By
Maryann
Teale
Snell
’86
Last spring, Linda Ocker Mashburn ’63 retired from her full-time job. This spring, she’s spending time in federal prison. In November the sixty-four-year-old scaled a barbed-wire fence at a military base in Georgia and was arrested for trespassing. She and others were protesting the role of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in training Latin American militaries, and the history of human-rights abuses associated with its graduates. Mashburn has demonstrated and been arrested three times before, but not until retirement did she feel “free” to up the ante and go to prison to support her beliefs.
Mashburn may not be your typical Mount Holyoke retiree; most of her contemporaries would opt for a bit less drama in their sunset years. But what they all have in common is this: they are the first generation of women retirees to have worked, in significant numbers, outside the home. That means they are blazing their own trail, based not on how they experienced their mother’s or father’s retire-
ment, but on how they’ve envisioned it for themselves.
Not Your Parents’ Retirement Retirement always seemed like “some far-off time beyond the incredibly old age of sixty-five,” observes Sandra Klamkin Schocket ’58. “I knew I didn’t want my parents’ version. They moved to an ‘over-fifty-five’ development
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly | Spring 2006
in Florida and spent most of their time playing cards, sitting by the pool, and going to dances, plays, and dinners.” Judy Shepherd DeBrandt ’66, whose mother “continues to manage her household and do what interests her,” is eager to do something more “to ‘contribute’ in some way,” she says. “I have traveled, volunteered, raised children,
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