Women Ageing

Changing Identities, Challenging Myths

Miriam Bernard, Val Harding Davies, Linda Machin, Judith Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134657681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Women Ageing provides a better understanding of what ageing is like for women and challenges the myths which have grown up around the ageing process. Blending the scholarly, the personal and the political, it reveals the range of strategies and identities women adopt to manage the transitions of the second half of the life course. In doing so it uncovers not only the commonalities and the similarities between mid-life and older women, but also some of the variation and diversity relating to ethnicity and race, class, disability and sexual orientation.
Women Ageing makes the ordinary lives of ordinary women as, in this instance, they grow older, more visible. Its findings have important implications for policy and practice. All those studying or working with older people, will find it an illuminating text.

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Women ageing

Changing Indentities, Challenging Myths

Miriam Bernard, Pat Chambers and Gillian Granville

Introduction

The authors of this book are women who have been, and in many cases still are, associated with what was formerly the Department of Applied Social Studies at Keele University and is now part of the School of Social Relations. We have academic interests and professional backgrounds in gerontology, social work and counselling, and many of us have taught both undergraduate and postgraduate students. While the book reflects these professional interests, it also draws specifically on the research that we have all undertaken on various aspects of the lives of mid-life and older women. The book is concerned with understanding better what ageing is like for women and has been developed around a series of key themes and issues. In particular, we are concerned with the ways in which women construct and reconstruct their identities in mid-life and beyond and how this changes. This involves consideration of the multiple identities which women develop and of the negotiations and renegotiations which occur as women deal with particular transitions or circumstances in their lives. We also hope to challenge some of the myths which have grown up around women's traditional roles and expectations of ageing, showing how the reality of our lives during the second half of the life-course is still shaped and constrained by a variety of external pressures. We uncover not only the commonalities and similarities between mid-life and older women but also some of the variation and diversity relating to ethnicity and race, class, disability and sexual orientation. The concluding chapter explores the range of strategies that women adopt in managing these changes to their own lives and the possible responses which society now needs to make in terms of both policy and practice.

The opening chapter provides an overview and introduction to the theoretical perspectives, key themes and issues pursued in subsequent chapters. All the major chapters are framed by an adherence to what might be described as a critical, feminist, life-course perspective. This perspective draws on a number of theoretical strands but has, at its heart, the desired intention to make more visible the ordinary lives of ordinary women as, in this instance, they grow older. We argue that the body of literature and research that we have to date has led either to the experiences of mid-life and older women remaining invisible or to an inevitable pathologising of their situations. This chapter also presents some of the thinking and principles which underlie what we are trying to do: the theory and the methods associated with our approach. The central chapters are concerned much more with illustrating the key themes through empirical research and/or professional experiences. In order that readers are clear about how we are using particular terms, we also discuss definitions of key words and phrases. Finally, we give a brief overview of the succeeding chapters.

Rethinking theory

Everywhere we turn these days, we are confronted with reminders about growing older. As women in particular, we are bombarded daily with media images designed to stave off the physical signs of ageing: wrinkle-smoothing creams; hair dyes; tooth-whitening products, to say nothing of the boom in cosmetic surgery (Belcher, 1999). Both the popular and the academic press frequently carry articles about the impact of our ageing population on the economy, on health and welfare services and on intergenerational relations (Kaye, 1999). However, we still know comparatively little about how we, as women, view our own ageing and about the day-to-day experiences of growing older in an increasingly ageing society. The way society is constructed, alongside myths and notions about women's natural roles and predispositions as carers and mothers in particular, sets up tensions and ambiguities in thinking about, and reflecting upon, these issues. Central to this are concerns about our own identities as women. The visible signs of ageing and the ‘ageist standards of appearance’ (Ann Gerike, 1990:41) to which we are subjected make manifest these tensions.

