Age Matters

Re-Aligning Feminist Thinking

Toni M. Calasanti, Kathleen F. Slevin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135928070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Gerontologia

This volume of original chapters is designed to bring attention to a neglected area of feminist scholarship - aging. After several decades of feminist studies we are now well informed of the complex ways that gender shapes the lives of women and men. Similarly, we know more about how gendered power relations interface with race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. Serious theorizing of old age and age relations to gender represents the next frontier of feminist scholarship. In this volume, leading national and international feminist scholars of aging take first steps in this direction, illuminating how age relations interact with other social inequalities, particularly gender. In doing so, the authors challenge and transform feminist scholarship and many taken for granted concepts in gender studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Age Matters

TONI M. CALASANTI
KATHLEEN F. SLEVIN

An inadvertent but pernicious ageism burdens much of feminist scholarship and activism. It stems from failing to study old people on their own terms and from failing to theorize age relations—the system of inequality, based on age, that privileges the not-old at the expense of the old (Calas-anti 2003). Some feminists mention age-based oppression but treat it as a given—an "et cetera" on a list of oppressions, as if to indicate that we already know what it is. As a result, feminist work suffers, and we engage in our own oppression.

This volume urges a shift in how feminist scholars approach the study of inequalities by demonstrating how and why age matters. In this introduction, we briefly discuss the omission of old age and age relations from feminism and point to some of the ways in which ageism permeates feminist work and the wider society. We then outline more clearly what we mean by age relations and how these form an oppressive system. We end by providing a road map to the book's content, highlighting how the various chapters deepen our understanding of inequalities and provide a new lens for feminist inquiry.

Neglecting Old Age

Feminist scholars have given little attention either to old women or to aging (Arber and Ginn 1991), despite Barbara McDonald's work in the women's movement in the 1980s and her plea that old age be recognized (McDonald 1983); despite the increases in absolute and relative numbers of those older than age sixty-five and the skewed sex ratio among old people in the United States; and despite the shifting age ratios in nations worldwide. The issues go ignored by most scholars, and one must ask why.

The Bias of Middle Age

Feminists consider age but rarely old people or age relations. Most focus on young adult or middle-aged women and on girls. Some attend to Sontag's notion of the "double standard of aging," by which women suffer scorn and exclusion as they grow old—"a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification" (Sontag 1972: 102). But even studies of women "of a certain age" (Sontag 1972: 99) focus on middle age—a time when physical markers such as menopause, wrinkles, and the like emerge and care work for old people begins to occupy women's time. Even though feminists have contributed to the literature on bodies, discussion of old bodies is sorely lacking (Laz 2003) beyond discussions of menopause. And while a handful of scholars in their fifties or sixties have done important work on age oppression, such literature "primarily refers not to deep old age but to the late middle years, roughly equating to fifties to seventies, and to the processes and experiences of aging rather than old age itself" (Twigg 2004: 62). That is, feminist scholarship on aging bodies has generally not been concerned with the "Fourth Age"—a time qualitatively different from the Third Age in that it is marked by serious infirmity. Care-work research tends not to examine old women who give or receive care. Old age, as a political location, has been ignored.

Feminist scholars recently have expressed more concern about aging (perhaps because more are aware of their own aging), but rarely do they study old people or examine age relations critically.¹ The scant scholarship on old age differs markedly from the passionate work on late middle age; it is "written from the outside, it is about them—the old—not us" (Twigg 2004:64). Scholars employ others' data to document the disadvantages that women face in old age, such as low income, widowhood, and physical disability. But these accounts of the "problems of old women" (Gibson 1996) do not analyze age relations. For the most part, feminists have not talked to old women to explore their daily experiences; they have not attuned to the advantages old women might also have in relation to old men, such as stronger support networks (e.g., Barker, Morrow, and Mitteness 1998). They have not considered the intersections of inequalities with old age such that, for example, old black men are more likely to be poor than are old white women (Calasanti and Slevin 2001).

