North London Older Women's Group

In the ate 70s the London Conference of the Women's Liberation Movement decided to hold a workshop for older women. Intrigued, I decided to attend. The first surprise was to find women in their early thirties there. Hardly old, I thought, so I asked them why they were attending. Their first answer was that they felt they had very different problems from younger feminists because they were already in steady relationships and had children. "The younger feminists don't want to talk about babies," they said. Their other concern was about the menopause - it was the end of life, they thought. An interesting discussion ensued.
Inspired by that workshop, a few of us who were over 50 decided to continue meeting to discuss our attitudes to ageing. We met regularly for a few months but over the summer holidays the group disbanded. As I had found it a mind-expanding and enjoyable experience, I decided to advertise in Spare Rib for older women to contact me if they wished to meet with other women their own age for discussion. Ten of us eventually settled down together to explore our feelings about ageing and to discuss feminist issues.
We talked of personal problems;exchanged experiences of loves and life;raged at sexism;laughed at men's conceits;supported the abortion campaign; and demonstrated at Greenham. Being working women, many of the problems we brought to the group were work oriented: the lack of promotion; the sexism and ageism we encountered; the someties problematic relationships with our colleagues because of our age; and the difficulties of getting a job at our age. And as most of us were mothers, the fraught relationships with our children were sometimes a subject of discussion, but as one of the group who did not have children herself complained, we tried to respect her feelings.
I sometimes felt we were bending over backwards to accommodate all the wishes of the members, to make us all feel comfortable within the group. I later found out that one woman felt intimidated by some of us; some felt the discussions lacked structure and depth;others felt there was too much structure; one felt like an observer - and they were the ones that stayed with us! Others felt the group had seen them through a difficult period of their lives and they could now move on - so they did. Some of us would have liked the group to be more study-oriented.
A highlight in our early days together was when we were invited in 1983 to produce a half hour film for the Open Space programme on BBC2 television. We called it "Invisible Women" and it was inspired by an article written by Flo Keyworth, a journalist on the Morning Star. We explored the virtual invisibility of older women in the media; why they were the butt of male comedians' humour; why they are portrayed as feeble and dimwitted; and why, if they have relationships with younger men, they are mocked, when older men are applauded for their affairs with young women. The Times review amused us. It said, "This passionate little film may have echoed at times with rather silly overstatements but only male bigots could deny the truth of its main contentions". The Daily Express commended us for "hanging on to our good humour as we discussed with frankness and insight the problem of ageing in a man's world." [Zelda doesn't mention that she commissioned me to write and perform the songs featured in this programme - just had to get that in!]
After that success I did a number of other TV programmes. One I particularly enjoyed doing was on the "representation of women in advertisements for washing powder over the past 20 years", which was filmed in a launderette in Bloomsbury. Another one I did was on education and, more recently, a film was made of my visit to Philadelphia to meet Maggie Kuhn and the Gray Panthers.
It is with some pride that I tell you that the Older Women's Group kept together for over 12 years.