All adult women are, whether we like it or not, ageing women. Yet, although the growing academic interest and the increasing ‘coincidence of age and gender’ in the literature (Diane Gibson, 1996:433) is to be welcomed, there is still comparatively little empirical research, certainly in a British context, which attempts to make visible the lives of mid-life and older women. The little we do know is predominantly focused on heterosexual, white and often middle-class women (Miriam Bernard, 1998), with minority ethnic women, women with other sexual orientations, poor women, disabled or differently abled women being some of the most marginalised and neglected groups (Meredith Minkler, 1996). We need, therefore, to be aware of the dimensions which bind us all together as women, but also alert and sensitive to the rich variety of differences and experiences among us (Colette Browne, 1998). Some sense of this variety can be culled from the increasing numbers of academic texts which address the lives of mid-life and older women (Ellen Gee and Meredith Kimball, 1987; Katherine Allen, 1989; Diane Garner and Susan Mercer, 1989; Sara Arber and Jay Ginn, 1991, 1995; Miriam Bernard and Kathy Meade, 1993a; Barbara Turner and Lillian Troll, 1994; Browne, 1998; Linda Gannon, 1999; Jenny Onyx et al., 1999). Together with ‘popular’ volumes written either by older women themselves or which contain transcripts and conversations with middle-aged and older women (see, for example, Susan Hemmings, 1985; Mary Adelman, 1986; Janet Ford and Ruth Sinclair, 1987; Jewish Women in London Group, 1989; Jean Shapiro, 1989; Germaine Greer, 1991; Suzanne Nield and Rosalind Pearson, 1992; Ruth Thone, 1992; Betty Friedan, 1993; Hen CoOp, 1993, 1996; Dorothy Rowe, 1994; Charmian Cannon, 2000), this growing body of writing is testimony to the fact that, as Browne (1998: 269–70) observes:

Aging women, demanding corrections to ageist and sexist myths, are insisting that their voices be heard and respected rather than ignored or patronized.

Although we strive, in this book, to contribute further to this body of literature and to address the points that Colette Browne raises, it is important to note that our premise is that no one existing theoretical perspective has a monopoly when it comes to trying to explain or to understand women's lives: we draw on a variety of intellectual traditions and theoretical developments to inform the work presented here.

Above all, we have a continuing commitment to a life-course approach, in tandem with insights from feminist perspectives and critical gerontology. We first advocated such an approach early in the 1990s, arguing that it: ‘is crucial to our understanding of the situations which confront women as they age’ (Bernard and Meade, 1993b:9). Within a life-course approach, the importance of a life span developmental perspective is one which has taken a while to become recognised. However, both we and other academic colleagues around the world have argued that such a perspective is vital if we are to understand better the interplay between the individual and the broader society in which we live (Bernard and Meade, 1993a; Browne, 1998; Gannon, 1999; Onyx et al., 1999; Matilda White Riley and John Riley, 1999). Critical gerontology and feminism also have much to offer to the study of ageing in general and to the lives of mid-life and older women in particular. To show how these differing perspectives inform successive chapters, each is discussed in more detail below.

Perspectives from critical gerontology

Social gerontology has been undergoing something of a sea change in the ways in which we think about ageing and old age for both women and men —and indeed in some of the sources of data that we use. In recent years, these issues have come together under the umbrella of what is now labelled ‘critical gerontology’. Ruth Ray (1996:675) defines critical gerontology as: ‘a critique of the social influences, philosophical foundations and empirical methodologies on which gerontology as a field has been historically constructed’. Critical gerontology has grown out of the broader critical social science movement and draws on at least three strands of work evident in gerontology's historical development (Achenbaum and Levin, 1989; Achenbaum, 1997).

First, it has its intellectual origins within the political economy perspective: a perspective associated in North America with the writings of people such as Carrol Estes and Meredith Minkler (Minkler and Estes, 1991) and in Britain with Townsend (1981, 1986), Walker (1981, 1982) and Phillipson (1982). Political economy perspectives have been very influential in getting us to look critically at how growing old is experienced, maintaining that the welfare state has effectively transformed ageing into a dependent status rather than providing opportunities for self-determination and continued participation in everyday social life. Although this perspective began to raise crucial questions about ageing for women, initially at least, it largely concentrated on class rather than gender as its main analytical orientation (Arber and Ginn, 1991).

A second strand emphasises an increasing concern with the uncertainties surrounding ageing. Drawing on work from the humanities (notably history, philosophy and ethics), this addresses the potential for loss of meaning in the lives of people as they age (Moody, 1992). This is linked with, and influenced by, insights and contributions drawn from post-modernism which suggest that now, more than ever, we ought to look at ageing and old age as a fundamental part of the entire human existence rather than spending our time and effort trying to stave it off or to substitute things which disguise or assert youth-oriented values (Molly Andrews, 1999).

