Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age

 “It turns out that my generation of women wants a fresh paradigm for aging. Our lives are not like our mothers’ lives and we are weary of ageist, sexist portrayals of women.”

From the foreword to the edition published in 2020, this quote responds to the positive feedback that Pipher received from women since the book’s initial publication in 2019. These positive responses show that older women support the book because they seek an alternative perspective on aging that reflects their own lives, not a view that reflects societal stereotypes or the lives of previous generations. With this quote, she underscores the need for this alternative paradigm and introduces the book’s overall aim to challenge ideas about older women as unattractive, asexual, and incompetent.

“In Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, published in 1994, I wrote about teenagers; in Women Rowing North, I reflect on older women. Both life stages are sharp turns in the river requiring us to expand our identities.”

Pipher compares Women Rowing North to her book Reviving Ophelia, which focuses on the experiences of adolescent girls in a male-dominated society and the mental health conditions they face as a result. Women Rowing North addresses the issues that women face while aging in a society that devalues them. Pipher describes how adolescence and old age involve abrupt changes that shift one’s experiences and identities, often due to sexism. Adolescence involves an introduction to womanhood, when girls are beginning to experience the world as young women whom society views in sexualized terms, and old age encompasses the late stage of womanhood, when society views them as no longer sexualized.