Round Up: Television Finds Women Over 40, Generations of Feminism, and Meet the New Nancy Drew

40 is Where it All Begins: Writing in the Boston Globe, Jane Rosenzweig looks at the new TV series set to debut this fall and notes that we could be on the brink of a cultural shift in attitudes about women over 40.

"Watching the protagonists of ‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘Sex and the City’ navigate their lives, you could almost imagine that they had read the now infamous 1986 Newsweek article warning that women over 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to marry, and that underneath their independence and bravado lay the nagging feeling that it might be true," writes Rosenzweig.

"Now, a year after Newsweek revisited, and revised, that conclusion — suggesting not only that many women do marry after 40, but that in general, women are no longer so preoccupied by their marriage prospects — television, too, seems to be revising its script."

Baby Boomers Working Longer: "Two new reports portray aging boomers as better educated, with higher incomes and longer life expectancies than the generations that preceded them. They also have fewer children and are less likely to be married, leaving them with fewer options if they need help in their old age," reports the Associated Press.

Caring for Grandchildren Doesn’t Undermine Grandparents’ Health: Despite previous research findings that showed negative health impacts on grandmothers who care for their grandchildren, researchers show that caring for grandchildren generally does not have dramatic and widespread negative impacts on grandparents’ health, according to a University of Chicago release.

Research was based on a study of nearly 13,000 grandparents between the ages of 50 and 80. The results are published in the paper "All in the Family: The Impact of Caring for Grandchildren on Grandparents’
Health," which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Science. The full study is also available here (PDF).

Generations of Feminism: Courtney E. Martin, author of the acclaimed "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," a new book about eating disorders and body image, has an essay up at the Huffington Post about feminism’s generational rift. "There need to be more magazines that share readership among The Feminine Mystique
and the Feministing readers," writes Martin. "There simply must be a way for younger women to express our gratitude loud and clear, so it is truly heard, and older women to make room to hear us out and give us optimistic advice."

Meet the New Nancy Drew: Nancy Drew becomes makes her big-screen debut today, updated for a new generation. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott is not impressed. The problem with "Nancy Drew," according to Scott, "is that it trusts neither its heroine nor its audience enough to approach its material with the confidence and conviction that Carolyn Keene, the pseudonymous author of the Nancy Drew books, brought to the franchise."

Stephanie Zacharek at Salon is more charmed: "Nancy Drew purists may be unhappy with [Andrew] Fleming’s admittedly tweaked vision of their heroine. But his movie captures a greater truth, I think, about the way very old and sometimes seemingly out-of-date stories can move us."

-Christine

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