It’s not unusual to wince when looking back at how we saw the world earlier in life—areas of innocence that became decidedly more complex and nuanced over time, invisible biases that once skewed our perceptions, situations that loomed with great significance yet seemed much less crucial decades later. After all, this expansion beyond our prior outlook marks the accumulation of life experience and perhaps also reflects long-awaited societal shifts. So, what’s a little humiliation in retrospect?

The issue of Generations Journal I’m choosing to highlight (Winter 2017–18, vol. 41, issue 4) takes us through many awakenings as to what it means to be a woman who is growing older.

In her essay “A Personal, Professional, and Political Journey as a Feminist Gerontologist,” Nancy Hooyman recalled one of her key reconsiderations: “Upon reflection, I am embarrassed to admit that I once wondered why women’s consciousness raising groups were necessary.” It wasn’t until 1978, when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that she witnessed firsthand “the ageism, sexism, and power dynamics of the health-care system,” when she saw providers talking only to her and her father—and “objectifying” her mother.

Yet in her caregiver research from the 1980s and 1990s, she notes how she joined others in seeing stress from caregiving as a private issue requiring “practice interventions that promote personal adjustment (e.g., education, support groups, and counseling) rather than macro-level change” (pp. 57–58).

Though I have long known Nancy as a mentor and a friend, I was inspired by the courage of her self-scrutiny as she describes finally moving beyond a focus on individual burdens:

"Gender matters in healthcare and in long-term care because of the gendered nature of the life course and the resultant inequities experienced by women as givers and recipients of care. … [The] interconnections between underpaid care by direct care workers and unpaid care by families, and between low status caregivers and care recipients, must be made visible to ensure gender justice across the life course, especially for women of color and immigrant women." (p. 61)

Throughout “Gender and Age: A Focus on Women,” we have a chance to witness several other generative transformations as the personal converges with the professional. In the essay “On Being an Aging Woman: An Annual Conversation,” Joan Ditzion, Phyllis Mitzen, and Connie Goldman together assert: “Along with economic insecurity and illness, ageism is the greatest social barrier to aging well. We needed to start with ourselves—to recognize and deconstruct our internalized ageism.” They recount how they decided to reveal their personal stories, “to give us a unique way to get to the roots of ageism and how it oppresses us in visible and invisible ways” (pp. 131–132).

I found their individual reflections so impactful that I will summarize them one at a time. Joan Ditzion recounted,

“the women’s movement touched me personally, at my core, like no other social change movement had. … The firsthand experience of caring for my mother forever deepened my sensitivity to the needs of aging women. … I fully embrace my sense of self as an aging woman and an aging activist. … I want to have a sense of agency as I age, to age well with passion and purpose until my last breath, and to work together to mobilize an inclusive, pro-aging social movement to end sexism and ageism.” (p. 132)

Connie Goldman explained,

“I began to interview others to find out how they remained active and involved as they aged. I quickly learned that the power of personal stories offers a perspective that facts cannot … that together we have power and that we need encouragement to express ourselves. … I hope what I say confirms the reality that we are more than ‘old ladies’ and we can eventually remove the implication that old ladies are “used up.” … Together we can unlearn some of society’s attitudes.” (p. 133)

Phyllis Mitzen recalled,

“I was a child of the 1950s, brought up with the traditional image of husband as breadwinner and wife tending house and raising children. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. I married in 1962 at age 19, having completed two years of college. … My friends and I … shared child-rearing as we studied, worked, and talked about what we wanted for ourselves and our daughters. … At age 36, I chose social work, deciding that it would give me the broadest practical and philosophical structure with which to address emerging issues. … Year by year, I reflect on my personal story … and I see no clear path but retain a restless desire to mentor younger women … and challenge our—and others—assumptions about women and aging in both the public and private spheres.” (p. 134)

For those of us who came of age before sexism and ageism had been named and challenged, there has been a great deal to reconsider. These three women had to cast off inner constraints to discover who they could be and how they could defy persistent limitations and stereotypes.

To this day, many of us still find vestiges of the old attitudes in ourselves and others. The reflex to care for others first and put ourselves last must be repeatedly examined so that choices can be weighed, help can be sought, and responsibilities can be shared across genders. At last, we can hold a vision for what it means to be an aging woman who makes room for her own aims in the midst of vibrant relationships full of giving and receiving.

