Women and Aging

Celebrating Ourselves

Ellen Cole, Esther D Rothblum, Ruth R Thone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317765288
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In our youth-oriented, patriarchal society, aging and older women often find themselves either ignored, pitied, or feared. Women and Aging is a valuable guide to help women break through the negative stereotypes of old age and find personal fulfillment through the stages of maturity. Full of warmth and support, Women and Aging strongly enables women to take and remain in control of their lives instead of passively letting others make life-changing--and possibly harmful--decisions for them. This essential guide for aging will help women increase the vitality of their old age, as it urges them to continue to plan for the future, keep and develop strong relationships, increase their overall wellness, and not be afraid to take risks. Truly a celebration of aging, the author's illuminating descriptions of her own aging and how she has overcome society's restrictions are sure to be a source of inspiration for all women--no matter what their ages.Women and Aging begins by addressing cultural attitudes toward women, including appearance, language, behavior, and "women's work." The middle section encourages women to face their fears and limitations and express their emotions, while the concluding chapters are a virtual "guide to life," showing how to live life to the fullest and find inner fulfillment while aging. Along with her own continuing narrative, the author includes a multitude of personal glimpses into the aging processes of other women. This uplifting, helpful book will be of great value not only for aging women, but for women of all ages who are interested in taking active control of their own lives.

II. ANGER, HURT, GRIEF, AND CHANGE: FACING OURSELVES

Chapter 8

Who Am I Going To Be When I Grow Up?

Remember the book, I’m Running Away from Home but I’m Not Allowed to Cross the Street: A Primer of Women’s Liberation (Burton, 1972)? It is a story of a woman and her marriage, her children, her role as helper to her husband and manager of their household and social life. She leaves that milieu, midstream as it were, barely managing to survive outside and beyond that traditional woman’s role.

I read that book in the late 1970s, a time of growth for me. My idea of adult life, until then, consisted of marrying, having children, being part of a couple, deriving my power from a male partner, and keeping house as my mother did before me.

During those sometimes painful midlife years between the ages of 30 and 50, my friends and I said to one another somewhat facetiously, “I wonder who I’ll be when I grow up.” For those of us not defined by career or vocation, we thought a time would come when we would be someone else, not entirely wife and mother. We had little idea of who that person might be. Even women with a vocational definition — teacher, farmer, lawyer, writer, bookkeeper, paid or not — at some point may find that they are operating out of someone else’s values, not having clearly defined their own.

However faint it sounded, I heard a call that has become loud and insistent in this last third of my life, actually a demand that I grow beyond my dependent, role-bound and defined self.

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu insists in Growing Young (1981) that “we were never intended to ‘grow up’ into the kind of adults most of us have become,” the ossified adults prescribed by society.

In his description of neoteny, the process of growing young, Montagu makes clear that the idea of becoming adult, mature or growing-up — especially ignored in the culturally-demanded hurry to become a heterosexual couple—not only is wrong, but stultifying. The young race after the power and freedom they perceive in adults, yearn to grow up faster, wish to be like the adults living ‘real’ life, beyond that of childhood.

Montagu demonstrates how our culture, schools, and families are in conspiracy against childlike traits, all those qualities with which the child is so abundantly and favorably endowed:

Those traits of childhood behavior that are so valuable and that tend to disappear gradually as human beings grow older … [including] curiosity, imaginativeness, playfulness, open-mindedness, willingness to experiment, flexibility, humor, energy, receptiveness to new ideas, honesty, eagerness to learn, the need to love. (p. 2)

“Children ask questions endlessly,” Montagu observes. “They can keep themselves busy for hours with the simplest toys … play games endlessly … accept changes without defensiveness … they laugh. Unless they suspect they may be punished for it, they tell the truth … they soak up knowledge and information like sponges.”

Words, written by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1977, p. 21–22), posted on my bulletin board for years, remind that:

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self importance, learn so easily and why older persons, especially if vain or self important have great difficulty learning at all—pride and vanity can thus be greater obstacles to learning than stupidity.

A large body of scientific research and reflection makes clear that the truth about the human species is that in body, spirit, feeling, and conduct we are designed to grow and develop in ways that emphasize rather than minimize childlike traits.

