A Certain Age

Women growing older

Susan Feldman, Marilyn Poole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000319477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Older women run their own businesses. Older women go to aerobics classes. Older women fall in love. In fact, older women have active lives and make a major contribution to the community despite the the public assumption that they are past their use-by date. A Certain Age explores the public and private worlds of older women. Challenging the emphasis on declining health in other studies of ageing, it looks at the interactions between older women and family, friends and the community, as well as their work and leisure activities. The authors discuss the factors that are important in older woman's lives such as home, menopause, fitness, learning, widowhood and intimacy. They show that many older women maintain good health and an independent lifestyle while others experience barriers that prevent them from continuing to be active members of their community. A Certain Age is valuable reading for anyone who works with older people, develops programs or policies for older people, or is interested in the experience of growing older.

part one
positioning

one
positioning older women

SUSAN FELDMAN & MARILYN POOLE

‘Old folk have ambitions and dreams just like everyone else’, commented John Glenn on his return to earth after five days in space in 1998. The imagination of the world was captured by images of the 77-year-old astronaut, who made his second space mission after a gap of thirty-six years. Ageing in the strict sense means growing old. As an older man Glenn is a hero, an icon. But this book is not about valorising unusual and perhaps even dangerous and physically challenging pursuits undertaken by an older person; rather it is about the wide range of experiences of growing old and the multiplicity of positions on ageing, on getting on with life.

On a more personal note this book is a response to our own ageing as women. As feminists we are aware that ageing has not been a central concern of feminism. The more exciting battles it seems have been those concerning women’s control over their bodies, the fight for equal pay, child-care provisions and breaking (or attempting to break) the ‘glass ceiling’ in management and the professions. Even as those people who worked for feminist goals in the 1970s themselves age and turn fifty-something, and more, few of them research and write about the ageing process and what it means for women. Why is this so? Is the thought of becoming an older woman (or an old woman) too terrible to contemplate? As one young woman said recently:

I do wish older feminists would tackle ageing; we young feminists really are grateful for all the ground-breaking you have done already, but matters such as reproduction rights and employment—these are for our generation. We are glad of your support of course but we would appreciate you going on and making some headway with the invisibility of older women, the ways in which they are stereotyped, the way they are treated …

This book is a small step in that direction.

Women are more likely to be penalised than men for ageing because, in Western culture, we are less tolerant of the ageing process and its physical manifestations in women (Kuhn & Gray Panthers 1974; Sontag 1972). The years beyond menopause have been viewed in a poor light, due in part to the dominance of the medically oriented, biological-decline model of ageing, and partly to the prevalence of derogatory stereotypes concerning the elderly generally, and women particularly. Menopause is ‘a prominent biological marker for an aging process in cultures that extoll youthfulness’ (Avis & McKinlay 1991: 65; Feldman & Netz 1997). The stereotypical view of the elderly as sickly and dependent has profound social and psychological effects. The reality is that, for the majority of older women, the later years are characterised by relative good health, activity and independence. Our society needs to provide cultural directions for older women beyond the stereotyped roles of submissive care-givers or frail recipients of care.

Who are ‘older people’ and how do we know who they are?

Ageing is a difficult concept and one that is hard to define. When we talk about ageing and older people do we mean those over sixty, over fifty, even over forty-five perhaps? Or do we mean people in the second half of their lives? Is the category of older person reserved for those retired from the paid work-force? The media are apt to label anyone over the age of fifty as ‘elderly’, and it is with a sense of shock that one reads in newspapers headlines like ‘Elderly woman robbed’ only to realise that this person is fifty-one! Indeed the media reflect the popular stereotypes of age—those of dependence, frailty, decay and decline: ‘Ageing of the individual in the strict sense means growing old’. It can also signify ‘life-long growth and development in physical, economic, psychological, cultural, spiritual and other ways’, a concept encapsulated in the theme for the 1999 United Nations International Year of Older Persons which seeks to highlight the contributions to society made by older people.

‘Chronological age is the simplest, most comparable, and most widely used measure of age’ (Rowland 1991). It defines membership in an age cohort, adding a historical perspective to a person’s life experiences. Using chronological age as a measure assists policy makers in terms of retirement and pension planning (Rowland 1991). The problem is that there is no ‘true’ point at which a person is considered to enter old age (Kerzner 1983). It can be argued that, as ageing is a process that begins at birth and ends at death, it is problematic to ask at what age one becomes older (Rossi 1994; Friedan 1993). Compared with the interest shown in the experiences of, and developmental patterns in, children and young people, little attention has been paid to the subtle distinctions between age categories for people over sixty years of age. Policy makers, clinicians and allied health practitioners need to bear in mind that there are many variations in people’s experiences across age cohorts and within age cohorts. The experiences of a 65-year-old person will be very different from those of an 85-year-old. Not only are these people from different generations but they also have different experiences of, and perspectives on, ageing. As a simple but obvious example, we would be astonished if politicians, health professionals, educators and policy makers placed all people from newborn up to the age of thirty in the same category in terms of their health, accommodation, educational and income support needs; but we scarcely blink when the category of older people includes those aged from sixty to well over ninety years.

Why pay so much attention to ageing?

The ageing of the world’s population is now recognised as a key issue, one that will have profound implications for our society from a global perspective. To date, population ageing has been a prominent issue largely in the industrialised nations of Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. In at least thirty of these countries 15 per cent or more of the entire population is aged sixty years or over and the elderly population is growing faster than the population as a whole. The rapid expansion in the numbers of older people in the population represents a social phenomenon without historical precedent. What is not as widely appreciated is that population ageing is occurring in developing countries as well, with the older populations growing much more rapidly than those in developed nations. Projections are that over the next twenty years the numbers of the world’s people who are over the age of sixty years will grow to exceed 1 billion by the year 2020 (National Institute on Aging et al. 1991).

