A Love Affair with CEDAW and Gender Equality: In Conversation with Alda Facio

Meet Alda Facio, a feminist activist, educator, creator and jurist whose work has influenced thinking about women's rights from Costa Rica to the United Nations. In this episode, Alda talks about her love affair with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and her 2 decades working with multitudes of women's human rights activists in the excellent Women's Human Rights Institute! Her pioneering efforts light the way to show us how the law can be harnessed as a formidable tool for justice and advocacy, and how  a U. N. Convention can unite women across generations and geographies to bring about meaningful change.  Drawing on the inspiring activism of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, we discuss how love and older women's determination and stature can be powerful catalysts for achieving social justice and equality.  With warmth and irrepressible humour, Alda brings us insights about human rights activism and personal revelations that delight and enlighten. 

Transcript

Elder Women Making Social Change

Speaker 1 0:00

I'm Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, your host of Wisdom at Work. Older Women, elder Women and Grandmothers on the Move, the podcast that kicks old stereotypes to the curb. Come meet these creative, outrageous, authentic, adventurous, irreverent and powerful disruptors and influencers older women and grandmothers, from the living room to the courtroom, making powerful contributions in every walk of life. Hi, it's Ilana.

Speaker 2 0:30

Welcome back to Wisdom at Work. Elder Women, older Women and Grandmothers on the Move. And today I have the extraordinary pleasure and joy of welcoming my mentor, my friend, my most beloved colleague, alda Facio. And Alda is from Costa Rica, she's a feminist jurist, she's a writer, she's a teacher, she's an international expert in gender and human rights. She's one of the founding members of the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice at the International Criminal Court.

Speaker 2 0:57

She was for many, many years over 20 years the Director of Women, justice and Gender, a program with the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, known as ILAMUD, and the vice president of the Justice and Gender Foundation.

Speaker 2 1:13

She was also one of the founding members of Ventana in the 70s, one of the first feminist organizations in Costa Rica, and she was also one of the five UN Special Rapporteurs for the Working Group Against Discrimination Against Women and Girls. And I first started working with ALDA when I was working at UNIFEM and ALDA, along with Shanti Dharian from ERA Asia Pacific, started a special program to bring women activists to New York, to the United Nations, when the CEDAW committee was meeting the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to help women activists from different countries connect with the members of the CEDAW committee to talk to them about what was really going on with women in their countries, and we're going to talk about that. Alda has for many, many years took that program, expanded it and it evolved over time into a Women's Human Rights Institute, and I want to talk about that too. But first, alda, I want to welcome you to Wisdom at Work, the podcast.

Speaker 3 2:13

Oh, thank you, Ilana, it's great talking to you, it's just, it has my heart happy.

Speaker 2 2:19

There is so much to talk about. I remember when I first met you and I was quite young and was just starting out I had just left working as a lawyer, and meeting you was really inspiring because you were one of the people who really changed my life, because you showed me that you didn't have to be practicing law or acting as a judge in order to use the law in the service of promoting human rights and, in particular, women's rights. How did it happen for you that you started to see how the law could be used in different ways and maybe even more important ways, to inform, advocacy and social justice?

Speaker 3 2:58

Well, you know, it has to do with feminism. Feminism changed my life and I discovered feminism when I was 17 or 18 years old and it was that beautiful time in New York, you know, with all the radical feminists coming together, and I met Kate Millay there when I was in New York at 17. And I was just ostrich and I couldn't even talk to her. I was so, you know. But I decided to study law after. I was a feminist. That's the difference with me and many other feminist lawyers that I met. I studied law with that idea to change the law. So I was always thinking of how unjust the law was with women and with the poor, and here in Costa Rica you always lose. If you're poor, there's no way you can get justice, or almost no way. And so, but I thought for a while I needed to learn all about the law. So I accepted being a judge when I was offered a judgeship, because I said that I have to know that part of the law by the time I was a judge and everything here in Costa Rica. Six years of studying law and so.

Speaker 3 4:02

But I had already worked at the UN in Geneva and there I fell in love with human rights. The Center for Human Rights was a teeny, weeny little office with, I think it was one desk and then two desks. There wasn't hardly anywhere you could read about human rights. There was the Universal Declaration, there was the Race Convention and I think, the two covenants and that's it right. When I was there, I went to several meetings of human rights and I said, boy, I need to learn about this. But all of the people that were there were lawyers. So I thought, well, I'm going to go have to study law. That part I didn't want in a way, because my father was a lawyer, my grandfather was a lawyer, everybody was a lawyer. I didn't want to follow them, but I was the first woman in the family to go to university and to study law.

