No I’m not going to say anything specific right now about ’sex’ - and no I have not even read this new book yet - just released this week! But I have been reading the excerpts and interviews, Gail’s blog, and visited the Seasoned Woman Network to read comments. I think the media is playing big with the ’sex’ aspect of the book when there is a lot of very important dimensions to what Sheehy is offering up in this newest book which explores the Second Adulthood (ages mid 40s to 70s) and marks the 30th anniversary since her book Passages and more recent The Silent Passage about menopause.

What makes a seasoned woman?

Time.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman—no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover’s bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.

Just how old is a seasoned woman? I define it very much the way Auntie Mame’s friend Vera did when asked, “How old are you, anyway?”
“Somewhere between forty and death.”

It’s not over at 45 or 50, “it” being sex, intimacy, discovery of a new identity and a new passion in life. On the contrary, it begins all over again. Today, 50 is the start of a whole new cycle. You may have already lived an entire adulthood, but now you are at the beginning of another one—a portion of the life span that I identified in 1995 as our Second Adulthood.

Women’s lives are long and have many seasons. As contemporary women, if we’re healthy, we will likely be around longer than our mothers were. As I first reported in New Passages, epidemiologists say that a woman who reaches the age of 50 free of cancer and heart disease can expect to see her ninety-second birthday….

Time is perceived differently after 50. People begin counting backward, thinking in terms of years left to live. But that may be forty years or more, and we can elect to make something magnificent of it. This is a huge cultural shift, making possible what I call the Pursuit of the Passionate Life.

If you would like to know how others are responding to this new book, check out the Seasoned Woman Network. And feel free to post your comments here also.

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