Safa Samiezade'-Yazd

As I was listening to the CBS Evening News the other night, an article stuck in my mind.  With Baby Boomers approaching retirement age, the article addressed the different health and lifestyle issues that older people deal with, as well as the fact that the supply of adequate medical care is far below its increasing demand.  At no other point in recorded history has our population carried such a great percentage of older adults, and for the first time in history, the number of adults over the age of 65 will outnumber the number of children under the age of 5.  A hundred years ago, people could only expect to live to the age of 47; today, life expectancy has risen to an all-time high of 78 years.

The article left me thinking, not just about the institutionalized ageism in our youth-obsessed culture today, but also about the feminist neglect of older women; as a trend, women’s rights has always been more focused on advancing younger women of the future than it has on preserving aging women of the past.  This concerns me, because women statistically live longer than men, creating a gender imbalance, so as our older population ages, it will increasingly become more female-dominant.  In Care2, Cynthia Samuels commented that we seem to be in a “feminist generational divide.”  Not only do I agree with her, I actually predict the divide becoming greater, and younger feminists find themselves unable and ...