Speaker 3 4:46

Even that's even more incredible. And of course in those days you couldn't go study human rights. There was no human rights course anywhere. So I studied labor law, which is the closest thing I could find to human rights law, and I was a labor judge at the beginning. It was so funny because most of the decisions that I made as a judge I was a lower court judge were all reversed.

Speaker 3 5:12

If it went up to higher court, they always said this lady is crazy and no, that's not the way. But there's an article in the labor code in Costa Rica that said that if the judge has doubts on who's saying the truth, well, where the truth is, then they have judge in favor of the worker and I thought that was great. I always said Article 3 of the Constitution, I have doubts, so pay him, pay her, pay him. And of course it was reversed whenever they went. But about 15 years later the Supreme Court said that I had the right interpretation of the Article 3 of the Code. So see again. I know I'm right, but it's just not the right time. But it came.

Speaker 2 5:52

It came. If you wait long enough, you'll be vindicated, and so I mean there's so much to talk about. But one of the reasons I started doing this podcast was and you're a part of the story for me, ald, although because when I was 30, I was working at the UN and there were all these inspiring women who were 50 or in their fifties, and then now I'm in my fifties and now all the women who sort of taught me and brought me along and were very generous with me, put up with me, are now all in their seventies and still going strong. And I realized the reason I wanted to do the podcast was because I really felt that in the I don't want to say obsession, but the focus on young women passing the torch, making sure that young women have access to understanding gender justice and feminism, et cetera, et cetera, that we sort of lose the wisdom, the lived realities, the patterns that older women activists can see. We don't hear from older women, and I kept going to conference after conference where there'd be these brilliant older women who'd be sitting on a panel and they would say, oh, but you know, there's these wonderful young women here. I want them to speak and I would be thinking to myself yes, I want them to speak too, but I want to hear from you as well.

Speaker 2 7:03

So I thought you know it's not just I think, oh, we're losing wisdom in this romantic way. I think it's very serious because the world is on fire and when I think about how do you live through a plague? How do you know that everything might be okay? How do you mobilize people in times of like massive turn to the right and regression around women's rights and human rights, yeah, I look to older women who have actually lived through parallels, who have already learned so many skills and so much survival. I look to you to say, ok, how do we survive? How do we get past this? If you think about what you've done over the last 30 years, you always made room for younger women. You have always worked with younger women. You have always worked across generations, women you have always worked across generations. But I wonder, if you look back on it like now, as an older woman activist, do you have different ways of seeing your own position or your own insights? Did it change?

Speaker 3 7:57

Not that it changed, but I have been very critical of the UN way of seeing youth right, as if the youth has all the answers and once you're past 60, you have nothing to say. For many reasons. One of them is that that is ageism, right, when you think that an old woman doesn't know anything and, as it's happened to me a lot or they assume that you have white hair, you don't know anything about computers. For when I have a problem with the computer and they say, well, did you turn it on? You know, and I go. Of course I turned it on. You know, like I've lived the ages of myself as I go. And of course, as you live through things, you learn things.

Speaker 3 8:33

If we don't get rid of all the forms of discrimination and we only concentrate on eliminating the intersectionality of gender and age, but only with young people, which older women have much more discrimination than young women, and young women could learn from that, like, how do you live through it? You know. And going through menopause, as your body gets older, it teaches you so much, you know. And now, if you have a migraine, I just think it'll pass. You know it will pass. When you're young, you don't know if it's going to pass or something, you just think that that's the end of the world. It's terrible. You know, the same thing with the things that we've seen with all the regression. I say this will pass. The sad thing is that I won't be around to see when it passes. But it'll pass, that I am sure right. So it teaches you patience and that things you know don't happen right away. And that takes me to CEDAW. Because when I do my work with CEDAW, they just go and it takes so long.

Speaker 3 9:32

I just had a meeting with my indigenous young friends when we started trying to get the general recommendation on CEDAW. They think that it was so long. They had to wait for like six years to get it. Six years is nothing. It was very fast in coming. When you think of laws and general recommendations take much longer.

