5 Articles About Gen X Women Everyone Needs to Read
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I’ve often said that Generation X is the awkward meat in the Baby Boomer/Millennial sandwich. There’s a good reason for that. We are outnumbered, severely, by both. As my generation—the one who gave you ubiquitous tattoos, body piercings, modern queer activism (you’re welcome), hip hop (Q-Tip and I are the same age)—got older and wiser, the aging Boomer population made it very difficult for us to move the needle on many social and political issues. We were always outvoted by our elders (and if you’re a millennial and reading this, your) parents.
The truth is that Boomers are a conservative bunch. That’s not anecdotal. This 2015 survey from Gallup found that 48% of the post-war Boomers identified as conservative. 52% of us voted for Obama over McCain in 2008 (compared to 50 of Boomers). Even as people my age were generally hip to climate change, pro choice issues, racial profiling, the shortcomings of U.S. trade policies, interventionist foreign policy, and the more we supported politicians who led with those issues: there wasn’t much we could do to move the needle when the conservative group ahead of us consistently out voted and out contributed us.
The cultural impacts were just as poignant, and that’s especially true for women. Women my age were consistently absent not just from the political conversation, but the economic one as well. We weren’t hired to run companies. We weren’t hired period. I graduated college into the early 90s recession, only to eventually end up in a digital industry that was then—and still now—mostly run by men. The good news about being a woman born in 1970 is that my mother and father both not only encouraged me to go to college, they assumed I would. By the 1970s and 1980s, equality was assumed, but that doesn’t mean it was achieved (also: it wasn’t).
As Gen X women age, we are only now starting to find platforms and movements that validate just how outmanned (see what I did there?) we were. It’s an important conversation to have if we plan on unseating the conservative minority that is striving to make sweeping and permanent changes inside of state legislatures throughout the country. I’ve had a lot of conversations with phenomenally smart women my age who are having the same epiphany that I am: as the first generation of women to enter the professional workforce en masse, we were groundbreaking in ways that we couldn’t contextualize (how can you when you’re the first ones to do it?). As we age, we continue to feel marginalized, as the media continues to talk about Millennials and “older voters” like the 62 million of us X-ers never happened.
We did happen. And we’re still here. And these lovely pieces of journalism address how I’m feeling so well, that I’m grateful I didn’t have to writ them from scratch.
Vanity Fair: Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope
This article is a little too rosy eyed about how “tough” Gen Xers were forced to be (as if) and how that made us better than our younger Millennial sibs (a notion I find to be utterly poetic and silly) but there is a lot of wisdom here that I think is important to understand. Namely:
“[Gen X] are a revolt against the boomers, a revolt against the revolt, a market correction, a restoration not of a power elite but of a philosophy. I always believed we had more in common with the poets haunting the taverns on 52nd Street at the end of the 30s than with the hippies at Woodstock. Cynical, wised up, sane. We’d seen what became of the big projects of the boomers as that earlier generation had seen what became of all the big social projects. As a result we could not stand to hear the Utopian talk of the boomers as we cannot stand to hear the Utopian talk of the millennials. We know that most people are rotten to the core, but some are good, and proceed accordingly.”
In short: Gen X was an IRL activation of the acid-fueled idealism of the hippies. We understood the cost of living with ideals in a way that revolutionaries can’t because we bore the burden of living in a post-60s America filled with those images, mingled with touches of punk rock, disco, and Reagan at the same time. It was our singular, weird, and utterly unique burden.
Oprah.com: THE NEW MIDLIFE CRISIS: Why (and How) It's Hitting Gen X Women
If your social media feed is anything like mine: you may have seen this article making the rounds. The gist: the reason that women my age don’t have a point of reference for how we’re feeling so discarded and confused as we collide with middle age is because no one discusses it publicly. Men have mid life crisis according to lore. But women my age have been utterly abandoned from that conversation. This is the part that I spend the most time nodding along with:
“If our [Gen X] childhood in the late '70s and early '80s was a time of massive changes—the first generation of latchkey kids, high crime rates in the headlines, missing children's pictures on milk cartons, the AIDS epidemic beginning—our transition to adulthood was equally rocky. Many of us started our job hunts in the early '90s recession, which was followed by a "jobless recovery." If you were born later into Generation X, you might have entered the workforce around the 1999-ish stock market peak, but the tech bubble started to burst, landing us in the 2001 recession.
