As people live longer and better lives, both women and men may look forward to many years in retirement. But living well in retirement depends on a variety of decisions people make as they prepare for and enter this new chapter of life and living. This book is for and about women approaching and experiencing life in their senior years. This largest and fastest-growing part of the population is living in a manner very different from our mothers, whose roles in life were much more predictable and circumscribed than ours. Today’s senior women live longer, are healthier, better educated, more involved in the world, and more active than the women who preceded us. Figuring out these uncharted years without role models or guideposts can be challenging, but, here, the authors gather the stories of today’s senior women, who have jumped hurdles, answered questions, and made decisions they never saw their mothers make.

Through these stories, readers will find fellowship and guidance, wisdom and acknowledgment of the challenges (and triumphs) that lie ahead. Culled from women in their sixties and beyond, and from a variety of backgrounds and current living situations, the stories reveal the realities of life for retirement-age women, and demonstrate the dreams, joys, concerns, and fears that come along with this phase of life. They address questions about living arrangements, adult children, loss of a spouse or partner, relationships and friendships, part time work, social connections, health concerns, and more. Facing these new situations with class, dignity, sass, and smarts, these women reveal the various ways today’s senior women can live and love her retirement years.

Barbara M. Fleisher, EdD, is a retired professor of education. She is the author of many journal articles and has presented her research at national and international conferences. She has made presentations and conducted many workshops for and about women in their sixties and beyond, and has interviewed hundreds of women about their concerns as they face new challenges in this stage in their lives.

Thelma Reese, EdD, retired professor of English and of Education, created the Advisory Council for Hooked on Phonics and was its spokesperson in the ‘90s. In that role, and as director of the Mayor’s Commission on Literacy for the City of Philadelphia, she appeared frequently on television and hosted a cable show in Philadelphia. Together, she and Barbara created and maintain the www.ElderChicks.com blog. She writes the monthly Family column for www.RightsideWire, and she and Barbara appear weekly on the Armstrong Williams show on Sirius Radio as he plumbs the wisdom of the “ElderChicks.”

Dick Goldberg is the national director of Coming of Age, the age fifty-plus civic engagement initiative working in thirty communities. In his previous career as a playwright and screenwriter, among the works he authored was the off-Broadway drama Family Business, which ran in New York for over a year, was produced in regional theatres around the world, and was the basis for his becoming a Guggenheim Fellow.

Foreword
Introduction
1: My Mother’s Senior Years Were So Different from Mine
How Should I Be in This New Age?
2: So Now I’m Retired
How Do I Fill My Days So I Feel Good about Myself at Night?
3: I Love My Freedom and Independence
How Do I Maintain It?
4: We Love Our Possessions but They Are Starting to Own Us
How Do I Downsize My Life?
5: The Children Are Adults
Has the Family Dynamic Outgrown Issues of Control, Rebellion, and Sibling Rivalries? How Do We Keep a Sense of Family across Generations?
6: Can’t Use My Computer – or Knit or Rollerblade
The World is Changing around Me. How Do I Remain a Part of It? How Do I Push Myself to Learn New Skills?
7: We Laugh about Our ‘Senior Moments’
Should We Fear Them?
8: Rx Health
We Can’t Ignore the Changes. What Do We Do about Them?
9: Separation and Loss Are Facts of Life
How Do I Handle Them?
10: Sometimes I Feel Safest in My Senior Bubble
My World is Shrinking. How Do I Expand It?
Finale: A Gathering of the Wisdom We Find in Each Other

This remarkable compendium of stories of and by women of a certain age provides enormous insight and wisdom to all of us as we approach retirement. This underlying message is reinforced in every page; "To thine own self be true."
— Molly D. Shepard, president and CEO, The Leaders Edge/Leaders By Design

The New Senior Woman is essential reading for “women of a certain age” who are on the verge on their retirement years. With its lively conversational style, The New Senior Woman is a self-help book for savvy women who typically eschew self-help. Baby Boom women have re-invented every social institution they’ve encountered, and old age is no exception. This book provides women with helpful yet never sanctimonious advice on how to navigate retirement, downsizing one’s home, health woes, cognitive decline, ever-changing parent-child relations, loss, and the other inevitable changes that accompany aging. Equal parts first-person narrative, scholarship, and self-help, The New Senior Woman invites women to face old age with knowledge, confidence, and guarded optimism.
— Deborah Carr, professor of Sociology, Rutgers University; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (2015-18)