Speaker 3 9:51

And so they can't believe it because they're still very young, they're in their 20s, and they just say, well, no, but it's just not worth it to work so hard for something and it's going to take so long. And so I always tell them, so that you're saying that my life is not worth it, because I've been working for feminism for 60 years and I'm still haven't it and they go oh yeah, you're right. You know, we still don't have a feminist world, we don't have a feminist country, we don't have a feminist anything. And for indigenous women it's even sometimes worse. For example, these women are from Guatemala, right, and there's so much injustice.

Empowerment Through Intergenerational Wisdom

Speaker 3 10:23

And, you know, I always tell them you should talk to your elders, because the indigenous women that live in Guatemala have so much knowledge they don't really think it because they've been brainwashed to think that only young people know about change, right. So that's what I'm trying to convince them now. I said, okay, we got a general recommendation. Now how do you unite this with older women and how do you start respecting your elders more and really believing that they have knowledge that you need?

Speaker 2 10:50

Right, tell me a little bit about the convention and why it's so important to you, and just so people understand that you know the convention, which we call in short form the Women's Convention, is the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. It's a UN convention and countries sign it and that's how they ratify it and then we hope that they in turn elect it and start to implement it. But the general recommendations are almost like thematic areas, right, like Indigenous women's rights or differently abled women's rights, pieces to go deeper and expand on what those rights look like and what the particular context of those rights would be. Those are general recommendations, just for people who don't know what is a general recommendation. But you have spent really a lot of life, many decades, working on the Women's Convention and my experience of working with you was that it was the first truly intergenerational work that I was ever involved in, because you brought together women across borders, geographies, identities, lived realities and age. So whatever piece of it is really at your heart I'd love to hear about.

Speaker 3 11:56

Well, I always say I'm in love with CEDAW. I've been in love, I've had a love relationship since I discovered it in 1985, I think it was and what really came to my mind when I started working with these young Indigenous women. It was the most important thing using CEDAW. It's not about getting the general recommendation or having this instrument or winning a case in the court. It's strengthening the movement, because the language of CEDAW helps you to cross generations, cross races. That's what it does. You use the CEDA theory. You convince other women from other ethnicities, from other places, to work with the same thing that you are. It unites you.

Speaker 3 12:36

It's the universality of discrimination helps you understand the diversity of the ways that discrimination happens. And so when people criticize universality, it's because they don't understand it. They think universality means uniformity and it's the opposite. The universality of human rights means that it's acknowledging that there's so much diversity. And so there's a tendency in the world now to want to take everything to court. Right, oh, we have a case and we'll take it to court, and that takes a long time, and then you might not even win and at the end you might win only for one person. It doesn't change anything. So the idea is to empower women, and empower women by telling them you have this right. You don't have to go to court to be told you have a right, you have it.

Speaker 3 13:21

At the same time, I love it. I love taking cases and I love litigating internationally. As I get older, I even like it better, you know, because you see how you have all the arguments you know, and then you can use it for teaching also. But going to CETA, why I fell in love with it? It's just so fantastic that you can make it, say, I always tell them, translate it, if you want to have this, like for little kids, so say what are the rights of the girl child, what are the rights that they have? And so they come up with it.

Speaker 3 13:51

And we did a little project with first to third graders in Central America. They read the CDAW and had to write something or say something or draw something of what it meant for them. So it was fantastic because, you know, the little girls were saying, well, I don't have to be the one that always has to clean the classroom. Why don't the boys clean the classroom also? That's not fair. And then, oh, I have the right to have my own notebook and not have to share it with my sister. Well, my brother has his own notebook.

