Two generations, different worlds

How do women across the generation gap view the issues they face? MICHELE HEWITSON talks to young and older women as we look to the future in part four of a special series.


Kim Blackwood ought to come with flashing lights and a sign: "Warning, young ambitious woman coming through. Do not stand in her way." Small chance.

She is 19, working two jobs in marketing while studying for two degrees in communications studies and management and international business at the Auckland University of Technology. She has a five-year plan, a 10-year plan, a life plan and a savings plan. She is going to have her own successful business. She wants a large family - four to six children. She will have her first child at 24; she doesn't want to be an "old mother".

She is ticking off her list: "My current focus is my education and career, then, as these stabilise, I'll look more to the relationship, marriage, family, home-making equation. And then somewhere in all of this you're supposed to fit in some fun and hope that Mr Right doesn't come along and mess up all these perfect plans."

She thinks these perfect plans are achievable "with careful planning and prioritising. You only live once."

She flashes her bright, white smile, tosses her glossy, healthy hair. She glows with good health and youth and with the expectation that the future will be fun and fulfilling. She lives with her mum and three sisters. All of them share the chores: dishes, cooking, chopping the firewood. She believes in girl power.

Around the table in a Newmarket cafe with Blackwood are three other young women. Look at them and you might conclude that the chicks have made it - and that they have it made.

If you listen closely to them, what you'll hear is something subtly, but tellingly different.

Ask them, for example, about the stresses facing them as young women in 2002.

Sarah Illingworth says, "Look good, breed, be successful, maintain your sanity."

Amy Williams: "The pressure to do everything, to be Superwomen. This stress is intensified by the disappearing boundaries between work and home, so women have less chance of escaping their stress."

Kim Blackwood adds: "How on earth do you fit in education, career, relationship, motherhood, home-making and personal health and well-being?"

They might like to ask that question of demographer Dr Janet Sceats. Sceats, the author of a study on children and the family commissioned by the Institute of Population and Social Security in Tokyo, has been talking to women in their 30s living with the reality of the choices the Newmarket group face in their near futures.

The women Sceats interviewed are the generation who were brought up with the "girls can do anything" mantra. Trouble is, she says, we heard that one wrong. "They are trying to do everything - it wasn't meant to mean that."

Young women are facing more choices than the Barbie dolls they grew up playing with have outfits. There is such a thing as being spoilt for choice, Williams says. "With so many choices there is a fear we may miss out. With increased choice I think women not only feel they should have everything, but they want everything. I think that most women still want traditional things: a happy marriage, children and a nice home, yet feel that there is something else around the corner that would make them happier."

Sarah Travis, in her second year of a commerce degree at the University of Auckland, has already acknowledged that one of her choices is likely to involve putting her career on hold.

She is happy to admit that she's "a little bit traditional in that I'm not totally against men having a more superior role to women. I want to have children but something has got to give ... I wouldn't mind giving in the career part."

These four young women range in age from 19 to 21. They are articulate, energetic and under no illusions about their status in the world. They know full well that women haven't achieved equal pay for equal work, that women still do most of the housework. (Sceats' study found that two-thirds of women are still doing most of the household jobs regardless of whether they are working or have children.)

They also know that they are going to be under pressure to decide whether and when to have their children, that once they do give birth and re-enter the workforce, they are going to have to struggle to hold on to their career status.

They are already thinking about these things. But getting them to look farther forward into the future is more difficult. It seems, after all, a very long way off. The old look back. "Unlike other animals," says writer and social analyst Anne Else, "we remember our youth too well."

Else, who has written extensively on issues to do with ageing, says it is difficult to imagine our old age when "there is a very strong cultural imperative - and certainly a strong commercial imperative - not to. There is a massive emphasis on youth and youth culture. You've only got to look at fashions at the moment. I don't actually want to look like Gidget goes to Hawaii, and frankly they don't suit anybody except 17-year-olds."

