She laments, embraces missing the revolution

Sally Friedman

is a freelance writer

in Moorestown

I used to feel so angry. If only I'd been born a few years later, I'd fume, I would have enjoyed the spoils of the women's movement and the sexual revolution. I could even have been a better athlete - but there was no Title IX back then. And I'd probably have become a more confident and comfortable woman.

The "mights" went on for a while, but then the anger vanished. I am as happy and fulfilled in my 70s as I could ever have imagined. I have found my place in the world.

But the immutable fact is that my gender and life lessons came before the great awakening, the cultural tsunami that changed women's lives on the wings of the pill, Betty Friedan, and the "You carry your own dish to the sink" pronouncements.

My world was encapsulated in a single night - the evening back in 1959 when my friend Lois got engaged. The girlfriend phone calls were punctuated by shrieks of delight.

Lois had caught the brass ring. She had reached the finish line. She'd gotten her man.

On the night when Lois got engaged, we were all 20 years old and waiting to catch our own brass ring, which looked strangely like a solitaire diamond with a couple of diamond slivers on the side.

I was in my senior year of college and, deep down, felt the weight of being left behind in the mad dash to the altar. Jubilation for Lois was mingled with panic.

I did manage to escape spinsterhood by finding a husband before I finished my senior midterms.

He was an "older man" of 27, already a grown-up lawyer with a life. I was taking my geology final on the weekend before we married, and my parents planned almost every last detail of the wedding.

We moved into a little house in the New Jersey suburbs, I taught for a year, and then along came kids - three of them in short order. I was diapering babies during those volatile years of marches and "I Am Woman!" cries. If I marched, it was to the supermarket for more bread and milk.

Yes, such very different times. Almost unimaginable times.

My daughters inherited a very different birthright than mine. They didn't need to bulldoze their way beyond firmly closed doors. Their horizons were as vast and wide as mine were limited back in the days when late-1950s caution and conformity reigned. My daughters ultimately became my best teachers, as I borrowed liberally from their stashes of post-women's movement self-confidence.

When I finally found my voice as a freelance writer, I discovered that there actually was enough room for love and work in my life. What a lesson for those of us who were often told the opposite.

The older man I married is still with me. We've grown so much more deeply connected than we were when we both pictured marriage as some Doris Day/Rock Hudson romp, with defined roles and rules.

But the contrasts between my earlier life and that of my 19-year-old granddaughter make me feel that we live in different civilizations, not just eras. At her age, I was thinking marriage and babies, while Hannah has traveled to South Africa before her freshman year in college, and is bent on saving the world. She roars.

But I still remind Hannah when I can that I surely and joyfully celebrate being a woman in 2013.

Yes, I missed some of the party. So did the many, many of us who came of age with a vague longing for more.

Today, we are the mothers and grandmothers looking at younger women with gratitude for all they have - and a little bit of envy.

They have so much we missed. How blessed they are.

But thankfully, there's still plenty of ice cream and cake for those of us who came late to the party.