It is generally accepted that the increase in the ageing population is a consequence of a range of factors, particularly those related to women’s health. These include the decreased fertility rates, reductions in infant and maternal mortality, reductions in infections and parasitic disease, and improvements in nutrition and education that have occurred, albeit unevenly, on a global scale. Because of the significant decline in the world’s fertility rates over the past decades, particularly in the more developed regions, an increasing proportion of the population will fall into the older age groups. It is also estimated that the number of women in the world over the age of sixty years will increase from 188 million in 1990 to 320 million by the year 2015 (United Nations et al. 1991). With the average life expectancy in 1996 for women from developed countries being nearly eighty years (for Australian women the average is closer to eighty-two years)—seven years longer than for their male counterparts—single older women dominate the older age groups in the ageing population (Bonita 1996). Those people over eighty years old now constitute the fastest growing group among the elderly, with women as the majority in this age group. Population predictions point to this trend continuing beyond the year 2000 (Clare & Tulpule 1994). It has become conventional in gerontology to define people as ‘young-old’ (sixty-five–seventy-five years of age) or ‘old-old’ (seventy-five years of age and older) (Moody 1998: 6; Minichiello et al. 1992). Such categories do not consider gender differences nor do they take into account the fact that women live longer than men.

These demographic changes have important implications for social planning, delivery of health and support services, and policy development. There has been intense public debate over issues relating to ageing, including the socioeconomic costs, health-care provision and the education of professional practitioners. In the past, discussions concerned with ageing, and in particular with older women, have focused primarily on the negative aspects of ageing such as illness, physical and mental decline and increasing dependency.

At the same time, the growth of older populations poses challenges to national public policies because societies’ needs change as the proportion of the elderly population increases.

Looking through the gender lens

Gender is one of those things that makes a difference in the way life is experienced (Arber & Ginn 1995). It has been argued that because social science research is not value-free the failure to incorporate a gender analysis of ageing into research is a reflection of the resistance to incorporating women into society, hence into sociological and psychological research. McDaniel (1986) emphasises that as women get older, the gender inequalities they experience at earlier stages in life become sharper and more visible. Arber and Ginn’s research (1991, 1995) is concerned with examining whether social-structural factors are more relevant than chronological age; they consider that the issues of gender and class are prime influences in the well-being of people in later life.

As the Australian female population ages there are significant implications for social planners, policy makers and those involved in direct service delivery. It is important that research on women and ageing considers demographic changes within a broader social context. Coupled with these demographic shifts are significant changes that have taken place over recent decades in relation to beliefs and expectations about the role of women in Western society and their identities in the context of work, family and community. In both developed and developing countries alike, there is a need to achieve a more systematic recognition of older women’s significant contributions in the family, in the home, in the fields, in both paid work and informal economic activities, and in the community.

The demographic reality is that there is a disproportionate and growing number of older women in communities around the world. While surviving to a greater age than men, women face a number of physical and social problems related to their longevity, including widowhood in older age. Experience of widowhood rises from 25 per cent of women aged between sixty and sixty-nine years to 75 per cent of women aged eighty years and over (National Institute on Aging et al. 1991). Women tend to outlive men and because women are usually younger than their male spouses the percentage of elderly women living alone is usually much higher than that of elderly men. The fact that many older women live alone is most often the result of having outlived a spouse, children or siblings.

While ageing is a life event that affects all human beings, it remains important to emphasise the inequalities suffered by many women over the life-course and to look at ageing through a ‘gender lens’. Systemic inequalities have affected women over their life-course in the labour market, in education, in public programs for health and income security, in national legal systems, and in other institutional systems of society. More formalised gender inequalities are often reinforced by custom and tradition which combine to place women, particularly older women, at a distinct disadvantage. Focusing on gender is more than just including women as a demographic consideration—‘add women and stir’ (Glasse & Hendricks 1992)—rather, it involves a recognition that women’s lives are subject to policies and ideologies that have been a major cause of their relative social and economic powerlessness.

When writers in the field of gerontology do focus on older women as subjects for discussion they often categorise them as a group who are considered to be ‘at risk’ in relation to their longevity. Wieneke et al. (1994) are critical of this approach and urge that research be undertaken with women who may be characterised by their independence and ‘wellness’. This concern is also voiced by other writers who consider that women who live to very old ages could be viewed as survivors. As Moody (1993: xvii–xviii) points out, in recent decades we have seen the trend towards the ‘biomedicalisation of gerontology’ (Estes & Binney cited in Moody 1993)—that is, research interests and funding have focused on the ‘biological and medical approaches to ageing’. As many governments in developed countries, including Australia, have moved to fiscal constraints in many aspects of public policy so the catchwords have become ‘privatisation’, ‘means testing’ and ‘rationing’. A recent headline in The Age (7 November 1998: 3) read ‘Young get Surgery before old’, in an article that stated that ‘discrimination against elderly surgical candidates had been taking place on an “unconscious level” in Victorian public hospitals for decades’. In Australia the current moves towards concepts of community care and the push for keeping the frail old in their own homes—while in some ways very positive—is also a cost-cutting measure throwing the care of the elderly on families.

A word of caution is appropriate at this point, as it can be argued ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part One Positioning
• Part Two Participating
• Part Three Relating
• Index