The third and final strand is gerontology's ‘rediscovery’ of the importance of biography in extending our knowledge and understanding about both individual and shared aspects of ageing (Johnson, 1978). Anne Jamieson and Christina Victor (1997) contend that this tradition is well established in Britain and, in Bill Bytheway's words (1997:14), ‘this cataloguing and enumeration of our past…is the way in which the past contributes to our sense of age’.

By bringing these strands together, it is possible to see that key issues affecting the lives of mid-life and older women have come under increasing scrutiny from the critical gerontology perspective. Conventional topics such as education, employment and income, health and well-being, poverty and pensions, caring and social relationships are all being discussed in much greater detail. However, as Gibson (1996) notes, much of this still focuses on what is wrong with ageing and older women, how they are socially disadvantaged and what can be done to correct this. Older women are still considered as ‘other’ to older men, prompting Gibson (1996) to call for a less ‘phallocentric’ analysis of women in old age. Approaches which emphasise women's biographies and the need to hear women speak for themselves are going some way towards answering this criticism. We now have, for example, a growing body of literature which exhorts women to redefine and re-examine our identities as we age in an effort to achieve a more authentic mature self (see, for example, Hemmings, 1985; Ford and Sinclair, 1987; Greer, 1991; Friedan, 1993; Hen Co-Op, 1993, 1996). In very recent years too, there have been attempts to put what Meredith Minkler (1996:470) describes as ‘a human face—and a human body and spirit—on ageing and growing old’. This essentially humanistic orientation, embraced by many gerontologists now researching and writing about the post-modern life-course, stresses both the diversity and the multiplicity of lifestyles touched upon above—but also argues for the use of data such as literature and visual images to help us to understand and explain the meanings and significances that we attach to ageing and old age.

Two particular issues arise from this. First, gerontology in general, and critical gerontology in particular, has made the study of ageism central to its concerns. This is fundamentally important to our understanding of the experience of ageing for women and is an issue which many of our central chapters address. The possession of negative attitudes based on age is one facet of the key social oppression that we now recognise as ‘ageism’. As Bill Bytheway and Julia Johnson (1990) have shown, the impact of ageism is such that it can generate and reinforce a fear and denigration of the ageing process itself. Along with racism and sexism, ageism manifests itself in all sort of ways in our society: in the vocabulary that we use, in visual imagery, in institutional policies and in discriminatory structures and practices (Butler, 1980; Johnson and Bytheway, 1993). None of us are immune to the impact of ageism and, for women in particular, it often intersects with sexism to produce particular pressures on us in terms of ageing and our physical appearance (Susan Sontag, 1978). As Colette Browne (1998:xxvi) also argues, ageism hits women harder than men in a number of other spheres, ‘leaving them with their financial, health, care giving, and social status seriously impacted’.

Not only is ageism rife among the population at large, we can also note that it is alive and well among those who care for older people in professional capacities (Olive Stevenson, 1989). The radical American feminist Baba Copper (1988:60) goes even further and accuses women of what she terms ‘woman-to-woman’ ageism: younger women can and do exploit older women, although the opposite is also true (Browne, 1998). These observations alert us to the tensions and complexities surrounding ageism and to some of the ways in which women are treated, and treat each other, in our society. One graphic illustration of the impact of ageism on women comes from the writings of Pat Moore (1986). At the age of 26, she decided to disguise herself as an 85-year-old woman in the hope that it would enable her to learn more about the ageing process and how the products that she was involved in developing as an industrial designer could be made more sensitive to the needs of older people. The 3 years that she lived as an old woman enabled her to document in detail the ways in which she was treated. This ranged from indifference and being short-changed by shopkeepers to verbal abuse and being assaulted and left for dead by a gang of youths. In a different cultural context, Sheila Green, a British nurse, found very similar attitudes being expressed when she repeated elements of this experiment (Sheila Green, 1991; Hope and Bernard, 1992).

