Reflections on women’s aging from the New York Times–bestselling author who inspired the film The Glorias. One day I woke up and there was a seventy-year-old woman in my bed . . . Gloria Steinem has been an eloquent and outspoken voice for women’s rights and equality for more than four decades. In Doing Sixty & Seventy she addresses an essential concern of people everywhere—and especially of women: the issue of aging. Whereas turning fifty, in her experience, is “leaving a much-loved and familiar country,” turning sixty means “arriving at the border of a new one.” With insight, intelligence, wit, and heartfelt honesty, she explores the landscapes of this new country and celebrates what she has called “the greatest adventure of our lives.” While appreciating everybody’s experiences as different, Steinem sees these years as charged with possibilities. Dealing with stereotypes and the “invisibility” that often accompany a woman’s senior years can be as liberating as it is frustrating. It frees women as well as men to embrace that “full, glorious, alive-in-the-moment, don’t-give-a-damn yet caring-for-everything sense of the right now.” This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gloria Steinem including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I’m not sure if my experience is the same as others, but I do have faith in talking to each other. We are communal creatures who must mirror each other to know who we are. Every living thing ages and dies, yet humans seem to be the only species that thinks about aging and dying. #2 I was writing an anthology of famous and not-so-famous last words and death scenes, and I was trying to understand the perspective of age. I sensed that I would be profligate with time until I admitted it had an end. #3 I had spent years ignoring the calendar and living outside the generational loop, which may have finally found a deeper use. They weren’t so realistic at the time, but combined with a new sense of mortality for balance, they yielded some valuable lessons. #4 The impact of generations on behavior is also relative. For example, the feminist generation, which was raised to believe that maleness was everything, could force sons to behave as their mother’s age peer or husband, or even father.

Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”