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Women are evolving. This generation of women currently ages 45+ are among the first women to live into a new life stage! In the year 1900, US census data showed the average white women’s lifespan was fifty-one years, and the average lifespan of non-white women was thirty-four years. It was at this time that women’s life spans began to increase. By 2011 women’s life expectancy had rocketed to eighty-one years for white women and seventy-eight years, for non–white women. Women have added more than a third of a lifetime to double a lifetime to their life expectancy! This has created a new life phase for women, potentially lasting another twenty years, from midlife to old age. These years from the late forties to early seventies are the years I call Regency and the woman who is living it, a Regent.
If you sprinted through your 20s, 30s and 40s and woke up one day asking these questions; "Did I miss it? Is this it? Now what?" you are not alone. Maybe you feel everything in your life is changing—your body, your face, your memory and your feelings— and you don't like it? Have you said to yourself and others, "Now it is my turn!" after caring for family, friends and career for so many years? If this touches on your experience, you are in, or entering your Regency years!
Regency has the potential to be the most powerful and fulfilling time in a woman's life. A Regent woman has sovereignty, or the desire for sovereignty, over herself, her life, and the forces that previously ruled or exerted strong influences on her choices. She is not removed from the activity of day-to-day living; she lives as a creatrix of the divine in the world, striving to embody all of her potential. The Regent woman is governing her own life, making choices that are hers alone to make, about who she will become, what she will do, and how she will peruse fulfillment in this new phase of life.
Women who experience Regency in their lives, are re-discovering their authentic, soulful selves that are so often overlooked during the career and householder years. This new phase of life encourages women to re-create themselves by cultivating their own creativity, personal development, and psyche. This is an important part of the ripening process of the individual, mature woman, still active and dynamic in the world.
Despite the gains of the past one hundred years, many women see aging as a frightening process to deny, resist, and delay. Due to societal and cultural pressures, many aging women experience their bodies, even when healthy, as a liability. Regency rejects this insidious insinuation, and offers women a new way of looking at themselves, their creative potential, and their power in midlife and beyond. This new stage of life offers a new vision of meaningful and dynamic growth, capable of effecting change from the personal to the global.
Admittedly, it may take generations to change the narratives of our youth-obsessed culture, however, women who make conscious, informed, choices about how to ride the waves of midlife transformation can, I believe, emerge on the other side of menopause and midlife with a new, positive, self-image and higher level of productive, creative, energy. This period of Midlife, and Regency is the time when women can re-member their personal goals and passions offering the greatest potential for personal change and transformation since adolescence. Regent Women, if organized, could become one of the worlds most effective cultural, political, social, and environmental leadership groups. Women Boomers are already an economic force to be reckoned with. In 2007 the Mass Mutual Financial Group reported that women aged fifty and up are one of the largest and most powerful economic groups in the U.S. owning over three-quarters of our nation’s financial wealth, with a combined net worth of over $19 Trillion.
Women have evolved from three life stages to four, from
Maiden Householder/Mother Wise Woman
to
Maiden Householder/Mother Regent Wise Woman
It was not until the 20th Century that women lived long enough to embody this new life stage. We are evolving. We are living longer, giving us more time to fulfill our greatest potential as women and as human beings. Claim your Regency years, re-claim your authentic, soulful self! Re- create yourself and write your next chapters with clarity and purpose. The world needs us all. Check out our upcoming events and services and get your Regency On!
xoxo
Dr. A.