Second, although theoretical writing and empirical research constitute particular forms of gerontological ‘evidence’, perspectives from the humanities have also demonstrated the benefits of complementing this with other, perhaps less conventional, ‘data’ in the form of literature and visual images which are particularly helpful in illuminating what ageing means for women. One illustration of this, which graphically portrays the struggles some us have with our own ageing, comes from the memoirs of the Irish poet Eavan Boland (1996). She writes about womanhood, nationhood, places and times in her life and about the ways in which traditionally silent women can find a voice through being the authors of their own poetry, rather than simply the objects of others’ poems. She describes putting her memoirs together ‘not as a prose narrative is usually constructed but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings’ (Boland, 1996:xiii). One of the ‘turnings and returnings’ that Boland deals with is ageing, and how difficult she found this to write about when younger. After talking to an older woman on one summer's evening in Dublin, she recalls how:

I begin to make notes for a poem. I try to write it. As I do, I am aware of that split screen, that half-in-half perspective which is so connected with the act of writing…At some point I do what I have rarely done—at least not at such a preliminary stage of writing. I put down the pen. I leave my notes. I set aside the poem in the complete certainty that it will never be written.

(Boland, 1996:203–4)

She goes on to dissect in detail what it is that has prevented her from writing this poem, concluding that it is nothing to do with either the suburb in which she lives nor with the Dublin hills behind it. Eventually, she writes (Boland, 1996:206–7):

Where the women stand and talk—deep within that image is, I know, another image. The deeper image is that shadow, the aging woman, the argument that the body of one woman is a prophecy of the body of the other. Here, at the very point where I am looking for what Calvino calls ‘that natural rhythm, as of the sea or the wind, that festive light impulse,’ the exact opposite happens. I cannot make her real; I cannot make myself real. I cannot make the time we are happening in real, so that the time I fear can also happen…I sensed, hidden in the narrative distance between myself and this theme of aging women, some restriction, some thickening and stumbling…I could not write these women…that I could not write it was nothing new. What unsettled me was that—at some level I barely understood —neither did I feel free to imagine it.

That, as a young woman and a poet, she could neither experience this sense of what ageing is like nor indeed imagine it was, she found, most upsetting: ‘I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in’ (Boland, 1996:209) she laments. Yet, years later in mid-life herself, she is now able to write:

That moment has come to me which was prophesied by another woman's body in a summer twilight years ago. I am older, less hopeful, more acquainted with the craft, more instructed by my failures in it. And once again there is a notebook open on the table by the window…I walk to the table. I sit down and take up my pen. I begin to write about a river and a woman, about the destiny of water and my sense of growing older. The page fills easily and quickly.

(Boland, 1996:238)

Eavan Boland articulates for us just how difficult it is to recognise and acknowledge one's own ageing, as well as the alliances that one might develop with other older women. The value of such introspective commentaries is that they offer us one way of getting ‘inside’ the experiences of ageing (Achenbaum, 1997:24). As women, we are having to deal with a great number of complex and often contradictory messages about who we are, what we should be doing and how we should be dealing with growing older. It is precisely these kinds of contradictions, complexities and ambivalences which, as authors of this book, we are attempting to address.

In sum, critical gerontology, although it may still be ‘an aspiration rather than a body of knowledge’ (Jamieson and Victor, 1997:178), alerts us to some of the ways in which society continues to oppress us as we age. It argues that ageing issues and older people have been marginalised and ignored and it prompts us to question long-held and taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs about old age, old people and the ways in which we and society respond to them. It also calls into question some of the traditional theories and methods that we have used to study ageing and old age, and is both about explaining how oppression and injustice occur and affect people as well as about attempting to make the voices of oppressed groups such as older women and black elders heard. Here, it is clear to see that these ideas resonate very strongly with feminist perspectives. Indeed, both Minkler (1996) and Achenbaum (1997) argue that feminist perspectives have integrated and invigorated critical gerontology by stressing the gendered nature of ageing and growing old and by getting us to look critically at what has been called ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Women ageing: changing identities, challenging myths
• 2 ‘Women's work’and the transition to retirement
• 3 Working carers: caring workers
• 4 Our ageing selves: reflections on growing older
• 5 Menopause: a time of private change to a mature identity
• 6 Older women undergraduates: choices and challenges
• 7 Women's voices in bereavement
• 8 Widowhood in later life
• 9 Older women, long-term marriage and care
• 10 Women ageing: changing policy, challenging practice
• Biblography
• Index