As this edition of Generations Journal makes clear, many barriers remain. The guest editor Martha Holstein wrote:

“Old women are everywhere and nowhere. My white-brown hair and small stature render me hyper-visible (she’s a little old lady) and then I become either invisible, that is, not deserving of attention, or in need of help, offered in the slow, monosyllabic, deliberate language of Elderspeak.” (p. 8)

Ageism is still alive and well six years after these words were written. This introductory essay is a gem not to be missed for what Holstein depicts with insight and eloquence,

“By letting being young and its norms become the default position for all that is good, we fail to honor the possibilities available to us in old age. We ignore what is sad or painful about old age and give too little credit to our capacities for resilience, for coping, for making meaning. Who will defend what we prize if not us? … We bow to ageism when we don’t insist on alternative language to describe what we are most proud of, or what we enjoy most now that we are old, or what the years lived have meant to us. We may be kinder, less critical of ourselves and others, content with one activity a day rather than five or six, but in our round-the-clock sped-up culture, what value is there in an afternoon spent with a cup of coffee with friends or a book? We may know more, understand more deeply, and come to know ourselves more fully.” (p. 9)

Each essay in this edition tells the story of finding ways to age with pride as women joining together to reduce economic disparities and other inheritances from past racism, sexism, and ageism. I hope you will read this collection of essays in its entirety. What a treat of self-discovery, even if we might wince at how we ourselves once adapted to or accommodated the confining expectations for women—especially older women—that still permeate our society.

Wendy Lustbader, MSW, is a clinical professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, teaching advanced clinical practice. Among her four books, Counting on Kindness: The Dilemmas of Dependency has elicited the most passionate responses from readers and has been kept in print by Simon and Schuster since 1991. Her other books include Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older and What's Worth Knowing, both published by Tarcher/Putnam.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/Nuva Frames

A Personal, Professional, and Political Journey as a Feminist Gerontologist

By Nancy R. Hooyman

Abstract:

This article reflects a feminist gerontologist’s personal and professional milestones in terms of scholarship, policy advocacy, and service-academic administration. It parallels changes that occurred with the women’s movement since the late 1960s, and how gerontology shifted from a focus on women’s issues per se to a feminist approach that articulates the intersectionality of gender with race, immigration status, social class, age, and disability.

Key Words:

feminism, gerontology, intersectionality, caregiving, women’s issues

As we gerontologists age, we increasingly recognize that aging is personally as well as professionally salient—a realization that was impossible to grasp fully when we were younger and first entering the field. In a special edition of The Gerontologist, in an article called “Aging: It’s Personal,” Pruchno (2017) noted that personal experiences could help identify gaps in gerontological research, theory, and practice. Additionally, Holstein (2015) affirms that our personal experiences are important sources of knowledge. However, when we are trained to be objective scientists, articulating private experiences can be challenging.

I am honored by Generations Guest Editor Martha Holstein’s invitation to write a personal reflection upon my career path—and to articulate what motivated me to adopt a feminist perspective and how it influenced my personal and professional life. However, it is a humbling, challenging task for someone more comfortable with hearing others’ stories than sharing my own. I am more at home engaging in scholarship, service, and policy advocacy for equity for others than in self-reflection. That this is so daunting is ironic for someone who agrees with Ray’s (1999) assertion that feminist gerontologists must engage in self-critique regarding their own attitudes toward aging, while questioning and resisting the status quo. Given my private nature and reticence, I now take the leap of briefly sharing with Generations readers how I came to hold a feminist worldview that has for nearly fifty years undergirded my personal life, along with my research, teaching, and leadership.

Never alone in this journey, I have been profoundly influenced by other feminist gerontologists, including Judith Gonyea, Martha Holstein, Ruth Ray, Margaret Cruikshank, Toni Calasanti, and Carroll Estes, to name several.

My Pre-Feminist Self

Nothing in my background or early academic training fostered feminist inquiry. I was raised in a conservative family in a conservative state and attended a small conservative college where issues of social and gender justice were invisible. Like many women growing up in the 1950s, this was simply the way life was—and not to be questioned. Experiences in my early 20s in the 1960s began to move me away from being satisfied with conventional world views.

I lived in Scotland in the mid-1960s, which exposed me to socialism, Marxism, and anti-Vietnam War protests—although no inklings of feminism. When I began graduate school in the late 1960s, the University of Michigan was a center of social activism. As a community-organizing student, I immediately became involved in welfare-rights organizing, outraged by economic and power inequalities faced by low-income women, many of whom were women of color. I recognized such inequities faced by other women from more marginalized populations. But because of my own internalized sexism, I did not think about how I was denied opportunities because I was female.

Upon reflection, I am embarrassed to admit that I once wondered why women’s consciousness-raising groups were necessary. When in the early 1970s I helped to form such a group on campus, I realized the interconnections between the personal and the political, or the private and public spheres. This awareness intensified in my first academic job when I discovered I was paid less than male counterparts with similar qualifications, and joined a successful class action lawsuit challenging gender-based pay inequities.

Where Are Old Women in Feminism?

The second wave of feminism in the 1970s focused largely on issues of reproductive rights, marriage, childcare, and employment facing younger women. Older women with disabilities and their caregivers were virtually invisible to feminists, reflecting the low status of both givers and receivers of long-term care. I had given no thought to the structural gender-based inequities faced by women as they age until 1977, when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Confronted by the ageism, sexism, and power dynamics of the healthcare system, I resolved to enter the field of aging with a professional goal that other older women would never be as invisible and marginalized by providers, including social workers, as my mother had been until her death in 1978. Providers rarely spoke directly to her, instead objectifying her as they talked only with my father and me.