What if ours is the first generation in history with no U-curve at all, just a diagonal line pointed straight to the lower right-hand corner?
When it came time for many of us to start thinking about buying a house or a car, we slammed into the Great Recession, the worst economic crisis since the Depression, which hit Generation X hardest: According to a Pew Charitable Trust report we lost almost half our wealth, compared with around a quarter for boomers. Gen X went from the most successful generation in terms of home ownership in 2004 to the least successful in 2015.”
Fast Company: Are Gen X Women Being Squeezed Out Of The Workplace?
In the name of all that is sacred to you (and if you don’t read any other articles listed here): READ THIS ONE. In fact, if there’s a single excerpt from any article I’ve listed here that describes me, it’s this one.
“[Gen X are] also not as vocal about their achievements or their desire to be promoted as their millennial colleagues are. Instead, gen X women tend to sit back, do the work, and think, “If I do all this, I’ll automatically be rewarded,” instead of advocating for a promotion for themselves, [generational consultant Hanhah] Ubl says.
This passiveness may be the result of the environment gen-Xers were raised in. As children, they were independent and self-reliant, says Connell, because they were the first generation where both parents worked outside the home. They also were raised during the women’s movement and were led to believe they could have it all, but, once they started working full-time, they realized it wasn’t possible to have it all, she says. Millennial women, on the other hand, saw their first female Supreme Court justice and their first female secretary of state while they were children, making it seem that anything is possible.”
Visioncritical: 13 Stunning Stats on Gen X: The Forgotten yet Powerful Generation
I have worked in marketing and messaging for over 2 decades now. I read about marketing trends all the time. Guess who gets left out of the “how to reach” subject all the time? Us. If you spend time searching the interwebs for blogs on “how to target to” articles, you will find plenty of intelligence about converting Millennials and Boomers. Once again, we’re right here and there are over 60 million of us and we do have disposable income. How’s this for a quote (from the article): “Ignore them at your peril.”
Pew: How Generation X Could Change the American Dream
The data in this article is fascinating, and it’s free from all the cultural hand-wringing of many of the others (on that note: The Breakfast Club and the movie Singles did not, in any fucking meaningful goddamned way, define or influence this Gen X woman and, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no is Kurt Kobain the voice of my goddamned generation and stop fucking saying he is, thanks; I also reject every single blog and article that slams millennials as the “particpating trophy” generation because it’s insulting and utter bullshit).
But the part that I related to, mostly, is this:
“But there is no single solution to these concerns. Improving economic mobility—especially upward mobility from the bottom—requires a multifaceted approach that recognizes the systems of advantage and disadvantage at work within communities and institutions, as well as acknowledgment that the majority of those in need of help are families of color. The current lack of mobility from the bottom is a result of policy choices, so reversing these trends means a collective agreement to prioritize equity in general and racial equity in particular.”
Ya think? Perhaps Gen X is the first generation to grow up having to face the reckoning of how our friends of color, that we went to college with, had to worker harder than us white kids did. Maybe one of the defining issues of my generation is that we grew up knowing that the game was rigged in our favor and that, overwhelmed by the Boomers, could do nothing to change it except listen to a lot of hip hop and smoke a lot of weed.
If there’s anything I’d want a woman born 20 years before me to understand it’s that my generation was the realization of your ideals, or that we were ready to reject American conservatism only you made that impossible. For my younger sisters, please just be more aware that your currency is in no small part built on the backs of women like me, women who entered a world that told us we were equal, and then did nothing at all to ensure that we were entitled to actual equality. To my Millennial girls, I say this: please treat us like the allies that we are. The minute that happens, we stand a legitimate chance to change the future outlook for the next batch behind you.