She adds: "It's such a commercial goldmine to sell people things to stop them ageing. On the other hand it's not as bad as the States here yet. We're not having Botox parties that I know of ... are we?"

By the time Blackwood and her friends are 65, Botox parties may well be passe. But Blackwood is aware that one of the big pressures facing her generation, one her grandmother's generation was spared, is "staying beautiful. Women used to age naturally and gracefully and 'Grandma tummies' were loved. These days, plastic surgery, HRT, copious amounts of skincare and dollars spent on fashion throws the beauty of ageing naturally out the window. It's a tragedy."

Williams says: "I remember my grandmother said to me once that it was accepted that you put on a pound with every baby. My mum would never have let that happen, and I don't intend to."

We can't predict how age will wither these young women, but we can take them into the demographic future with the help of Statistics New Zealand.

By 2025 they will be living in a New Zealand where over 25 per cent of women will be aged 65 or older. There will be two women to every man over 80. A quarter of the population will be classed as elderly: 65 years and over.

By 2041, 10 women who were aged between 20 and 24 in 2001 (the year of the last census) will have watched the population grow to around five million. Three of our group will have lived overseas for an extended period, but they will return. They will all have travelled in their youth - unlike the older women we meet later who didn't travel until they were in their 40s. One will travel between New Zealand and Australia regularly on business.

At 65, five of the group will not yet be looking at retirement. Three will have decided that between their savings and New Zealand's superannuation, they can afford to leave the workforce. One will have returned to studying and one will still be occupied at home with children who either never left the nest or who have returned to it (those children are likely to be burdened with student debt).

Of the five still in the workforce, these women will be running their own small business in the service industry, or working as an employee in the area. One could either be managing a farm or working in manufacturing or one of the new forms of energy supply.

The ethnic makeup of the group will be eight New Zealand Europeans, one Asian (who may have been born in New Zealand) and one Maori. The Maori woman is likely to die soon after 65. In 2041, only two of the group will be legally married. One is a widow, the other divorced.

Our younger women, now aged 65, having grown up with technology, will embrace the new labour-saving devices. If they can afford it, they will have a robotic vacuum cleaner and a self-cleaning toilet. These women will have stove tops which disappear from view when not in use and a washing machine which scans microchips in fabric for washing instructions.

On Mondays, when women like Glen Menzies were the age of Kim, Amy and the two Sarahs, they did the washing.

On a Friday morning, in the hall at the senior citizens' club in Balmoral, Menzies, now 73, is line dancing.

She married at 18, had her first child at 19 and the last of her six children at 32. When she was 23 1/2, she got her first washing machine.

"They all came in from the street to watch it. It was an agitator. It was a novelty."

When Menzies was growing up, the idea of having a woman prime minister would have been more than a novelty - it would have been in the realms of the unimaginable. Still, she likes the idea of having a female leader: "It would be ridiculous if we were going out working all the time and we never had anyone rise to that office."

Menzies worked - she was a clerical worker - before and after her marriage.

Her husband died three years ago. She owns her own home and has interest from investments in addition to the super. She likes living alone. It is, she says, a sort of freedom.

Menzies, like Maureen Miller, 66, Mildred Frensham, 82, and Pat Davies, 66, is enjoying older age. These women share a meeting place, the Mt Eden Senior Citizens Club, and an air of stoic contentment. It is the way they have lived their lives.

You won't hear them complain about their health, although Frensham says multiple sclerosis means that she is no longer able to dance - and she misses it.

They make no complaints about their standard of living. Miller lives in a Housing New Zealand home with her husband; the others are in mortgage-free houses. Menzies, Davies and Frensham are widows.

The three who rely on national super for their income say they can manage a few treats. Frensham says, "We like to have a drink when we go to the RSA. We like to have our hair done occasionally."

Their experience tallies with the 2001 Living Standards of Older People survey, which tells us that if you are mortgage free, if your health is fair, your retirement will be manageable.

But there is a potential problem looming for our young women, says Anne Else.