Flying cross-country with an infant and a 3-year-old to give care, I had no term to name what I was doing as caregiving. I was simply doing what was expected of a “good daughter.” I had neither autonomy nor flexibility in whether or how I provided care. Nor did I question why my husband remained at home while I juggled my job and our young sons. End-of-life resources such as hospice, which might have enhanced both my mother’s and my well-being, did not yet exist in Ohio.

Both gerontologists and feminists neglected aging women during this time period. It is striking that women were only added to the Baltimore Longitudinal Survey in 1978; the first older women’s caucus was held in 1975 at the Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America; and the 1980 White House Conference on Aging was the first to sponsor a special committee on women’s concerns.

In 1981, at the formation of the Older Women’s League (OWL) during the mini White House Conference on Aging, which was focused on women, I was inspired by the activism of Tish Sommers and Laurie Shields, who recognized the imperative of policy advocacy toward gender justice. And I was moved by the African American women who spoke about their lives at the closing session, challenging Caucasian women, who were in the majority, to include the voices of women of color.

Where Is Feminism in Research on Old Women?

During the 1970s and 1980s, research on aging moved from ignoring gender, to controlling for gender, and then to describing gender-based contrasts. However, few efforts were made to understand the structural sources or implications of gender-based variations in economic or health status in old age. Older women’s poverty often was described as being due to individual attributes rather than a result of gender-based differences across the life course in employment history, childcare, and parent care (or a lifetime career of caring for vulnerable others), all of which underlie career interruptions, types of occupations held, earnings, and retirement circumstances.

Even when gerontologists studied older women, they did not always bring a feminist analysis to bear. When I reviewed three new books on old women in The Gerontologist (1999), I asked: Where is feminism in research on older women? These books reflected a gender-neutral or women’s issues approach to research samples, models, and theories derived from men’s experience. From a feminist standpoint, such approaches are inadequate because conceptually, gender is considered an individual rather than structural attribute, and men are viewed as the implicit standard for assessing women’s lives. I argued that it was not enough simply to add women to research studies—an add woman and “stir” mentality—nor was it enough to document the existence of gender differences without also analyzing their origins, meanings, or social structures that maintain them over time.

Because gender is an organizing principle and institutionalized by processes through which people assume “masculine” and “feminine” to be natural, men and women experience aging differently. And because feminism begins from women’s standpoint and views women’s oppression as fundamental to its analysis, women’s experiences of aging can only be understood in light of macro-level social, economic, and political forces rather than as isolated results of individual choices. For example, feminists move beyond documenting women’s lower retirement benefits to ask why they exist and why they are viewed as “natural.” Conventional gerontology may frame studies of women’s retirement in terms of individual financial responsibility and literacy, while a feminist perspective questions what social and economic structures and policies across the life course make it difficult for women, especially women of color, to accumulate savings despite decades of employment.

Moreover, the gender identities that emerge in social interactions across the life course—such as caregiving for dependents—serve to privilege men and disadvantage women. Those who are privileged use their greater resources to justify gender-based inequities as “natural” or based on social necessity, such as implicitly assuming that women will be the primary caregivers. Bringing a feminist analysis to bear on elder caregiving first required a recognition of its absence in feminism and that causes for this are structural rather than individual. Feminism and Intersecting Identities Moreover, feminist theorists not only contend that gender should be a primary consideration in understanding aging, but other intersecting identities should also be incorporated. Early feminist work was critiqued for excluding the experiences of individuals who fell outside of white woman-hood and for failing to acknowledge that being female is experienced differently by individuals in different social classes, of different races, or who identify with non-heterosexuality. I, too, initially neglected to analyze the intersectionality among age, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and functional ability in both my research and my career as an academic administrator.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I attempted to implement feminist values that would benefit all members of the University of Washington School of Social Work. I took what was perceived by others to be the risk of using the “f” world in my interview for the position of Dean and later sought to use my position to model feminist leadership and mentoring in a large hierarchical bureaucracy. Our social work school was nationally known for its research on women and mental health, an Anti-sexism Task Force, a graduate-level Specialization on Women, courses on older women, and support groups. But these initiatives were attended primarily by white women, reflecting our failure to recognize that factors such as race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation are at least or more important for some women than their identity as female.

When we collaborated with other marginalized populations to address intersecting inequalities, we enriched both my feminist analyses and the organizational culture of our school. To some extent, this process paralleled the maturing of the women’s movement, which brought a determination to include the often excluded—never-married women, older lesbians, working-class women, older women of color, and older women with disabilities. Similarly, Calasanti (1999) argued that a feminist perspective offers us one of the best frameworks for understanding the diverse experiences of all groups.

