Dr. James Hollis

I'm living in a retirement community as of a year ago, and so many of the women that I've had dinner with, my wife and I have dinner with various people, have said, well, when I was at this stage, women were not allowed to do this.

One woman was a scientist and she said, I just wasn't recognized in the physics world until like late in my life.

And you forget how recently that was the case.

I mean, that was a deep violation of the human spirit.

But it was routine.

And so many of the women that I see there who are going to be over 70, most of them are over 80.

lived in a world that was not unlike a segregated world.

You know, just as, you know, I grew up where segregation was practiced by half of this country.

It's not so long ago.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, and, you know, the 60s happened and what happened to the 60s is a kind of resurgence from below in both men and women, some men and some women.

to overthrow the sort of oppressive nature of role definitions and so forth.

I mean, you couldn't think of marrying a person in another religion, for example.

You couldn't think of marrying someone of a different race.

I mean, the price of that meant you had to go live anonymously in the city somewhere.

Or you couldn't be gay, for example.

The love that dare not speak its name, as it was called.

All of that's been radically challenged and rightly so.

And yet what that does is bring about a world of great freedom, greater freedom, but also ambiguity.