"We know home ownership is dropping rapidly, we don't know whether there's more people renting who will buy a home when they have kids. There is also the student loan factor."

Else says we're "likely to end up with more people without home ownership in their old ages. I think that the pension will be less likely to keep people put of poverty than it has done because it pretty much has been based on home ownership."

This is of particular concern to aging women: "Women are much more likely to end up living alone. They're increasingly likely to be divorced and their husbands die sooner."

How far apart are they, these women, in terms of their aspirations and attitudes?

Sceats says these two groups could well have come from "different universes".

Glen Menzies certainly thinks so. She believes women of her generation have a connection with women of previous generations that the younger ones are lacking.

"We have an awareness of the past going back hundreds of years, years where things didn't alter much. This generation aren't going to know some things - we don't even realise what they don't know. We had no washing machines in the beginning. We know how to light fires."

And if you thought that these women might be envious of the opportunities available to the younger generation of women, think again.

Menzies says: "We had security; they have freedoms. But they haven't got the freedom to walk the streets. I actually think we had more peace of mind. Mothers were respected - as if we were actually doing something good."

Miller says she doesn't actually count having children "out of wedlock" as an advantage. Young women, she says, are "pushed towards it" through social trends.

And if the older generation think they were lucky not to have had the same sexual pressures, it's still on the minds of the younger.

Amy Williams feels it keenly: "We are led to believe that we can do what we want, that there is a freedom in being a sexual creature - yet there is still a double standard. There is still a stigma attached to being a promiscuous woman."

The universe the younger women inhabit revolves around education, and opportunity. Out at the Manukau Institute of Technology, Colleen Templeton, Nikki Tawhai, Brooke Williams and Julie Ah-Ken are in their early 20s and all, except Williams, who works at MIT as a web technician, are still studying.

At their age, all the older women had left secondary school. Frensham went to work as a chocolate dipper at the age of 12 after her father died and she had to help support the family. Davies, who was born in Britain, left school at 15 to work on the beauty counter of Boots the Chemist. They all worked during their marriages, but they were always, they stress, home when the children came back from school.

Davies: "There weren't creches to leave your children in."

Frensham: "There was no person who came to your home to look after your children. You had to have a mother. It was either your parents or your relatives that did that sort of thing for you."

Menzies always thought that her generation, with their washing machines and a "proper social life" involving extended family and none of that "racing around after work taking the children to all sorts of things to make sure they're properly developed", were "modern."

It turns out that they might well have been. Sceats has found that women are increasingly finding that to juggle career and family, the support of grandparents is becoming increasingly important - once again.

They didn't face the attitudes that today's younger women did about having their babies young. Says Illingworth: "Having kids young is kind of patronised. People tend to think you have no real ambition if you want kids at 22."

And "marriage isn't as logical a conclusion for many younger couples. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I couldn't imagine being married at my age."

Pat Davies and Mildred Frensham laugh at the very idea that they might have considered another route.

Says Frensham: "In those days you got married. You had a family. Well, that was your duty."

FACT FILE


* The average personal income for women aged 20-24 is $13,600; for men that age it is $16,100.

* The average personal income for women aged 65+ is $12,700; for men it is $16,600.

* 11.5% of women aged 20-24 leave school with no qualifications; 34.2% of women aged 65+ left school with no qualifications.

* 35% of women 20-24 have post-school qualifications, compared with 11.8% aged 65+.

* Pacific Island women will take an average 33 years to pay off debts from three-year degree courses; Pakeha women will take 22 years; Maori women, 24. Pakeha men will take 15 years, Maori men 16, Pacific Island men 21.

* At 65+ women can expect to live a further 19.8 years; men 65+ can expect to live for a further 16.4 years.

* New Zealand's rate of fertility is 1.9 children per couple. The population replacement level is 2.1.

* The cost of all infertility services in New Zealand is $9.2 million. Half of that is contributed privately, the rest is Government funded.

Read the rest of this series:
nzherald.co.nz/nzwomen