudes towards age are very real in the world of media. It would appear that there is however that there is a whole load of interest and intrigue about older women having babies now especially women who give birth in their late fifties and early sixties! However women who want careers later on in life having been devoted mothers for the last twenty years could by all accounts appear to be “kicked to the kerb.”
However the late arrival of babies into this world through older women, reminds us that anything is possible in today’s world and if you want to do a degree when you are sixty, why not!

So what happens about women who have children young because they want to be young parents believing that this is the right thing? They may have left school at sixteen like I did, didn’t go to University because they were considered Miss Average and then worked their way up We started with the bun run remember that and escalated through a number of jobs. We were then happily married in our early twenties and had our first children about the age of twenty three to twenty eight as over twenty eight was definitely considered too old to have a baby in the eighties.
This was certainly considered the normal pattern for women for many years. As young mothers but not teenage mums, they still may not have had time to establish a career. It could just be that they had an average to fairly good job, being a job that paid enough to pay the mortgage and live on.
These women or Miss Averages who were neither very young single parents, nor old career women may consider that when their children reach their twenties that they are still young enough to “go out and get that career they never had.” Now these very interesting and go getting women who have had all the experience and hard work of bringing up a family are told that they are old and uninteresting or features that may be written about them which would definitely be appealing to women of all ages are resigned to the older the mature magazines. Hang on a minute...

Is it remarkable that some of us actually chose to stay at home as we believed that it would make us good mothers and that we actually wanted to spend more time with our children in preference to going out to work.

So I am asking you readers can’t we be both? Surely we can be both mature in spirit as women and also young in body and attitude. Some of us for the first time in our lives perhaps getting that opportunity to progress up the career ladder, or may be going for that degree. Or it might be the right time for us to train for a brand new career. Can we go out and enjoy a night out dancing salsa with female friends or join a social group, without feeling that we are out of touch with the younger women. In one respect women are being told forty is the new 20 and we are also being under-valued for our life experience.

If you have a toy boy apparently you are in and if you are willing to hurt someone you love by saying things which aren’t strictly true then this is also enormously popular. Thankfully, forty year old women have lost the needy desire to compromise who they just for recognition but along with this it is apparent that we are also denied a certain amount of opportunity. It is not a requirement to put your age on your CV but certainly it someone does know your age it may go against you. So come on over forties with grown up kids, let the world know what you have to offer and step forward with the confidence, wisdom encompassing all of your life’s experience. We are certainly not ready to knit baby jackets, or be part of the media scrap heap.