Moving Toward a Caring Society

In the 1980s and 1990s, my feminist and gerontological scholarship addressed two separate but interrelated areas: feminist practice in social work settings, and family caregiving. Only in recent years have these strands become interconnected for me as a feminist gerontologist.

Not for Women Only (with Bricker-Jenkins, 1986) pointed out that studying women and using feminist analyses are not the same and that feminist perspectives may begin but do not end with women. Instead, feminist analyses help us to understand women’s and men’s privilege and oppression and the necessity to end patriarchy. Gender relations—socially constructed power relations between women and men that become institutionalized in various social arenas—are interconnected with other systems of privilege and oppression. Although my work articulated strategies to implement core feminist principles in practice settings (Bricker-Jenkins, Hooyman, and Gottlieb, 1991), I did not fully address the interconnections between private and public spheres (e.g., that caring cannot be examined apart from the policies surrounding it) until my research on family caregiving.

The first wave of caregiving research in the 1980s and 1990s documented family caregiving as a women’s issue, but not necessarily a feminist one. Early research, including mine on objective and subjective burden (with Montgomery and Gonyea, 1985), tended to view caregiving stress as a largely private responsibility, with an emphasis on incremental practice interventions that promote personal adjustment (e.g., education, support groups, and counseling) rather than macro-level change. This individualistic approach overlooked how existing structural arrangements within the home (e.g., family care) and work (e.g., women’s employment in predominantly low-status, low-income jobs) underlie women’s lower socioeconomic status across the life course and their greater incidence of poverty, chronic health conditions, and likelihood of living alone in old age (Hooyman et al., 2002).

As noted in my work on younger women, a feminist perspective involves social critique and social change (Hooyman and Gonyea, 1999). Accordingly, I began advocating for feminist policies in the workplace (paid family leave) and public arenas (public long-term-care insurance) to ensure fundamental structural change in social institutions and attitudes (Hooyman, 1992; Hooyman and Gonyea, 1995). Caregiving not only is a central feminist issue, but also a life-course issue reflecting cumulative disadvantage (Ferraro, Shippee, and Schafer, 2009; Poo, 2015).

Calasanti (2010) posits that to theorize gender gives us a framework to understand not only why gender differences occur, but also why and how they matter. Similarly, a feminist analysis of care moves beyond documenting women’s pre-dominance as caregivers, and a focus on individual burden and supports, to address structural gender-based inequities based on employment and income factors underlying the greater burdens women face across the life course and into old age.

Gender matters in healthcare and in long-term care because of the gendered nature of the life course and the resultant inequities experienced by women as givers and recipients of care. Extending this analysis beyond the private sphere of family care, I later argued that the interconnections between underpaid care by direct care workers and unpaid care by families, and between low status caregivers and care recipients, must be made visible to ensure gender justice across the life course, especially for women of color and immigrant women (Hooyman, 2013, 2017; Hooyman et al., 2002).

My Vision for the Future

A feminist lens broadens the questions I ask about caregiving. Now, I am not focusing only on family care, but also on the central role of women as underpaid direct care workers in caring for old women. My more recent work is based on the premise that long-term care is a central feminist issue across populations and across the life course. But most models of long-term care do not start with gender justice. Currently, I aim to integrate my personal and administrative experiences, along with my scholarship on feminist practice and on caregiving, into a broader narrative toward a society in which caring relationships and interdependence—not independence and individualism—are truly valued by society as a whole.

Seeking to change underlying Western values of familism, privatization, and an ideology of community care, how do we create a caring society—one where those who care for dependent and vulnerable individuals will be cared for by the entire society? Accordingly, my work on direct care workers addresses the intersectionality of gender with race, sexual orientation, immigrant status, social class, and disability. This intersectionality determines who cares for and receives care and the subsequent place in the social order, as well as the disparities faced by care recipients who are primarily old women (Calasanti, 2010; Hooyman, 2014–15; Hooyman, 2017).

I have been influenced by Calasanti (2009), who theorizes that being old confers a loss of power, which is exacerbated by illness, disability, race, and gender. Those who care—whether unpaid or underpaid caregivers—for the old, sick, and disabled (e.g., the powerless), may them-selves experience loss of power, status, and respect, resulting in financial and subsequent health disparities across the life course and into old age. The ways in which these intersections shape women’s aging and physical well-being as caregivers and care recipients are embedded in our society’s undervaluing of care work.

Now I am of the age my mother was when she died. Although in good health and employed, with adequate economic resources, I am living the experience of older women’s invisibility—similar to what my mother experienced. But 50 years after I first called myself a feminist and began to incorporate a feminist worldview in my personal and professional life, I now have the opportunity to learn from a younger generation of feminists associated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs for Justice, and Caring Across Generations.