Speaker 3 14:21

You know, I like to use it more for empowering and for understanding abstract concepts like what is justice, you know, bringing it to the concrete. Otherwise it's still up in the air, you know, and when we used to work with the program that you started at UNIFEM, you know, so many of them would come to do the shadow reporting. That's how they thought they were using CEDAW, and so I said something's wrong here. I don't want it to be focused on going to the committee or I wanted to use it in their everyday life, and that is how we've been trying to do this year, where it's been 20 years since the founding of the Institute of the Women's Human Rights Institute, which has had CEDAW at the center, and one beautiful thing that has happened now that I realized that all the women that work in the Institute now are former participants of the Institute, and everybody does it without pay, because we don't have any money. So it's incredible. They love the course so much, they want to do something, and so we have lots of people that give up their time giving their knowledge, and really warms my heart, and through the course we've had 1,300 participants in the 20 years, and those are the ones that are counted, because I've also done a lot of courses in Spanish. We've women of all ages. That's one of the things that they tell us, and the course when we used to have the evaluation is that it was so great to have so many different ages, because when you're studying in a classroom or in a formal study, you're usually with people your same age and the professor of different age, but here we've had participants that are 65 years old, 70 years old, with participants that are 18, 21 years old and in between. So that helps a lot of people to see a different way of being with older people, which I think that the society is getting more ageist, because I remember when I was younger, we used to like to listen to the older people and tell us about how the history. Now they just people think that you're just too boring or too old.

Speaker 3 16:19

I was shocked when my granddaughter told me that the person that she admired most was me and I go. What? And she goes? You're just so incredible. I love hearing you. Wow that I did not. She had never told me that.

Speaker 3 16:30

You know in all these years, like I saw in Sweden, that in this building they had old people living and there's like two or three apartments for old people and one young, and if the young people who live there they get their rent reduced, if they promise to just talk to the old people, and I said this is great, it really is, because you know they have great friendships and just to be aware that there's an older person there that might not be able to go to the supermarket. And then the woman that I met when I went to this apartment building was living like that. She was a younger woman who had lived in an apartment. She had to pay hardly any rent, but she had two older women that she had to make sure that they had gotten their groceries, that they had their stuff. They didn't need something.

Speaker 3 17:18

Swedish women are very independent anyway, so they probably. No, no, I have everything. Go away, go away. I said, boy, I would love if somebody came and said you want me to do something for you. So it's just good to know that you know that there's somebody there that can do something in case you fall or something. One of the things that I'm afraid of being alone, because I live alone now with my chihuahua who doesn't help me when I fall, and I fell the other day and I couldn't get up. I was going, oh my, God what am I going to do?

Speaker 3 17:49

I started to get panicking, you know, and my heart was racing and then I said, just calm down. And I said, wow, if this had happened to me a few years ago, I wouldn't have been thought of that. I just said be calm. What's the worst thing that can happen? You can die. That's not the worst, you know. It's okay. I've lived a lot, so wow that's hard to hear.

Speaker 2 18:13

A first of all, I'm sorry that you fell down and you were alone and that happened to you. But you know, at the same time it's amazing to have certain parts of your life where you're quite powerful, like in this, in the women's human rights Institute, where you're teaching activists all over the world about SIDA and you're sharing your incredible and specific knowledge of it. Like in that position, you may not have a lot of power over, but you have power within position. You may not have a lot of power over, but you have power within, you have the knowledge. Yeah, and then also, at the same time, it can happen to you that you're kind of physically powerless in a moment, like the older women that I know the older they get, the more they step into their own power. They're not as worried about what people think of them. You know there's a certain liberation that comes, but at the same time I think it's a very strange dual reality to have.

Speaker 3 18:54

But at the same time I think it's a very strange dual reality to have the physical frailty but the spiritual and intellectual and sort of courage of your conviction is at its peak but it also to me, it brings a lot of something which is very important in life, I think, when you start getting frail which I am, there's a lot of things I can't do anymore. I love gardening, but I can't move one pot from here to there. I don't have anymore. I love gardening, but I can't move one pot from here to there. I don't have the strength, it's the humility to say you know, I can't do it, and to know that that doesn't take away your power.

Speaker 3 19:24

There are certain things you can't do, but it doesn't make you less powerful. It just makes you need help from other people, like you give help to other people. It's give and take, and this society, our society, make it so like you have to be independent. You have to do this and I would say no, we can be interdependent. First of all, nobody is independent actually, or totally autonomous or totally independent. But why not think of interdependency?

Speaker 3 19:49

Much more beautiful concept to think that, yeah, sometimes maybe you need more help than I do, but there'll come a day when I need more help. But it is hard, more tiring, you know, like just taking a shower is sometimes. Some days you go. Oh, yeah, I wish somebody would just come and bathe me. But you say and I learned this from one of my colleagues and she would say well, it's terrible getting old, but the alternative is worse. You know, I said what is the alternative? Dying young. I mean, there's no other alternative. You're either old because you lived a lot or if you never get old, it's because you die young. So she would always say it's much better to be old. That's true.

