All Kinds of Older Women : THE NEW OURSELVES, GROWING OLDER, <i> By Paula B. Doress-Worters and Diana Laskin Siegal</i> , <i> in cooperation with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster: $18; 531 pp., paperback)</i>

Reading “The New Ourselves, Growing Older,” a resource book for women over 40, is a little like having lunch with your favorite elderly aunt, the one who was a feminist before it was fashionable. You love her to death. You appreciate her advice on life, love and hemlines. You just wish she wouldn’t whine about how hard it was in her day for women to prove themselves. You wish she would realize that things have changed.

Like a smart, hip aunt, this book (an updated version of the 1987 “Ourselves, Growing Older”), produced in cooperation with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, is brimming with excellent information, including discussions on everything from midlife childbirth to hot flash management and dental health. “Ourselves” is modeled after the successful “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was first published in cooperation with the collective in 1971 and widely regarded as a milestone in feminist health care.

What threatens to spoil the new book, though, are statements that might reflect the frustrations and perceptions of individual writers more than hard-and-fast data--statements that seem, for the most part, not true anymore.

Two examples: The chapter on exercise, which encourages weight training, notes that “society has stereotyped women as soft, round, weak and submissive” but allows that the picture is changing. That should read “has already changed,” at least at Los Angeles gyms, where the lines for the stair-climbers, treadmills and weights are gender-balanced.

In another chapter, “Our Looks and Our Lives,” comes the statement that “middle-aged women, seen primarily as mothers, are considered to be past their social usefulness because they are no longer bearers of children.”

Whoa. Did this miss the eyes of all volunteer manuscript readers and the editors? The footnote after the statement cites a book published in 1981.

Those criticisms aside, there’s a lot to praise about the book and to suggest 40-something women should buy one for themselves and another for their mom--or that elderly aunt who picks up the lunch tab.

The 30 chapters overflow with information, mostly on health topics. But there are also chapters on money matters, care-giving and alternative living arrangements. It’s a one-stop, quick-read source to educate yourself about menopause, money, middle-aged birth control, retirement planning, boomer childbirth and in general what to expect from your body and your mind with age.

The resources section includes well-known organizations such as the American Assn. of Retired Persons and the National Organization for Women (NOW), along with interesting, lesser-known sources such as the American Dietetic Assn. toll-free information line and a Massachusetts-based firm that specializes in outdoor vacations for women over 40.

The book is very PC. It devotes many pages to the special problems and concerns of married, widowed and divorced as well as never-married women. It gives equal time to the concerns of lifelong heterosexuals, lifelong lesbians and those who switch orientation at midlife.

Women will discover options they’ve probably never thought about, such as a group living arrangement described by one woman. She resides with 11 other adults who rotate chores so each person cooks dinner only a few times a month.

Another highlight is the liberal sprinkling of anecdotes throughout, identified only by the age of the contributor and collected by the co-authors from letters, personal conversations and other sources. These stories run the gamut from practical to humorous and poignant.

There’s a report from a woman, now 80, who divorced at 37 and finally landed a teaching job after starting out as school secretary.

A 51-year-old woman reveals that she knew she was middle-aged when a “quickie” began to take 45 minutes.

A 78-year-old woman admits that she still mourns the death of her daughter 40 years before but is doing better. “Now I can accept what happened, even if I don’t like it,” she writes.

Whether women skim this book or digest it cover-to-cover, they will be better prepared to answer the question that opens the last chapter:

“What kind of an older woman do I want to be?”

Doing It for Themselves

While readers will understandably be tempted to use the voluminous “New Ourselves, Growing Older” as an encyclopedia, looking up facts as needed, the co-authors hope women will approach it more as a novel. “I would urge women to read it through,” said one co-author, Paula Laskin Siegal in a phone interview. “If they only look up a subject of interest, they are going to miss an awful lot in the prefaces and opening chapters that apply to women of all ages.”

This edition is the second team effort for Laskin Siegal and Paula B. Doress-Worters. They worked together on the original 1987 book. Updating for the second edition took about 18 months, Doress-Worters recalls. “Every chapter went through three drafts,” explains Laskin Siegal. Each draft was reviewed by women who had experienced the topics under discussion, by medical or other appropriate experts and by a corps of about 300 volunteer readers. Once the drafts arrived back with comments, the co-authors would spread them out on a table and decide which revisions to make.

There were 45 contributing writers, but nagging writers to meet deadlines wasn’t part of the scenario, according to Doress-Worters. “Older women are very focused on what they want to accomplish,” she notes.

The basic message they want to communicate, says Laskin Siegal, is the same as that conveyed in the first “Our Bodies, Our Selves” book: “We are quite capable of understanding our bodies.” The other message? “Aging is part of the life span, not a medical event,” Laskin Siegal adds.

Besides serving as a good information source, the co-authors say they have heard their book is serving as a jumping-off point for daughters and aging mothers to broach difficult topics, such as nursing homes and life-threatening disease. Another fringe benefit, Laskin Siegal hopes, is that women who read the volume will get “a feeling of community and solidarity.”