Acting upon their recognition that care work underlies all other work in our society, they are giving voice to low-income women of color and immigrants, who have been marginalized and made invisible (Avila, 2017; Gupta, 2017; Poo, 2015). They put into action the principle that collective action and responsibility are fundamental to feminism. Forming creative cross-cutting alliances and advocating for fundamental change, they offer hope for the future, despite the current political climate. Implementing feminist values and an intersectional approach in all of their interactions, they eloquently articulate that as long as caregiving is viewed as a private duty rather than a “public value,” the economic disadvantage of women who do this work will continue. Their research, policy advocacy, and social interactions build on making visible the story that addressing inequities within long- term services and supports is central to improving women’s well-being across the life course and into old age.

Contrary to individualistic “lean-in” feminism, their voices are central to feminist gerontology and, most importantly, to a feminist future of a caring society, which addresses the intersectionality of gender with race, immigrant status, class, and disability.

Nancy R. Hooyman, M.S.W., Ph.D., holds the Hooyman Professor in Gerontology and is director of the Doctoral Program in Social Welfare and dean emeritus at the University of Washington School of Social Work in Seattle. She can be contacted at hooy@uw.edu.

References

Avila, R. A., 2017. Immigration Enforcement: Impact on Women and Home Care Workers. Symposium presented at the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics World Congress, July 23−27, San Francisco, CA.

Bricker-Jenkins, M., and Hooyman, N., eds. 1986. Not for Women Only: Social Work Practice for a Feminist Future (2nd ed. in 1990). Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers.

Bricker-Jenkins, M., Hooyman, N., and Gottlieb, N. 1991. Feminist Social Work Practice in Clinical Settings. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Calasanti, T. M. 1999. “Feminism and Gerontology: Not Just for Women.” Hallym International Journal of Aging 1(1): 44–54.

Calasanti, T., 2009. “Theorizing Feminist Gerontology, Sexuality and Beyond: An Intersectional Approach.” In V. Bengtson, D. Gans, N. M. Putney, and M. Silverstein, eds., Handbook of Theories of Aging (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.

Calasanti, T. 2010. “Gender Relations and Applied Research on Aging.” The Gerontologist 50(6): 720–34.

Ferraro, K., Shippee, T. P., and Schafer, M. H. 2009. “Cumulative Inequality Theory for Research on Aging and the Life Course.” In V. Bengtson, D. Gans, N. M. Putney, and M. Silverstein, eds., Handbook of Theories of Aging (2nd ed.). New York: Springer.

Gupta, S. 2017. Telling the Story of Care in America. Symposium presented at the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics World Congress, July 23−27, San Francisco, CA.

Holstein, M. 2015. Women in Late Life: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hooyman, N. 1992. “Social Policy and Gender Inequities in Caregiving.” In J. W. Dwyer and R. T. Coward, eds., Gender, Families and Elder Care. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Hooyman, N. 1999. “Research on Older Women: Where Is Feminism?” The Gerontologist 39(1): 115–18.

Hooyman, N. 2013. “Social Work, Direct Care Workers and Family Care Provider Challenges: Crisis in Care.” In R. L. Talley and S. S. Travis, eds., Multidisciplinary Coordinated Caregiving. New York: Springer.

Hooyman, N. 2014–2015. “Social and Health Disparities in Aging: Gender Inequities in Long-term Care.” Generations 38(4): 25–32.

Hooyman, N. 2017. Addressing the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Immigration Status in Long-term Care. Symposium presented at the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics World Congress, July 23−27, San Francisco, CA.

Hooyman, N., and Gonyea, J. 1995. Feminist Perspectives on Family Care: Toward Gender Justice (Family Caregiver Application Series). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Hooyman, N., and Gonyea, J. 1999. “A Feminist Model of Family Care: Practice and Policy Directions.” Journal of Women and Aging 11(2–3): 149–69.

Hooyman, N., Montgomery, R., and Gonyea, J. 1985. “The Impact of In-home Services Termination on Family Caregivers.” The Gerontologist 25(2): 141–5.

Hooyman, N., et al. 2002. “Feminist Gerontology and the Life Course.” Gerontology & Geriatric Education 22(4): 3–26.

Poo, A. 2015. The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. New York: New Press.

Pruchno, R. 2017. “Aging: It’s Personal.” The Gerontologist 57(1): 1–5.

Ray, R. 1999. “Researching to Transgress: The Need for Critical Feminism in Gerontology.” Journal of Women and Aging 11(2/3): 171–84.

On Being an Aging Woman: An Annual Conversation

By Joan Ditzion, Phyllis Mitzen, and Connie Goldman

Abstract:

As women age, they encounter ageist attitudes—personal, cultural, and institutional. This article describes the eleven-year evolution of an annual intergenerational panel and discussion group at the Aging in America Conference. It was created by activists who believe the feminist approach to deconstructing sexism could be a way to deal with ageism, redefine the public perception of what it means to be aging women, and deal with the challenges of aging. The model can be replicated and adapted to stimulate cross-generational activism to help end ageism.