Speaker 2 20:30

Well, that's like. My first interview I ever did for this podcast was with my mother. We were both getting discouraged because we were talking about just the state of the world. She often feels quite discouraged by the state of feminism in the world and what's happening. And I said to her but how do you keep going? Because this is kind of a downer like this is challenging that to me. She said you know what, honey? There's optimism and survival and yeah, it's the same thing, acknowledging that surviving and aging are signs that you're still here and you're still vital and you still have a role and you still are your own person. It's quite an amazing perspective.

Speaker 3 21:10

Yeah, it's staying engaged, because all my life I've tended towards depression. Right, I get depressed and then I don't want to do anything and then I just look at the world and the past few years I've learned to say, well, this will pass. As I was saying to you at the beginning, whenever I get depressed I realize that it's my chemistry, you know, and I'm just going to be depressed because there's no reason to be depressed. Well, there's always a reason to be depressed. You just have to look for it, right, you can say I'm depressed because of the war that's going on, but there's always been wars, there's always been people, injustice, you know, but that day you decide to really focus on it, and so it just learned that those things will pass.

Speaker 3 21:46

And there's also a lot of things that are beauty in the world still, even though it's looking really bad right now, there's still so much beauty, right? Or little presents that life gives you, like these birds that made their nest in my window here, but they were so incredible. I saw them hatching, I saw them being born and then yesterday they flew for the first time. It was like a three-week gift, right, where there were little eggs and then there were little chips and the mother and the father would come and give them food. And today they're gone. But I wasn't sad because they've left. They went to do their life, but I shared part of it. It was just so beautiful.

Speaker 2 22:24

That's gorgeous. I love that. I want to come back to something around SIDA that doesn't have to do with the birds, but I want to come back to it because SIDA really sets the standard for substantive equality. It's something that you talk about in a particularly grounded way and this comes up a lot now actually. In fact, I'd be really interested to hear what you think, because the foundational sort of heart of CEDAW is this concept of equality and over time there's more and more of a discussion. People use the word equity so much and it's so funny because I talk to people and I say, no, you don't mean equity, it's substantive equality that you're talking about. Equity is when things are the same, same like everybody gets paid the same. That's pay equity, but equality, substantive equality. How do we actually achieve equality? It's not by everybody being the same all the time. That's not actually what Sita was talking about with equality.

The Power of Love and Equality

Speaker 3 23:14

No, it's like the concept of universality. It's very difficult for most people to understand because it's not taught. It's something that is very abstract. I've written a book about substantive equality and to me it's just such a beautiful concept. If you take the most discriminated person in the world, it would always be a woman. So if you try to eliminate all the forms of discrimination, the intersectional forms of discrimination that women suffer, you have to eliminate it for men too. You can't eliminate discrimination against Black women, for example, if you don't take race into account and gender into account and sex. So if you really start thinking, well, how do I eliminate all these forms of oppression for all women? And because CEDAW that's an incredible part of CEDAW is for all women. It's half of humanity, you know, and it's for all those women. But equality makes you think of diversity. It goes together. Equity doesn't. It's a certain kind of diversity, but you don't have to look at the whole diversity of humanity, and so of course it's very difficult and of course politicians prefer equity because it's easier.

Speaker 3 24:20

The substantive equality is such a beautiful concept. It includes love and good love of your neighbor. It includes love of others and love of those who are different from you. It includes really to be open to hear what other people have to say, which is something that is not happening anywhere now, with the polarization of every society. Right, it's just the right and the left and the this and the that, and there's no discussion. That is the importance of CEDAW.

Speaker 3 24:46

But even those who criticize equality criticize it wrong. I listen to a lot of podcasts now from the right wing in the US because I want to understand how they think. You know, and this guy was complaining about equality and even equity or equality. They don't understand it. They think that it's taking away from somebody. You take away from men to give it to women and so now women have all the power. That would be the opposite of equality. Right, but that's what they feel because and most people explain it wrong right, you have to give up your rights so that this person can have a right. Nobody can give up. In fact, you can't give up your right. It's against the law, it's against SIDA to give up your rights. Right, but you don't give up your rights. You just understand what is a right and what is a privilege. Privilege. You have to give up and that's hard, but you don't have to give up rights.

