The Older Women’s Workshop
The Older Women’s Workshop, held this past March on the east coast of the United States, was a highlight of my Re-evaluation Counseling life. It was a privilege to lead it with Diane Balser, the RC International Liberation Reference Person for Women.
Leading this workshop was a big stretch for me and a personal victory. It was an affirmation of setting a big goal and discharging toward it and fighting to have my mind as a female. Diane’s and my joint leadership was a model of cooperation and of complementing our respective strengths. I learned so much from Diane’s decades of experience leading women of different constituencies on many issues.
We were eighty women spanning five decades and at least two generations (we were in our fifties to our nineties). We were from a diversity of backgrounds, and our accumulated experience in RC was at least two thousand years!
We older women are the majority of Co-Counselors and leaders in RC. We built the Communities and spearheaded the work on sexism. We have internalized RC women’s liberation theory. We get to be a united force as we think about what an older women’s liberation movement would look like.
We celebrated ourselves, looked at the effects of sexism and old-age oppression, and figured out what it means to lead bigger, more significant lives. We noticed that this was a women’s workshop—that we are fully female, that it’s great to be female, and that none of our issues as older women are trivial.
Topic groups included the following: taking on [confronting and doing something about] climate change, taking charge of our bodies and health as we age, fears of death and dying, relationships with younger women, leadership in RC and the wide world, and keeping our minds as we age.
It was a relief to be together and be pleased with exactly the females we are, without having to compare ourselves to younger females or to any standard of beauty defined by sexism and age. We got to acknowledge and value our accomplishments and enjoy and appreciate each other. We discharged early hurts from sexism and put attention on the effects of sexism on our bodies. The physical counseling sessions, with eighty women on the mats or in chairs, were no-holding-back, loud, fun, and powerful.
The terms “sexual harassment” and “date rape” didn’t exist when we were younger, even though we experienced these things. We need to fight against sexual victimization, past and present. We need to stay close to men and take charge of our relationships with them.
We can take charge of our financial resources. We don’t get to “retire” in any real sense. We get to put our female minds on big issues like climate change and ending oppression.
Jerry Yoder did an incredible job of organizing the workshop. She took responsibility for every detail to make sure it went well, which included thinking about Diane and me as leaders.
Seattle, Washington, USA
I was pleased to lead the Older Women’s Workshop with Ellie Putnam. Ellie is a counselor at Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources, leads women-and-physical-power work, and has helped to build several RC Communities. She and I have known each other for over forty years. I had also known many of the other women at the workshop for close to half a lifetime.
A large number of today’s RC leaders are women aged sixty and older. Many of us began RC in our young adult years and “grew up in RC” under the leadership of Harvey Jackins. We played a large role in building the RC Community and its liberation work. We trained, and continue to train, a new generation of leaders.
Some of us were in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. It was the biggest fight for women in the history of the world. We were deeply affected by it, and we are still in that fight.
It was wonderful to be together in a space in which we were not being targeted by ageism. It was wonderful to be with women who had been younger together, who remembered what it was like not to be targeted by ageism, and who had not experienced the kind of sexism that comes at younger women today—widespread pornography, sexualization in the media, and so on. Our commonalities provided a deep safety.
Our ability to take on [take charge of] our oppression as older females will shape how well we age, and lead, and model what RC is and can be about. Working on our early distresses is central to successfully taking on the oppression. Challenging and discharging the many effects of having been put in a victim role is also key, as is discharging how sexism has affected us in each stage of our lives.
We discharged remembering women leaders who had died and on fears of our own death. (The direction “I will never choose to die” has been useful for me.) We have memories of, images of, and distress recordings about the older people who have been part of our lives. We need to recall and discharge on what we know about our mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers and how they aged.
The following are some additional issues for older women:
- Taking charge of our financial lives
- Our reproductive lives, and feelings about no longer being reproductive
- Our histories of being exploited sexually
- Changes in our bodies and body images
- Our living situations
- Our labor being exploited as mothers and grandmothers
- Taking charge of all aspects of our physical lives
- Our responsibility to and significance for the future of humankind
- Our leadership goals, and becoming bigger and bigger
- The limits we have accepted as permanent, and challenging them
Love to all my growing-older
sisters, and my younger sisters
who are also growing older,
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
discussion list for leaders of women