Key Words:

ageism, feminist, intergenerational dialogue, aging activist, sexism, aging paradigm

In 2006, Connie Goldman, Martha Holtstein, Phyllis Mitzen, and Joan Didion, longtime professionals in the field of aging and longtime members of the American Society on Aging (ASA), realized there was no place at the Aging in America (AiA) Conference where we could talk with one another about our own aging process. We all voiced this same thought: “At the Aging in America Conference, let’s wear our personal hats and talk about aging as us not them!”

All of us at that time were pre–baby boomers—aging women spanning two decades (ages 75 to 62)—who had been activists, with second-wave feminists roots. Suddenly Pogo’s quote, “We have met the enemy and he is us” translated for us to, “We have met old age as professionals and now we are growing old.”

Thus, in 2006 at AiA, we formed an annual panel discussion group, “On Being An Aging Woman: A Conversation.” We promised a safe place for participants of all ages (and genders) to give voice to our aging process. Here we could support one another wherever we were in our aging process, recognize and resist ageist attitudes as they oppress us in our journey into aging, and help each other to liberate ourselves from ageist generalizations.

Aging is a personal and a political process. It is impossible to age in our society without encountering ageist attitudes—personal, cultural, and institutional. We believed that the feminist approach to deconstructing sexism could give us a way to deal with ageism. Along with economic insecurity and illness, ageism is the greatest societal barrier to aging well. We needed to start with ourselves—to recognize and deconstruct our internalized ageism and the cultural and institutionalized ageist attitudes targeted at us.

Feeling “over the hill,” “invisible,” etc., not only are personal and stigmatizing assaults on women’s sense of self, but they are political problems requiring changes in the cultural, social, political, and economic contexts of women’s lives. The personal was political then and it remains so now. We believed that we needed to reinvent the women’s consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s, but now they would address aging, and be applied throughout the life course. Sharing our personal stories would give us a unique way to get to the roots of ageism and how it oppresses us in visible and invisible ways. Our stories could be the basis of an agenda for social action.

For women, the stakes are higher: women out live men and tend to be caregivers. Our well-being and the well-being of our children and grandchildren depend upon us. There aren’t clear road maps for us, but together we can find a way. We need a new generation of intergenerational consciousness-raising.

Personal Reflections on Aging as a Feminist: Joan Ditzion

Reflecting on my adult life at age 74, I see there has always been interplay between my personal life, feminist activism, and my professional work—all with a commitment to social justice values and making the world a better place.

Looking back, I feel it was fortuitous that I was in the right place in the right time in the late 1960s and early 1970s to become one of the original Founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS). None of us would have imagined that the book would have touched the hearts, souls, and minds of so many women here and around the world.

I am forever grateful I came of age during the second wave of the women’s movement, when a whole generation of women was just awakening to the implications of having been socialized female in a patriarchal society. We began to deal with our internalized sexism, embrace our identities as women, foster a women­centered view of the world, and begin to trust our voices and authentic experiences about our bodies, ourselves, and our lives. We believed that everyone would benefit if we eliminated sexism and embraced feminism and the full economic, social, and political equality of women and men.

I was involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and when I was a graduate student at Berkeley I became politically active and was arrested while participating in the Free Speech Movement. But the women’s movement touched me personally, at my core, like no other social change movement had. The personal is political.

Over the years, I have grown up with the Our Bodies, Ourselves book. Initially, I was interested in female identity and in claiming a non­sexist, women­centered view of the world. When I chose to become pregnant, my focus shifted to affirming parenthood (if chosen) in the context of reproductive justice for all, raising the next generation, and the importance of society supporting caregiving, childcare, and work­family balance. This is still the unfinished business of the women’s movement.

The OBOS project led and inspired me at age 42 to become a geriatric social worker. I have always felt a synergy between the values of the social work profession and my personal­feminist values, which have informed my work: writing, clinical practice, teaching, conducting workshops, and advocacy. The firsthand experience of caring for my mother forever deepened my sensitivity to the needs of aging women.

I’m personally devastated by the election of Donald Trump, the rise of misogyny, and the fact that sexism is still alive. But it inspired activism and has gotten us back to our roots. The current generation of younger women now understands and has born witness to misogyny; these women more deeply understand the negative im­pacts of patriarchal power. Diverse women of all ages are stepping up to the plate: we will find ways to work together, young and old, to build on the past and nurture female friendship across generations to defend and protect the advances made, oppose reversals, and end ageism.

I fully embrace my sense of self as an aging woman and an aging activist. I want to pass on my legacy to a younger generation and continue cross­generational conversations as we do on this annual panel event at Aging in America. I want to have a sense of agency as I age, to age well with passion and purpose until my last breath, and to work together to mobilize an inclusive, pro­aging social movement to end sexism and ageism.