Feminists exclude old people both in their choice of research questions and in their theoretical approaches. They often write or say "older" rather than "old" to avoid the negativity of the latter. They may see old age as a social construction and take it as a sign of women's inequality that they are denigrated as "old" before men are, but we do not often question the stigma affixed to old age. We don't ask why it seems denigrating to label someone "old." Feminists have analyzed how terms related to girls and women, such as "sissy" and "girly," are used to put men and boys down and reinforce women's inferiority. Yet we have not considered the age relations that use these terms to keep old and young groups in their respective places.

The absence of a feminist critique of ageism and age relations furthers the oppression that old people face, especially those marginalized at the intersections of multiple hierarchies. For example, by accepting the cultural dictate to "age successfully" (e.g., Friedan 1993) that underlies the "new gerontology" (Holstein and Minkler 2003), feminists reinforce ageism. Developed by Rowe and Kahn, the notion of successful aging was meant to displace the view of old age as a time of disease and decline with a "vigorous emphasis on the potential for and indeed the likelihood of a healthy and engaged old age" (Holstein and Minkler 2003:787). Successful aging requires maintenance of the activities popular among the middle-agers privileged with money and leisure time. Thus, staying fit, or at least appearing fit, is highly valued social capital. In this sense, successful aging means not aging, not being "old," or, at the very least, not looking old. The body has become central to identity and to aging, and the maintenance of its youthful appearance has become a lifelong project that requires increasing levels of work.

Many of the age-resisting cultural practices are the purview of women. Successful aging assumes a "feminine" aspect in the ideal that the good elderly woman be healthy, slim, discreetly sexy, and independent (Ruddick 1999). Suffice it to say, our constructions of old age contain little that is positive. Fear of and disgust with growing old are widespread; people stigmatize it and associate it with personal failure, with "letting yourself go." Furthermore, class, gender, and racial biases embedded in these standards of middle age emphasize control over and choice about aging. We see advertising images of old people playing golf or tennis, traveling, sipping wine in front of sunsets, and strolling (or jogging) on the beaches of upscale resorts. Such pursuits, and the consumption depicted in ads for posh retirement communities, assume a sort of active lifestyle available only to a select group (McHugh 2000): men, whose race and class make them most likely to be able to afford it, and their spouses.

Cruikshank noted the "almost inescapable" judgment that old women's bodies are unattractive, but we know little about how old women endure this rejection (Cruikshank 2003: 147). Thus, though reporting on women who have aged "successfully" (e.g., Friedan 1993) might help negate ageist stereotypes of old women as useless or unhappy, it remains ageist in that it reinforces these standards of middle age. In light of the physical changes that occur as they age, then, many old people must develop strategies to preserve their "youthfulness" so that they will not be seen as old. As a result, old people and their bodies have become subject to a kind of discipline to activity. Those who are chronically impaired, or who prefer to be contemplative, are considered to be "problem" old people (Katz 2000; Holstein 1999; Holstein and Minkler 2003). Those who remain "active" are "not old"; those who are less active are "old" and thus less valuable.

This study of age relations also complicates theories of gender privilege. For instance, consumer capitalists can profit by the degradation of the status of men as they age. Katz (2001/2002) argued that the advertisements of the antiaging industry present old men as potentially manly but in need of consumer regimens to remain so. Even old men who are white and rich are also generally retired and weakening, thus losing their institutional grips on the hegemonic ideals of manhood. Once out of the labor market and the realm of those considered sexually desirable by the young, old men find themselves second-class citizens. The men pictured in the antiaging advertisements drive themselves into expensive and strenuous fun, translating the achievement orientations of the labor market into those of recreational consumption. Banned from the competition for salaries and promotions, they struggle for status by spending the wealth and strength they have to play as young men do in their attempt to appear as vigorous as possible.

Proponents of agelessness argue that being old is all a social construction (Andrews 1999)—based on how one thinks and acts. Thus we can avoid becoming old by simply not thinking and acting "old." To be sure, age categories are subjective, and all stages are constructions. Nevertheless, as Andrews (1999:302) observed, "there is not much serious discussion about eliminating infancy, adolescence, or adulthood from the developmental landscape. It is only old age which comes under the scalpel." Whether our quest is to age successfully or to be ageless, this need to deny old age lies at the heart of ageism. We deny that we are aging, and when forced to confront the process, we treat it as ugly and tragic.