Montagu (1981, p. 4) traces the history of valuing being old or young. “In Western industrialized, and to some extent in even not-so-affluent other parts of the world, the cult of youth has come to be a kind of secular religion … and given rise to and also a result of a multibillion-dollar industry.” (Not that the cult of youth values the growth and development of children as described by Montagu, concentrating, as it does almost entirely, on the physical characteristics of being young).

Such worship of youth was not always in vogue. Until some time after World War II, in Britain and Western Europe as well as in the United States, to be old was revered. Governments were run by graybeards, the world’s business was conducted by old men and families were subject to the wills of their oldest members.

Women, of course, suffered under this regime even more than men, because daughters were considered even more immature, more vulnerable, and more dependent than sons, and in greater need of supervision and protection. Childhood was seen as a difficult period that was unfortunately necessary for the production of mature, no-nonsense adults … the closer their behavior to that of adults, the better. (Montagu, p. 5)

“We have made some progress in this understanding over the past 50 years,” Montagu reports. Many scientists and educators “have begun to recognize that children are not simply small imperfect adults who must be dragged as early as possible into the adult-behaving world.”

Montagu (1981, p. 6) reports that research begun by zoologist Julius Kollman in 1884, and continued by scientists Havelock Ellis, Louise Bolk, J.B.S. Haldan, and Konrad Lorenz, led “directly to a belief that human beings are designed to retain into adulthood many of the behavioral traits that characterize human childhood.” This is such a Catch-22, or -44, that women are caught in, because of our need to grow up, in a healthy way, before we get old!

To be serious, sober adults leaves out the very characteristics that allow us to grow, change and develop. Montagu adds that German sociologist Arnold Gehlen

recognized as early as 1940 that the unique and outstanding human trait is that of remaining in an unending state of development … the specialty of humans is nonspecialization, versatility; they have remained free to change as change is required by whatever environment they encounter. (p. 8)

Growing up in a linear, duality-dominated patriarchy, our lives appear to go in a line from birth to death, not in a circular, spiral process. We are accustomed to separate, label and make judgments about life and death, young and old, good and bad, productive and lazy, heaven and hell, bodies versus minds, black and white, and feeling versus thinking, in an effort not only to make sense of this short span of time but to control and manage it. We often try to define it in ways that allow us to “grow up,” to be like those whose power and possessions we envy.

For old women, or women becoming old, the charge is to “grow up” in middle age, and to “grow up” into a value system that honors their lives, their years, their age, their bodies and to be careful of all sisters and brothers. This process allows one to shed the false values of the culture and traditional thought patterns of “growing up,” validate and affirm one’s true self, shed the preoccupation with conforming, with power over, and with contorting one’s self in order to belong, to be noticed and to be approved.

Theologian Ann Belford Ulanov (1986, p. 66) describes the journey thus:

If we spend a lifetime avoiding who we are, veering off from the central issues of finding and building our personal way of being, our personal ways of putting ourselves into the world; of facing the hard questions of injustice and suffering—or the sometimes harder ones of justice and pleasure — of facing the blasting challenges of really loving someone more than our-selves; of surviving failure and learning from it; of reaching to the center, always the center, seeing persons as uniquely themselves, not fully defined by class or economic level or education or talent, we reap the results in old age. We survive as unique persons who go on growing, experiencing, changing, and consolidating ourselves. Life continues to offer excitement.

According to an old saying, as we age, we become more of who we already are. Therefore it behooves me, to make sure that who I am is someone I like and want to be, someone whose life is satisfying and on the mark, before I am really old.

The truth of neoteny, and not a sentimental denial of aging, offers a challenge and opportunity to rediscover the qualities of our childlike selves, a way to stay open to life and all its possibilities right up to our last breath.

Chapter 9

Who Am I?

My friend, Nan, wrote to me one spring: “I know who I am and that is all I can be. Most days it’s not much. But then, just to be myself … maybe that’s enough.” Both the surprise and the limitation of knowing who I am, after weathering the midlife transition, is a seminal issue for me in these years of becoming old and, I think, surely for other aging women.