Personal Reflections on Aging as a Feminist: Connie Goldman

I was a mother raising one girl and two boys in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when very few women had emerged from the home­centered role. I wanted my children to understand that women were beginning to accept roles outside the home, in addition to managing an orderly household, and that both could exist simultaneously. In the mid­-1970s, when my career in public radio started, I was working with a majority of males. I struggled at Minnesota Public Radio and National Public Radio to establish myself, and the validity of women, in the world of journalism.

In those days, broadcasting was a male­dominated workforce and society thought women belonged at home. It was a time when people commonly disregarded the female point of view if it conflicted with the male perspective. I had to find less aggressive ways of presenting any ideas for change, and learned to become very subtle. If I had an idea, I avoided conflict and rejection by suggesting that a male had inspired it. It was more important to me that the idea be implemented than to fight for credit.

In the 1980s, American culture was focused on finding ways to avoid and deny discussing aging. On my birthday, greeting cards arrived containing implications that I was heading into a time of life that I should try to avoid. I wasn’t much cheered by them. Hey, we loved turning 21; it opened new worlds. Why wouldn’t additional years continue to present expanding horizons? What if we looked at midlife and years beyond as a quest, not a crisis? Maybe our later years would be richer if we labeled them “mature” instead of “old”?

I began to interview others to find out how they remained active and involved as they aged. I quickly learned that the power of personal stories offers a perspective that facts cannot, yet also offers a source of comfort and inspiration. We hear a story and we laugh, cry, empathize, and sympathize. Insight, inspiration, and new possibilities can arrive as we learn about ourselves through the stories of others.

Our annual panel is and has been a reminder that together we have power and that we need encouragement to express ourselves in accepted and appropriate ways. It is an important experience for us all as we face individual changes and challenges. In my earlier years, I earned the gift of validation, which has brought me to a time of life, at age 86, where I am working not only by example, but also by the words I write and speak. I hope what I say confirms the reality that we are more than “old ladies” and we can eventually remove the implication that old ladies are “used up.”

I’m hopeful our AiA sessions “On Being an Aging Woman” will help others to welcome their later years. Together we can unlearn some of society’s attitudes, and by telling our stories with honesty, we can inspire others to stay active.

Our Panel Discussion Group’s Eleven-Year Evolution

Our panel of women is diverse, representing different decades, starting with those who are in their 50s, and our diverse audience has ranged from people in their 20s to their 80s. Each year, we attract loyal followers and new audiences.

We invite new people to join our core panel to represent intergenerational activism and to give an authentic voice to women’s experiences and stories at each decade (Eleanor Browne, 2009–2011; Pat Pullens, 2012–2014; Catherine Williamson, 2016–2017).

We panel founders also have aged, passing the milestone years of 65, 70, 80, and 85, becoming grandparents, adjusting to new patterns of work and retirement, dealing with health challenges, and losing parents, partners, and friends. We were conscious about the changing place we held in our social, political, economic, and cultural positions in society and talked each year about finding ways to adapt and cope. Our goal was to inspire participants to apply principles of the consciousness-raising process in their personal and professional lives, and to replicate or adapt the model back home.

The panel’s discussion session starts with each panelist spending three to five minutes responding to the question, “Can you give examples in the last year when age-related challenges felt particularly central to your identity? How did you feel?” The audience reflects on the panelists’ experiences, and we then divide into intergenerational groups of four to five to discuss a question that enables audience members to reflect on their own aging processes. The room buzzes with conversation before audience members report back to the larger group. The conclusion is an open discussion on implications for resisting ageist attitudes.

Some of our sample discussion questions include the following:

• In what ways has your aging process shifted the priorities in your life from what they were last year, both in your internal process, and the way you relate to the world?
• Has your aging body led you to make any specific choices about how to live your life?
• What does a good old age mean to you? What do you fear most about becoming an old woman?
• In our youth-obsessed culture, how do you accept the natural changes in your aging process and not give in to cultural attitudes that devalue us as we age? How do you deal with your own internalized ageist attitudes?
• How do you react to your face in the mirror? What do you see?
• How has the role of friendship in your life changed as you have aged?

This annual AiA session allows space for authentic dialogue among our age cohorts and across generations, as together we rethink the aging paradigm and co-create new narratives.

The themes that arise are rich in the diversity and complexity of women’s lives. We talk about our roles as caregivers for parents, and about spouses, children, grandchildren, lovers, and friends. We talk about divorces, widowhood, and loss. We talk about the power of community, particularly as we transition from work (including ageism in the workplace) to retirement. We talk about changing living environments as we downsize or anticipate moving to age-segregated housing, and the financial implications—will I have enough money for the rest of my life?

Legacy has been a thread that wove through many conversations: how can we engage in meaningful activities while passing on our legacy to future generations? We talk about the many changes happening in our bodies and society’s pressure on us to stay young. We talk about coping with the inevitable changes in our health, accepting new vulnerabilities as we uncover hidden suffering, along with acceptance of these changes. There is always the lingering question of “Who will care for me”? And this leads to off-shoot questions: Who will I survive? How will I face my own mortality?

