Colette Dowling - Red Hot Mamas: Coming into Our Own at Fifty

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

RED HOT MAMAS

A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published March 1996
Bantam trade paperback edition / March 1997

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1996 by Colette Dowling.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-36807.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79692-9

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To my mother, Gladys Stearley Hoppmann, whose richly nuanced conversations with me, in her late eighties, proved that she remains, unquestionably, a Red Hot Mamaas well as my most significant friend and role model.

I DECIDED TO WRITE a book on midlife women because, in my own life, turning fifty presented challenges Id never had to face before. I wanted to talk with the women whose work, and whose lives, would give me some understanding of the psychological issues I was facing at this new stage of life.

Firstand it was a great place to begin my researchwas a brilliant study by Lois W. Banner of how historical attitudes toward sexuality and power in women affect us as we age. In Full Flower was eye-opening on the out-and-out hatred of sexuality in older women that percolates beneath the surface of the culture even todayand of what that can do to us.

The physiological status of midlife womenincluding mood, libido, and the ability to think clearlyis just as important as the psychological to our overall well-being. It is affected far more by hormonal changes than has heretofore been recognized. I thank the many scientists and educators I interviewed whose wonderful research and articulate manner of explaining it allowed me to transform my own health at midlifeand, I hope, write about it in a way that will help others to do the same. Among these are Barbara B. Sherwin, Ph.D., of McGill University, and Philip Sarrel, M.D., Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, both of whom have done ground-breaking research on estrogens role in the well-being of women in midlife and beyond. Sheryl Sherman, Ph.D., Director of the Aging Institute of the National Institutes of Health, gave me a framework for understanding the vastly important research presented by both basic and social scientists at the institute-sponsored Menopause Workshop, in 1993.

The special challenges to midlife women of being caretakers to both their parents and their children has become grist for the mill of both therapists and social service agencies. Of tremendous help to me in grasping the growing importance of this issue in the lives of women turning fifty was Monica McGoldrick, Director of the Family Institute of New Jersey and associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Vivian Fenster Ehrlich, Executive Director of DOROT, a social service agency on Manhattans Upper West Side, helped found the Caregivers Center, and was generous with her time in talking to me about midlifers need for help in caring for the older generation.

Carol Anderson, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and Administrator, Western Psychiatric Institute, devotes herself to studying the social and psychological issues of midlife women. I met Carol at a Harvard-sponsored conference for couples therapists, where she spoke about the need for couples in their fifties to reevaluateand often restructuretheir marriages. I have also been influenced by her pioneering ideas on living alone, and how therapists can help women at midlife become comfortable with being single.

Donna Boundy, MSW, gave me a great deal of help in understanding womens psychological resistance, at midlife, to managing their money and investing adequately for the future. She also helped in the computer organization of my research.

Robine Andrau, whose own midlife transition was capped by a degree in library science, helped me gain access to work being done at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. Robine also conducted computer searches whose data formed the underpinnings for several chapters of this book.

Rebecca Daniels helped in the interviewing of some of the sixty-five women in their fifties whose stories are the flesh and blood of Red Hot Mamas.

Finally, I thank all the courageous women who were willing to put their experiences out there so that others might benefit. Included in this group is Gretchen Cryer, the thoughtful and creative author and star of Im Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road, who shared with me the various crises of her fifties decade and how she dealt with them.

Last of all I am grateful to my mother, Gladys Stearley Hoppmann, whose courage and openness in dealing with her eighties has become the major inspiration for my life as I am living it today, in my fifties.

Coming Into Our Own The Way It Was The Way It IsThe Original Red Hot MamasChoice Points: The Revolution Among Midlife Women

I T WAS WILLAS fiftieth. The women kept surging out onto the floor to dance, while the men stood around the edges of the lofty, cathedral-ceilinged living room and watched. Catherine had made a tape of all those songs from the 1970s, when their lives had begun to change. Tonight, there was something incantatory about the voices, the clapping, the Reeboks and cowboy boots beating rhythmically on the floor. The Mamas, many of them having reached fifty but some still in their forties, were jubilant. The dancing was hot. Claire, visiting from the city and dressed in black bikers shorts, high-tops, and a motorcycle jacket, was especially fun to watch. Her hair was gray as weathered wood, short as a boys, and her smile was ecstatic. Her body moved as fluidly as if she were much younger, but with this assurance, this strength. That combination of social confidence and physical endurance, said Susan, back in the kitchen inhaling guacamole, was killer.