Let's Row Together
Envisioning our purposeful lives. Learning from two inspirational 90-year old women, Gloria S. and Dr. Jane. A Locker Room Talk blurb from Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the NCAA women's Final Four.
Is 90 the new 60?
This came to mind this week after Gloria Steinem, then Dr. Jane Goodall turned 90 years old in a span of eight days. Now in her tenth decade, each woman is living her purposeful life with inspirational leadership and give-back attitudes. Relentless in her lifelong fight for women’s rights, Gloria is involved in winning back the rights she helped to win decades ago. Dr. Jane speaks up for animals, as she always has, while championing hope with her environmental/climate activism.
Count me in for this kind of eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-decade activism, if I am fortunate enough to live these years.
Watching Dr. Jane and Gloria Give Back
When my daughter Maya was in middle-school, she and I decided to create a Roots & Shoots group with her school friends in Cambridge, MA. Maya and I had gone to hear Dr. Jane speak at a local zoo and when she brought youngsters to the stage to tell us about Roots & Shoots, we decided to start a group of our own.
A year or so later, we did.
Dr. Jane founded Roots & Shoots in Tanzania in the early 1990s after talking with young people who wanted to be like her. Roots & Shoots give youngsters the tools and mentoring support that they can use to bring positive change to their communities. Maya and her friends named themselves “The Sprouts of Hope” and created a motto that they put on the T-shirts they designed – Have a Dream, Make a Difference. Then, they did. They wrote, published and distributed to public libraries a book about how kids could learn with their families how to conserve energy. They mentored younger kids at science fairs, in school and at conferences. Dr. Jane invited them to speak with her at events, and they sewed a gorgeous quilt about sustainability with quilt maker Clara Wainwright as their mentor. Onto it, they sewed portraits of environmental heroes – Bill McKibben, Dr. Jane and Wangari Matthai.
Top photo: Dr. Jane came to the Sprouts of Hope’s school, King Open, to celebrate the girls’ accomplishment in publicly advocating for and participating in designing what became Cambridge schools’ pilot composting program in 2010; today, composting happens in every school in the district.
Bottom photo: The Sprouts of Hope with Gloria Steinem after they’d talked about activism and women’s and girls’ lives for more than two hours.
This visit with Gloria happened after I discovered that the girls did not know who Gloria Steinem was. This meant they also didn’t know the critical roles she’d played in enabling girls like them to have the opportunities they did and she didn’t when she was their age. I’d found this out when I asked Maya and her friends, who were riding in the back seat of my car, about Gloria. I asked the girls this because I’d just left the Schlesinger Library, an archive of women’s history, where I’d been researching for my book. (I donated my papers from my court case to that archive.) That day I’d read a 1978 story pairing me with Gloria as a women’s libber. I was curious if middle-school girls knew of, especially these girls since at that moment all of them were studying the American suffragists in school.
When they didn’t know Gloria, I called my dear friend and former Time colleague Jane O’Reilly, whose birthday is today — Happy Birthday, Jane! She wrote the memorable “click” story - The Housewife’s Moment of Truth – published in the first issue of Ms..
Jane’s story identified daily “click” moments that women were experiencing that told them that their lives needed changing. Soon, the women’s movement was on its way to being the powerful lever for those changes that girls experience as “normal” now.
Jane is a lifelong friend of Gloria’s. After Jane and I agreed that these girls’ lack of knowledge about Gloria and second-wave feminism should not stand, she emailed Gloria. The next morning, Gloria emailed Jane – inviting these girls and Jane’s own middle-school aged granddaughter to visit her in New York City,
During spring vacation, we did.
Gloria assigned these 8th graders homework, asking them to read her essay, “If Men Could Menstruate.” I had them read Jane’s Ms. story too. Reading both opened their eyes to a recent history that they didn’t know. After their New York visit, the girls wrote their own brief essays describing what they would never forget from talking with her and Jane.
Lilly wrote:
Meeting with Ms. Steinem completely changed how I thought of women’s rights today. I had assumed that we were past all the big leaps that had to be taken. All around me, I see women in successful and powerful positions in society with rights completely equal to those of men. However, she made me see that we still have a ways to go. In other countries and even our own, sex trafficking is a huge problem. And women who work in all kinds of jobs still get paid lower wages than men. And even in our own community, it can be harder for girls just to participate in sports.
Risa wrote:
The message that will stay with me forever is the importance of listening, especially to people who you think might want your help. Gloria is a great storyteller. In response to a question that Jane O'Reilly's granddaughter Elena asked her — about how Westerners often seem to arrive in foreign countries with an idea already in their heads of how they are going to help people they've never met — Gloria told us a great story about how the complex problem of women being trafficked for sex had been solved by something as simple as a fence. It wasn't a solution anyone would have thought of unless they listened carefully about the situation that women in this village were experiencing. Turns out the women couldn't plant and harvest their maize crop — and with it feed their families — unless they found a way to stop elephants from coming into their fields. The lesson I took away from this story is that only by listening to and talking with someone and taking time to understand a situation completely is it possible to know how to help in ways that will be effective.
So, what shall we do with our extra years?
For someone like me, who never uses the word “retirement,” I find that the more “elder” years I live – I’m about to turn 73 – the greater the pleasures I receive from this give-back phase of my life.
Now that I am no longer focused on growing my career, raising my daughter, caring for ill family members and just keeping my own life on track, I look for opportunities to experience what I think of as purposeful living; these are the kind of days that make me happy to wake up each day! And I’m gaining a broader vision of the possibilities for doing what I can to give a boost to others in a world in which needs are evident, urgent and abundant.