At the end of our session, the panel routinely challenges the group to think about how its collective conversation can be a starting point to reform society—to rethink lifecycle stages, to address gender and intergenerational inequalities, to end ageism, and to activate women’s voices in public and political spaces.

A Few Final Thoughts

Panelists at our AiA sessions are all aging activists and are highly motivated to change the public perception, redefine the narrative of what it means to be women, and to deal with whatever challenges we face as we grow old. It’s a hard problem to solve and we have a long way to go.

The power of this session has been the ability of professionals in the field of aging to come together to recognize our attitudes, to take ownership and to embrace changes, opportunities, and challenges in our own diverse and complex aging processes. Each year, we learn new insights based on our experience and we acknowledge that the solutions to our problems require collective action. Through our personal learning and engagement in these spirited intergenerational conversations, we discover new ways to fight ageism—internal, societal, and cultural—create new narratives about ourselves, and contribute to changing the aging paradigm in ways that will help create and drive an inclusive social movement.

The model we developed eleven years ago has withstood the test of time and is reproducible in our personal and work lives. We are all professionals in the field of aging and therefore have the obligation to understand ageism and the richness and complexities of aging. Many of us are on the front lines, working every day with aging women and dealing with ageist attitudes, which sometimes emanate from the people we serve or the institutions where we work. As panelists, we offer this model with the hope that it will be replicated and adapted to create consciousness-raising groups in people’s personal lives, workplaces, and communities.

All of us have a unique opportunity to engage in intergenerational dialogues, to be role models and mentor younger women, and to provide thought leadership to educate and raise consciousness in the public arena about what it means to grow old. The current political climate has stimulated cross-generational activism.

As professionals in the field of aging, and as women, we can once again raise the banner to create a social movement to end ageism.

Personal Reflections on Aging as a Feminist: Phyllis Mitzen

My path to my career and feminism evolved over the course of life experiences, career choices, and social movements. I was a child of the 1950s, brought up with the traditional image of husband as breadwinner and wife tending house and raising children. My mom was a stay­at­home mom. I married in 1961 at age 19, having completed two years of college. I imagined myself teaching other people’s children while our children were in school. However, we had three children in rapid succession. In 1965, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and had experimental surgery precipitating a debilitating stroke. My mother, with teenagers at home, had nowhere to turn to get help with my rapidly aging dad and turned to me. He died seven years later.

All of this took place during the 1960s and early 1970s—with children in tow, our family campaigned for Bobby Kennedy, we marched against the Vietnam War, travelled to Washington, D.C., to see Resurrection City (the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign), and wrote letters to support the Civil Rights Movement.

Reading The Feminine Mystique, Ms. Magazine, and Our Bodies Ourselves, was revolutionary for me. My friends and I, all PTA ladies, joined the League of Women Voters, ran for local office, and went back to school. We shared child­rearing as we studied, worked, and talked about what we wanted for ourselves and for our daughters. There was no clear path for us, only the restless idea that there needed to be a radical reordering of the public and private spheres.

My father’s illness and mother’s predicament had a profound effect on me. I worked for a brief time in a nursing home, which helped me to realize my affinity for working with older adults. Having an academic mentor who focused on aging was a catalyst for shaping my ideas of what I wanted to do. I thought I could have a positive impact on how individuals age and how our society and culture organizes itself around aging. At age 36, I chose social work, deciding that it would give me the broadest practical and philosophical structure with which to address emerging issues. I chose the University of Chicago in order to study for a master’s degree under Bernice Neugarten, a hero, and Shelly Tobin, a mentor. My field instructor schooled me on the insidiousness of ageism shortly after Robert N. Butler first framed it as an “ism.”

All this was at the beginning of my career. Now, toward the end, participation on our annual panel has had a profound effect on me. Year by year, I reflect on my personal story and the stories of hundreds of women and some men. Now, as in the 1970s, I see no clear path, but retain a restless desire to mentor younger women (in the company of colleagues and friends) and challenge our—and others’—assumptions about women and aging in both the public and private spheres.

Resources for Networking the Experiences of Aging

Our annual session at the Aging in America Confer­ence has also provided an opportunity for panelists and participants to share their experiences with the following organizations that embrace aging with all its warts, losses, and possibilities:

√ Conscious Elders Network (www.consciouseldersnetwork.org)

√ Encore (www.encorenetwork.org)

√ Generation to Generation (www.generation togeneration.org)

√ Life Planning Network (LPN; www.thelifeplanningnetwork.org)

√ Pass It On Network (www.passitonnetwork.org).

√ Sage­ing International (www.sage­ing.org)

√ The Renewment Project (www.renewmentproject.com)

√ The Transition Network (www.thetransitionnetwork.org)

And also of note: At AiA 2016, early leaders in the field of aging and ASA founders gathered to form the Corps of Accomplished Professionals (CAP) as a way to provide meaningful roles for ASA members as they “age out” of the aging field, or as they age into old age.