Sometimes stories get carried over generations. They have felt true for so long that they endure in part because everyone is so used to them being true. This is how I feel about the very familiar idea that when women hit middle age, they become invisible. This was once in many ways true. But from my 53-year-old perch, that doesn’t feel like the case anymore. I love being a middle-aged woman. I have found more joy, strength and selfhood in my 50s than I have known in any other era, a personal fact that can be backed up more universally: Some studies have shown that in the last few years, happiness in the United States and Britain has begun increasing in middle age, rather than the opposite, more familiar trajectory of hitting the bottom of the barrel. I have been working on a book called “The Joy of X,” based on a New York Times Magazine cover story I wrote last year on how some Gen X women are finding their sexual prime in middle age. The idea for my recent Times Opinion guest essay came from stumbling across this invisibility trope over and over in my research, often flowing from the mouths or pens of the most fabulous middle-aged women who have ever existed, none of whom were in any way invisible in their 40s or 50s: Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, Nora Ephron … the list goes on. It was like a cultural brainteaser. At first, I believed it was simply women who are not invisible saying it for the women who are. But when I spoke to current middle-aged women, like Rachel Weisz, 56, drawling about being invisible on a TV show she was starring in, I thought: Something else is going on here. What is this leading lady in the middle of the screen missing? Not beauty. Not relevance. Not power. Not attractiveness. Only youth. I have been seized by this unstoppable desire to shake the shoulders of women my age and ask them just to look at how hot and cool and unbelievably necessary middle-aged women can be today, even with all the never-ending overwhelm of jobs and kids and menopause and aging parents and needy partners. I don’t have a female friend who would rather be in her 20s than in her 50s today. And I don’t think there is another era in recent memory, or perhaps in any memory, when that would have been the case.
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