Speaker 2 25:34

You're right, it's an important way to think about it too. But I'm interested too that you brought up love, because one of the things that I've really noticed lately with much more diversity and intersectionality in feminism, many different stories being told and one of the things that I think I have really learned and admired is the way that love is actually not just a nice emotion, a beautiful emotion that we have for one another as humans so that we can fall in love, but that actually at the heart of a lot of activism. And I think I'm hearing it more and more because we're getting more and more diverse voices that have deeper understandings of all of these different intersections and lived realities. So is that also connected to older women as well? Like my experience of women talking about love as a force for change and social justice isn't just older women, but women the older women activists I know all talk about it quite unselfconsciously, like they're not embarrassed to talk about love Like it's touchy-feely. You know what I mean. What do you think?

Speaker 3 26:35

Well, I'll tell you, I have always thought this way, but I didn't dare say it because I was afraid of being thought of as mushy things like that. But I even wrote an article about how the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo began the whole movement against violence against women, and it was political. So love can be political. They're the mothers. They're using maternal love to say we need a different kind of society, grandmotherly love and maternal love to say this is not going to happen ever again. And the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are so clear about that. The love of the children, the love of the grandchildren made them continue even though they're old and tired. It's that love that moves them. I wrote an article about that, but I have never talked about it as much. You know, just embarrassed. But that's a good thing of getting old. You just are not embarrassed anymore about saying things that you think people might think they're silly.

Speaker 2 27:28

Yeah, we need that, especially now. We need it because the whole concept of love as a foundational force and connector and it's not about being mushy or flaky or anything like that, it's the way you said it really resonates for me that love and equality go together. You need them and it's not just something nice you put on a card, it's actually a necessity.

Speaker 3 27:54

Yeah, well, you know some of my workshops I do. I make them stand in front of each other, you know, and say what about this person? Do you love about this person that you know is your colleague? Say it, say it, what do you love? Don't because we're used to say that, critiquing and I don't like her because of this and I don't like her, but say you love. Don't because we're used to say that critiquing and I don't like her because of this and I don't like her, but say the things that you love not only like, but love about her, that you would love to have it flourish more, that you would love to have it in you too. And wow, they really do it.

Speaker 3 28:23

Judges do it. You know, and I said so, when you get a person that is being, you know, accused of stealing or do you try to love that person? It's difficult because, especially if it's a guy that's being accused of raping a woman, what part of him do you love? And they'll go. I don't love any part of him. I said you do. You have to love him because if you're going to be fair, if you don't see the humanity in him, you won't give a fair decision, right? So I've learned that also trying, you know, teaching judges teaches you a lot, because you become the teacher of the judges.

Speaker 2 28:55

That's right. Well then you can lie in bed at night and imagine the impact if you don't get it right. That's a heavy responsibility. That's serious. That's serious In terms of grandmotherhood. You are a grandmother biologically. You have a grandchild. How do you think about it in terms of political activism and improving the human condition and your own long history of activism? How do you see it?

Speaker 3 29:24

First of all, I love the idea of a grandmother because in Latin America we have a different take on motherhood and grandmotherhood, and grandmotherhood is even more a bigger title than even if you're not a biological mother and not a biological grandmother. When you're walking in the street sometimes they'll call you, right, abuelita. You know, abuelita, here People call me that, and I was with a friend the other day in Ciudad Juarez and a young man called her Abuelita, you know, or abuela, and she said I'm not your grandmother and I said I am, I am, I am, I want to be your grandmother, you know, because I love being the grandmother of this guy that doesn't even know me. He was being nice, you know, he wasn't, he was, it wasn't an insult. He was saying oh, abuelita, what would? You can bring me a beer, if you can. I would like that a beer.

Speaker 3 30:11

But really it affected me from the first time I heard Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo. I thought, wow, they're so smart to put that title because you can't say that they're rebellious young people that should be put in jail. They're these old ladies, you know that don't harm anybody, and so it's very political because you cover yourself with that. They can't say that you should be, you know, put in jail or just don't pay attention because you're supposed to listen to your grandmother, right? Yeah, so I like the title and I've always had like. A lot of my students, as I've gotten older, have become my grandchildren, my granddaughters yeah, because they can't be my daughters anymore. My son is 51, 52 this year and I go wow, he says oh, I'm so old. And I go think about what about me? If you're 52? I'm ancient, right?

