You Can't Be Old before You Are Young: Aging and Pedagogy.

rative of aging and pedagogy that mitigates the terror by contesting and refuting cultural stereotypes. The force of our narrative is, we feel, enhanced by recent research into the physiology, neurology, and psychology of aging, especially of women's aging. Our story of change and development grows not merely from the experience that comes with years. We are not merely experienced pedagogues and humans, garnering knowledge from years of attentive living, although we are that: we are also different mentally, emotionally, and physically than we were thirty years ago. Recent studies of female aging suggest that there is substance to Margaret Mead's formulation of "post-menopausal vigor." In the 1970s we rejected the reductive formulation "biology is destiny," and we still reject it when it is used to mean that women are purely reproductive entities. We feel empowered, however, by new research that suggests that female biology is sufficiently rich and complicated to allow for physical, mental, and emotional changes that encourage new and powerful priorities and understandings of the world and our place in it (see, for example, Brizendine, quoting Protopopescu; Motzer; Morgan; and Labouvie-Vief). While many women in the reproductive stages of life are vulnerable to moodaltering hormonal shifts, are emotionally labile, and are easily distracted by cultural as well as physical/neurological pressure to mate and procreate (Brizendine, quoting Light and Tang), postmenopausal women can be less subject to such messages. Indeed, despite the plethora of crippling cultural messages that women's worth begins with sexual attractiveness and ends with menopause, many women with high career momentum at our stage of life view their work as more central to their identities than the beauty/mating/ motherhood paradigm of their twenties, thirties, and forties. Such women also demonstrate higher levels of self-acceptance, independence, effective functioning and physical health than other women (Helson 2001, Helson and Soto 2005).