Invisible Women [View all]

[OKNancy]

This topic has been done many times. Interestingly, I hadn't read anything about the "invisible woman" but came to the term on my own.

I was talking to a friend and telling her about how now that I am older I seem invisible to people. Gone are the days when the grocery sacker rushed to help me. The waitresses seem to glide past my table when my elderly mother and I are out. No second looks when I walk down the street. At parties, I used to be swarmed... no more.
I am a post menopausal woman. I don't exist any more. I have no value. I am invisible.

She said.. Nancy, there are tons of books and articles that say the same thing. You are saying what many already have said.

I just read this short blog. It's a good read.

http://www.katehorsley.com/blog/2011/02/01/invisible-women/ - author Kate Horsley's blog.
Read some of her other stuff. It's a nice blog.

Excerpt:

When I was a teenager in the 60′s, I was hot. Yes, indeed. I went braless, wore halter tops and mini-skirts; I had long red hair and what my mother called “bedroom eyes.”

My mother in her day was a classic beauty, though she was embarrassed that she had large breasts. I had neither the big breasts nor the stunning face of my mother. But men looked at me, and when my mother and I went out together, to the grocery store for example, she’d walk behind me and watch how men would turn and look as I passed. “When you get to be my age,” she said when she was five years younger than I am today, “you’re invisible.” She was amused, not bitter.

I used to pity women over forty who seemed pathetically doomed to invisibility, uncool, unsexy and basically worthless. Even as a feminist, somewhere deep in my very shallow soul – the waters barely sloshing around my ankles at the time — I believed that to be sexy as a woman was more valuable than say, winning the Nobel Prize. But to be sexy AND win the Nobel Prize – that would most definitely be cool.

Now 58 years old, I stand up in front of five classrooms full of men and women. In that sense people are forced to look at me. And I’ve got a partner, whose soul’s waters aren’t so shallow as mine were, who loves my aging self. So, I can’t complain about being invisible. But I am not remotely hot in any public way, and I don’t see any chance of winning the Nobel Prize unless there’s some apocalyptic occurrence and the only person left to receive the prize besides me is George W. Bush.

The rest is at the link...
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I'm not just posting this for other women my age, but also for you younger women. Know what is ahead, but also to remember your older sisters and don't discount us. Perhaps be aware of your own feelings when you see an older woman.