Speaker 2 31:03

well, and I see it that way too, because the grandmothers in my life are not necessarily biological grandmothers, but all the older women I know have people in their lives who are younger right and are playing some critical role in those lives.

Speaker 3 31:19

I always have young people because I teach, a lot of the participants are younger. Well, everybody now is younger than me. Wherever I go, I'm the oldest one, but I don't see myself as always being the grandmother right. Sometimes I have a friend who's she's 43 years old and we're really good friends and she doesn't see me as a grandmother. I don't see her as my grand or anything, I just. But she comes once every two months or something like that, and we just have whiskey and talk. I have that friendship with her. And I have other friendships with younger women who I do see as much younger but, it's.

Speaker 3 31:52

You can have different roles. Just because of age doesn't mean you have to be always the grandmother or always you can be. Just you have young friends and that's it. But also, giving yourself permission to be silly is what I love about being old.

Speaker 1 32:05

I love that Because that's what you know.

Speaker 3 32:08

my, my biological granddaughter said to me you're so silly sometimes. You're so lucky that you allow yourself to be silly. And I said, yeah, you'll be that one day Because you think you're so grown up now. You're so silly, but you don't realize it. It's so true.

Speaker 2 32:25

I have noticed that too. The power to just be silly and laugh, not as self-conscious, and yeah, I love that. What do young people call it? Your superpower, the ability to be silly and not care, is a really powerful. It's actually really powerful.

Speaker 3 32:41

Yeah, and that really translates in your physical appearance and everything. You know I dress any way, I do my hair like whatever I want. I don't think about anybody, so I have to like how I look in the mirror, you know, and I don't even look at myself in the mirror that much, so it's really great. But I do get shocked. When I really look at myself and I see how old I am, I go, oh wow, I had forgotten I was this old.

Speaker 2 33:12

Well, it's true too, because I'm not your age yet. But I do find, like I remember my mother saying to me I don't know, I still feel 40 all the time, like you know, no matter how old. I remember saying that to me once and I was saying so funny, I have no idea what that means, but now I know exactly what she is. There's a certain part where your inside person is still the same. You know, yeah, when I look at older women grandmothers, elder women, abuel, that you know, actually there's still a person there Like I think that part of the problem with romanticizing older women, like Norman Rockwell sitting in the rocking chair and maybe like, oh, so cute, oh, she's so wise, cause everybody's supposed to be wise as soon as they turn 70 or 80. Like I think you know now, when I look at older women as I'm aging so wise because everybody's supposed to be wise as soon as they turn 70 or 80, like I?

Speaker 2 34:11

think, yeah, you know now, when I look at older women as I'm aging, so funny how hard it is for people to say, wow, you know, they look at pictures of my mother, my mother's 84, they look at. Someone looks at the picture of my mother, says, wow, look what she looked like when she was young and was like, yes, that's going to happen to you too yeah like, as you say, if you're lucky enough to grow old, if you don't die young, this will be you.

Speaker 2 34:32

Yeah, we're all going to go through this. So this is the one universal leveler, it is the one level thing that everybody is going to have. So there's something about how we own that, how we make.

Speaker 3 34:42

that's what everybody tries to forget and that's why a lot of people globalization has sent american culture everywhere right dress, they think they, they think they talk, and so a lot of ways that being older in other cultures was so different. Right Now, at least among the young, they think it's the worst thing that can happen to you is getting old. It's stress, it's the way of being so afraid of getting older, being afraid of life, of the progress of life.

Speaker 2 35:11

The one thing that I do know is that the fear of aging is also like a disease.

Speaker 3 35:18

Stressful. Yeah stressful Because fear is stressful, right? So if you're stressed, you get sick, Okay Well thank you for this, Ada.

Speaker 2 35:27

I love this conversation and I love you and I appreciate you so much.

Speaker 3 35:31

I love you too. I'm so happy that appreciate you so much. I love you too. I'm so happy that we got in touch again. Bye.

Speaker 1 35:35

Bye. Thanks for listening. I'm Ilana Lansford-Lewis, your host of Wisdom at Work. Older women, elder women and grandmothers on the move To find out more about me or the podcast. You can go to wisdomatworkpodcastcom, formerly grandmothers on the Move, and you can find the podcast at all your favorite places to listen to them. Tune in next week. Thanks and bye-bye for now.