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"It&amp;#039;s a good time to be 50. My friend Harriet disagrees, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s never a good time to be 50,&amp;quot; she says, fearing her upcoming milestone birthday. For years she&amp;#039;s been telling everyone that age is a just a number \u2014 but hers is unlisted. But I&amp;#039;m serious about this. If you&amp;#039;re lucky enough to turn 50, which is how I look at it, then it&amp;#039;s a good time to be coming of age. Why? In part because there&amp;#039;s much more discourse about women and aging (and menopause) than there ever has been.  &amp;quot;50: It&amp;#039;s more than an age. It&amp;#039;s a movement,&amp;quot; states Barbara Hannah Grufferman, the author of The Best of Everything After 50, in a blog for the HuffPo. Now part of this feeling undoubtedly stems from the &amp;quot;we can change the world, we&amp;#039;re special&amp;quot; baby boomer philosophy, and yet another has to do with the sheer numbers of people entering midlife. &amp;quot;Every 7 seconds someone turns 50,&amp;quot; says Grufferman, quoting the US Census Bureau statistics. What&amp;#039;s more, Americans over 50, while ignored by advertisers, &amp;quot;generate more than $2 trillion in annual income, own more homes than any other age group, [and] account for 50% of all discretionary spending,&amp;quot; she says. We also own more iPads and smart phones than other generations. I&amp;#039;m at the tail end of the baby boomers, and the beginning of Gen X, and I&amp;#039;ve always felt a tad less optimistic (and economically advantaged) than my baby boomer cohort, though I agree with Grufferman and other writers on midlife, that it&amp;#039;s time to explode the negative myths about turning 50 and reshape this period as one of possibility and change. Since I&amp;#039;ve turned 50, I have the, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m 50, I don&amp;#039;t have to do X anymore,&amp;quot; philosophy, which has been enormously liberating. &amp;quot;Make no mistake: there is a revolution brewing and women over 50 are moving it forward,&amp;quot; writes Grufferman. We want &amp;quot;a societal sea change&amp;quot; on how women over 50 are viewed. I&amp;#039;ll march in that parade. How about you, reader? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/a42101/the-revolutionary-decade-15106/>