Caroline Kennedy is the New Fifty

During our holiday hodgepodge at Fifty is the New, we share a recent blog about Caroline Kennedy’s bid for Hillary Clinton’s senate seat, written by Suzanne Braun Levine, first editor of Ms Magazine, for The Huffington Post.

Whether or not she becomes the junior senator from New York, Caroline Kennedy has already become the poster-woman for those of us thriving, changing, and taking chances at an age when our mothers were encouraged to retire modestly to sitting by the phone, awaiting a call to baby-sit for their grandkids. Women in their fifties and sixties—what I call our Second Adulthood—are a new breed, liberated by better health, greater longevity, experience in the larger world, and self-confidence that is increasing every day. Many are, as Caroline appears to have been, galvanized by reduced emotional demands as their children move out into the world; they find that they can, as one woman told me, “go out of the emotional management business.” And start taking care of their own business.

In my forthcoming book, Fifty Is the New Fifty, I describe what makes this new stage of life for women so exhilarating for us — and often so confusing to those who have known us up until now. No one expected the “intensely private” Caroline Kennedy to start calling attention to herself and her accomplishments. But the first lesson of the experience she embodies is: You are not who you were, only older. At this point in life, we are stepping across a new frontier.

Read Suzanne Braun Levine’s entire piece at The Huffington Post >>