the ageless generation no.3

how did we get here?

Photo credit. sk Unsplash

Middle age, much like the teenager, is a relatively new concept. Through history, there wasn’t the luxury of worrying about labels and what we should or shouldn’t wear, or do, or think. Time was spent just living from day to day, and season to season. We are blessed with more time, freedom, and money than our predecessors could ever have dreamt about. If you were likely to die in childbirth or because of disease, worrying about what you did before you got too old to do stuff was at best an irrelevant luxury.

If you think back just a couple of hundred years to the time of Jane Austen (around 1800), women had a very defined place in society. Men and women both knew what was expected of being a female in their very restricted environment. Girls were expected to get married, have children (a number of whom wouldn’t live past childhood) and if they were lucky, they then lived into their early 50’s. While there are obviously women who didn’t fit the mould, by and large in this society, women conformed to the stereotypes of their social patterning, and that of previous generations.

Photo credit. Library of Congress Unsplash

Fast forward about a hundred years to the early 1900’s and women took to the streets in the demand for Women’s Suffrage, although the seeds of the movement had been sown in the mid 1860’s with the establishment of societies debating the idea of equality. Positions of women in society had changed gradually to this point, as had life expectancy, now in the late 50’s, but there was still an enormous divide between the sexes and between classes. Women who were still expected to be seen and not heard had had enough, and a significant change was coming. The right to vote and the right to be more self-determining had become an unstoppable movement.

Even by the middle of the 20th century, women were largely expected to follow the traditional roles of their ancestors although with much more freedom and enlightenment. However, it was the ‘cultural revolutions’ of the 1960’s and 1980’s that largely swept away all the centuries-old thinking. Being a woman is no longer a barrier to doing things, and your age is increasingly irrelevant to what you want to do and how you are perceived. If you didn’t want to ‘retire’ from life at 50 or 60, you didn’t have to.

It is easy to take the advantages of being alive in this period of history, but as a woman being able to have ambition, creativity and freedom is a luxury. By being creative you can build a wardrobe to reflect your experiences and your aspirations for the future. Being part of the Ageless Generation is a voyage of discovery, not a destination.

Continues in No.4…

All rights reserved. Milly Churchill asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.