With my energy refreshed, I have the firepower inside of me to engage in causes larger than myself. Taking on our climate crisis. Securing our fragile democracy. Making sure that history is taught as it was lived, not by just one selected group of people but by all who lived through it.
To name a few.
Giving back is also the reason I wrote Locker Room Talk. I hope my book provides a platform from which I can tell my story to young people who are still struggling in a “man’s” world and are willing to fight for equality and equity in their lifetimes, as I’ve fought in mine.
I mean, you didn’t think I wrote this book to pay my bills, did you? Once Locker Rom Talk is published, I will pay my own way to travel around the country to talk about my book so I can share my legal struggle for equal rights in a time of fresh legal struggles for women. I cannot thank enough my many friends who will house me along the way and those moderating my book talks in various cities. THANK YOU!
A Locker Room Talk Moment
Let me share the last of my six book endorsements/blurbs, this one from Doris Kearns Goodwin. She will moderate one of my Boston book talks in early 2025. We’ll be two “elder” women recalling the roots of our love for baseball, nurtured by our parents - with Doris, her father, with me, my mother.
“I grew up recounting baseball games to my father, so I loved discovering in Locker Room Talk how Melissa Ludtke’s mother passed down her love of the game to her daughter. For this daughter to now tell us the story of how, as a young woman, she went to court to revolutionize our nation’s most tradition-laden sport provides a splendid resource for historians and a cherished gift for baseball fans.”
~Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and author of Wait Till Next Year
I admit that my give-back impulse lived inside me even in my busiest years of work and family responsibilities. Before my own motherhood, for nearly a decade, I was a “Big Sister” to Andrea. She was 10-years old when we were paired by Big Brother/Big Sister and met in her mom’s South Boston apartment; now in her 30s, and a mom to two girls, she works while taking college classes to earn the degree she wasn’t ready to seek in her 20s.
Did I make a positive difference in Andrea’s life? She says I did. That’s enough for me.
Andrea and I stood with Senator Ted Kennedy on the balcony of his office after he’d spent time talking with Andrea about what he did as a senator. I flew Andrea to Washington, D.C. in 1996 to take her to the Stand for Children event at the Lincoln Memorial. I wanted her to experience what it meant for people to gather so they could act together to bring about positive change — in this case on behalf of America’s children. The week before, I’d reported Time magazine’s cover story on the planning and purpose of this event.
When I was a Time correspondent in the Boston bureau, along with being a Big Sister, two friends and I created ArtStart, a weekly after-school arts program for kids living in the city’s homeless shelters. We secured a grant from the Stride Rite Foundation and, with it, hired artists for this first-of-its-kind arts program at the Boston Center for the Arts. We held an exhibition of the kids’ art projects in the gallery there.
Yes, We Can
Why do I tell you these stories?
I do so because I know that each of us has the skills, talents, passions, wisdom, ideas and yes, the time to give back. And when we do, we can make a positive difference in the lives of those who haven’t had the opportunities or family circumstances we were fortunate to have. Each of us contains stories about times when we struggled and how we found ways to overcome challenges. Telling such stories to young people can be invaluable, as is mentoring them, being there for them, and supporting them as they act to right what they see as wrong in their world/community.
I’ve told you about ways that I’ve reached out and given back. And what I’ve shared is unlikely to be how you decide to reach out and give back. Each of us finds our own variations on this theme, but what I hope we share is the impetus to do this. We might play different tunes, but together our actions resound in a symphony of hope and care.
Please share your give-back experiences as feedback on my Substack. We all learn when we share our experiences and the lessons learned from them.
Just last week, over Zoom, I told again my story about my equal access court case, this time to a Women in Journalism class at Emerson College. Professor Diane Mermigas thanked me by sending these heartening words:
“Your exceptionally unique voice and spirit inspire students to pursue their goals, even in the face of continuing harassment and discrimination. They are already off and running with your advice! We are so very grateful for your generous gifts of time and effort to influence and mentor so many young journalists.”
I am looking forward to doing many Zooms with many journalism classes next fall, when my book comes out. If you are journalism professor - or teach a high school class exploring history – and you’d like me to speak with your students, please let me know. I’ll be there, in person or via Zoom.
On We Go … with NCAA Final Four Women’s games
I’ll be watching with several of my rowing Goldfish at a bar/restaurant in Boston – with its TVs tuned into the women’s games.
Note to readers: On test messages I sent to myself) I saw that the folks at Substack seemed to insert buttons saying “Upgrade to Paid.” Please know that I did not put those buttons in my Substact. All of my content is available to everyone.
Melissa loved loved loved your post "Is 90 the new 60"? and your stories about your "little sister," Jane Goodall and Gloria Steinem, and giving back. I too am becoming aware of my purposeful life and giving back at the age of almost 70. Where on earth did you get a copy of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. You're probably a pack rat like me. I'd love to read the actual story "The Housewives Moment of Truth." Is this second wave feminism or have we gone backward to the first? Your thoughts about retiring are spot-on. I just unretired. Never to go back. I' hope I'll be writing the rest of my life. I also have the firepower in me and the time to avail myself of giving back. I so look forward to your book "Locker Room Talk" coming out in August. Thanks so so much for being on Substack and writing your truth. It's much appreciated.
Thanks, Kit, for your kind words about my Friday Substack. That my experiences can inspire others gives me hope for our future. Only by passing down what we’ve learned and giving young people the tools and confidence to get engaged in their communities will be find the answers to our many challenges. I will see you at the boathouse, but not in the morning; I made the switch to the evening GS! Onward, M