For much of some women’s lives, they have been who they thought they were supposed to be, who they imagined someone else wanted them to be, and who others told them to be. They internalized and increased all those messages by adding a version of their idealized self.

Awareness of mortality can send us deep into ourselves or into frenzied activity and/or deep depression, to do whatever it is we must do before we die. To discover that real woman under all those layers of socialization and expectation becomes the task.

In writing about what happens when “the myths that have driven our institutions are exposed,” Madonna Kolbenschlag says in Lost in the Land of Oz: The Search for Identity and Community in American Life (1988, pp. 104–5):

The project of the true self has been abandoned. Colonization is subtle. It is partly the fault of our own passivity and lack of vigilance, but it is also an inexorable effect of the systems that absorb us: family, workplace, class, gang or peer group, education, profession, and media. Each of these systems … becomes a ritual text that can estrange us from our real, true self. Instead we are left with a kind of laminated persona, each layer easily exploited by a culture in which many systems are in a runaway state.

Reclaiming our personal power, our sense of belonging to ourselves and to others as fellow human beings, requires that we challenge the myths of power that have shaped us… The first is our faith in dominance and, consequently, hierarchy. There are many subcorollaries … such as “men take charge,” “father knows best,” “heroes are loners.” … The second is our denial of our mortality and fallibility, of our finite capacity. There are many subcorollaries to this myth also: the idolization of technology, denial of death in life, perfectionism, compulsive celebrity, “more is better,” organization over organism.

I often say that I do not want to die having missed the point. Poet Marge Piercy writes in “If They Come in the Night,” one of her selected poems in Circles on the Water (1982, pp. 222–23 [italics in second verse mine]),

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil

a friend said, Why are you happy?

He explained (we lay together

on a hard cold floor) what prison

meant because he had done

time, and I talked of the death

of friends. Why are you happy

then, he asked, close to

angry.

I said, I like my life. If I

have to give it back, if they

take it from me, let me only

not feel I wasted any, let me

not feel I forgot to love anyone

I meant to love, that I forgot

to give what I held in my hands,

that I forgot to do some little

piece of the work that wanted to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine,

the muted grey light off the waters

of the bay at night, the white

light of the fog stealing in,

the first spears of the morning

touching a face

I love. We all lose We lose

ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do

lasts, what love sculps from us;

but what I count, rubies, my

children, are those moments

wide open when I know clearly

who I am, who you are, what we

do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,

with all my senses hungry and filled

at once like a pitcher with light.

In At Seventy, A Journal (1984, p. 10), writer May Sarton answers the question: “Why is it good to be old? Because I am more myself than I have ever been.” One may not get “better” in the conventional sense of the world—not look like a fashion plate or have lots of answers. There may be confusion and ambivalence and it is possible to become dismayed with the world and one’s friends.

One may also speak one’s own truth more often, say “no” to things more easily and not waste energy tilting at the windmills of fools quite so often. As my friend does, women may find their limitations, a very plain sense of being enough or even some serenity with being “not much.”

Writer and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell says, in The Measure of My Days (1979, p. 13),

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.

Later Scott-Maxwell (ibid, p. 42) says: “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”

Some women engage in discounting themselves, making fun of the woman who is “finding herself,” internalizing the backlash against women who want more, seeking change, and upsetting the current “order.” These women want more than what writer Carolyn Heilbrun (1988, Sept. 4) calls “loneliness at worst, golf at best.” The outer furniture of a life — jobs, commitments, marriages, duties, old pleasures—may get rearranged and there may also be enormous inner turmoil that brings one closer to the bone of who one is.

Issues struggled with for years may lessen in importance or become worth the pain of change in order to resolve them. Issues such as dependence on a partner or children, general malaise about one’s life, the need to focus and prioritize, to accept limitations, to push one’s horizons, to become financially independent and/or more response/able, or to find what one truly loves and live out of that, all crack through the tough wall of overactivity or blast one out of the slough of despair.

This change may mean wearing different clothes, no longer putting on makeup, not going to certain events, finding joy in knowing someone we passed by before ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Editor
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• I. Unmasking Our Own Truth as Aging Women
• II. Anger, Hurt, Grief, and Change: Facing Ourselves
• III. Honoring and Gathering Our Strength
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Reading List
• Index