Age categories have real consequences, and bodies—old bodies—matter. They have a material reality along with their social interpretation (Laz 2003). Old people are not, in fact, just like middle-aged persons but only older. They are different. And as is the case with other forms of oppression, we must acknowledge and accept these differences, even see them as valuable. We must distinguish between age resistance and age denial (Twigg 2004: 63), and to do so, we must theorize the age relations that underlie the devaluation of old age.

Age Relations

Scholars have scarcely theorized age relations, beyond Laws's (1995) important work on age, as being a complex of social relations.² As a result, our discussion here represents an early stage in this endeavor. Our notion of age relations comprises three dimensions. First, age serves a social organizing principle; second, different age groups gain identities and power in relation to one another; and third, age relations intersect with other power relations. Together, these have consequences for life chances—for peoples abilities to enjoy the good things in life. The focus on age relations enables us to learn more about how all of our positions and experiences rest on power relations based on age.

The first assertion, that societies are organized on the basis of age, is widely documented by scholars in aging studies. Age is a master status characteristic that defines individuals as well as groups (Hendricks 2003). Societies proscribe appropriate behaviors and obligations based on age. The second and third aspects of age relations speak more directly to issues of power and how and why such age-based organization matters for life chances. Old age not only exacerbates other inequalities but also is a social location in its own right, conferring a loss of power for all those designated as "old" regardless of their advantages in other hierarchies.

When feminists explore power relations such as those based on gender, we point to systematic differences between women and men (recognizing that other power relations come into play). In theorizing age relations, then, we also posit systematic differences between being, for instance, an old woman and a young woman. This position does not deny the importance of life-course and aging processes but instead posits discrimination and exclusion based on age—across lines of such inequalities as race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, or gender. The point at which one becomes "old" varies with these other inequalities. Once reached, old age brings losses of authority and status. Old age is a unique time of life and not simply an additive result of events occurring over the life course. Those who are perceived to be old are marginalized and lose power; they are subjected to violence (such as elder abuse) and to exploitation and cultural imperialism (Laws 1995). They suffer inequalities in distributions of authority, status, and money, and these inequalities are seen to be natural, and thus beyond dispute. Next, we briefly discuss how old people experience these inequalities.

Loss of Power

Old people lose authority and autonomy. For instance, doctors treat old patients differently than younger clients, more often withholding information, services, and treatment of medical problems (Robb, Chen, and Haley 2002). On one hand, doctors often take the complaints of old people less seriously than younger clients, attributing them to "old age" (Quadagno 1999). On the other hand, old age has been biomedicalized—a process whereby the outcomes of social factors are defined as medical or personal problems to be alleviated by medical intervention. Old people lose their ability to make decisions about their bodies and undergo drug therapies rather than other curative treatments (Wilson 2000; Estes and Binney 1991).

Workplace Issues and Marginalization

Ageism costs old people in the labor market both status and money. Although the attitudes and beliefs of employers are certainly implicated (e.g., Encel 1999), often ageism is more subtly incorporated into staffing and recruitment policies, career structures, and retirement policies (Bytheway 1995). The inability to earn money in later life means that most old people must rely on others—family or the state. And when we consider the economic dependence and security of old people, the oppressive nature of age relations become apparent. The fiscal policies and welfare retrenchment in many Western countries provide one lens on the discrimination faced by old people as they increasingly face cutbacks. As Wilson (2000: 9) noted, "Economic policies are often presented as rational and inevitable but, given the power structure of society, these so-called inevitable choices usually end up protecting younger age groups and resulting in unpleasant outcomes for those in later life (cuts in pensions or charges for health care)." Demographic projections about aging populations are often used to justify such changes, even though relevant evidence is often lacking. Furthermore, neither the public nor decision makers seem willing to consider counterevidence, such as cross-cultural comparisons that reveal little relationship between the percentage of social spending on old persons and their percentage within the overall population (Wilson 2000). Predictions of dire consequences attendant on an aging population are similarly unrelated. Indeed, with only 12.4 percent of its population age sixty-five years and older, the United States ranks thirty-seventh among countries with at least 10 percent of their population age six...