“I deserve better—such a dangerous, mad thought for a woman to entertain.” —Meredith Duran
“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.” —Gloria Steinem
One fall afternoon I sat in Holmes Park with a bird guide and binoculars. A little girl with blond curls and a red wool cap approached me for a look at my book. As her mother watched, I showed the little girl some pictures of ducks and geese and pointed out their resemblance to the birds we could see on the lake. The little girl enjoyed this, but after I closed the bird book she looked at me and asked with sincerity and kindness, “Where do old ladies come from?” Apparently, she thought we were a separate species!
Older people are walking reminders that aging is everyone’s inevitable fate. In our society, we see cultural and emotional distancing from the old. Of course, this causes distress to both sexes, but women can be especially disempowered.
Old women in America suffer a social disease. For us, ageism may be an even more serious challenge than aging. Our sexuality is mocked, our bodies are derided, and our voices are silenced. We can feel as useless as poinsettias a week after Christmas. In a society that values the young, fit, and beautiful, we all eventually wind up lacking. To make it even worse, older women, including witches and mothers-in-law, are often portrayed as evil villains, intent on doing harm. Although some women have reappropriated the word “crone” and utilized it for empowerment, the population at large does not value crones.
Birthday cards for older women are demeaning. Their jokes are about being senile, drinking too much, or being either sexually over-the-hill or sexually insatiable. While jokes about different races are considered impolite and harmful, jokes about old women are not taboo. In fact, they are everywhere.
When I tell my friends that I’m writing a book about older women, they often respond indignantly. “I’m not old.” “Old” is a negative word in our culture, like “fat” or “dirty.” What women mean when they say, “I am not old,” is “I won’t accept the ideas that the culture has about me.”
Television, movies, fashion, and advertising rarely reflect the needs and circumstances of older women. A February 2017 joint study by the Media Diversity and Social Change Initiative and Humana found that older people appeared in fewer than 12 percent of all Academy Award–winning movies between 2014 and 2016. Furthermore, almost none of these older people were women. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reports that in family films, male characters outnumber female characters by three to one. With some notable exceptions, women over forty have gone missing in Hollywood.
Everywhere in America, attractiveness is overvalued as a defining characteristic. Women’s bodies, no matter how old, are expected to look young and slender. The older we get, the harder it is to meet this ideal. Meanwhile, in this culture, many of our strengths, such as caretaking, emotional processing, peacemaking, and connecting to others, are not acknowledged.
I recently met a beautiful woman my age who works in publishing. Rosa told me she did not want to dye her hair brown, but she had been warned she needed to look young in order to keep her job. Many older women experience great pressure to look young and often consider cosmetic surgery. But we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
If we forego cosmetic surgery, we may risk losing our jobs or our partners. Yet, if we undergo cosmetic surgery and it doesn’t go well, we feel even less attractive and also deeply humiliated. We may be mocked. Even when it does go well, most women keep cosmetic surgery a secret. They don’t want to be judged for artificially improving their looks, or trying to appear younger.
Older women are sometimes perceived as incompetent. My seventy-five-year-old cousin, who still holds a full-time job, was paying for her groceries at the checkout line when the cashier inflicted help by offering advice on what money she should pull out of her wallet. My cousin said that she was torn between laughing at the absurdity of the situation, bursting into tears, or telling her that she could still manage cash just fine.
Another unpleasant experience is when people address us with the plural pronoun, such as “Do we want our jacket now, honey?” or “What do we want for our breakfast?” Ha ha. That use of “we” is infantilizing and can send some of us around the bend.
Explanations for the behavior of the old tend to be markedly different from what they are for the behavior of younger people. For example, if an older woman has a fender bender or gets a speeding ticket, it may be attributed to the fact that she is old. Some of us are not good drivers, no question about that. On the other hand, it could have been the kind of accident anyone could have. If a younger woman had experienced it, the assumption would be that she was in a hurry or just unlucky, or it might be shrugged off by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes.”
These unfair judgments can come up around finances. If we have an overdraft or an unbalanced checkbook, we may be vulnerable to a discussion of our money-managing capabilities. Getting lost, leaving the stove on, and falling have different implications when we are old.
Not long ago a friend in his twenties came over to plant butterfly milkweed with me. We had a good talk while we worked, and I felt satisfied with our visit. That is, until I went in and looked in the mirror. I could see salsa on my shirt. Immediately I was chagrined and wondered if my young friend would think that I was getting addled. If I had been younger, I would not have entertained that thought.
As we age, we also experience role reversals that can feel disempowering. Younger people have the prestige and prominence. Our supervisors, doctors, and attorneys are sometimes decades younger than we are. Our adult children are moving into their own power and, in many cases, they do not want our advice and opinions. This is no one’s fault, but it changes power relationships in ways that can be confusing and painful.
If we’re not careful, we can internalize negative messages and feel ashamed of our bodies, our wrinkles, and our assigned roles. We may struggle with valuing ourselves and even make derogatory comments about ourselves and other older women. Negative cultural scripts can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we are told we are worthless, we can become worthless. If we are told we are not capable of a rich and enjoyable life, we may not build that life for ourselves.
Young people do not understand older people because they have never been old. When we are old, we have memories of being a child, a teenager, a young adult, or a middle-aged person. Our own experiences provide us with a vehicle for empathy and understanding. Younger people have no frame of reference for the experience of sixty-year-olds. They cannot quite imagine our felt reality.
In 2012, the Yale School of Public Health conducted a study of social disapproval of the old in Facebook groups. They found that in the twenty-to-twenty-nine-year-old age group, 75 percent of participants denigrated older people. This study talked at length about what they called “gerontophobia” and its implications for social policy. Of course, ultimately ageism is a prejudice against one’s own future self.
Margaret Mead defined an ideal society as one with a place for every human gift. Our cultural scripts do not offer aging women much of a place. The stories of our complexity, our wisdom, and our joy are not often told.
This isn’t true in every culture. When immigrants and refugees arrive in our country, some find work in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They are often surprised by how older people are treated here. These newcomers often come from places where old people are cared for by their families and tribes.
Around the world, when countries industrialize, the relationships between parents and children change rapidly. In Thailand, young people from the villages have moved into the cities for work and left old people behind. For the first time in Thai history, older people have no one to help them. In Japan, there is a long tradition of living with and caring for aging parents, but this is changing as adults of both sexes work long hours and live in small apartments in crowded cities. Japanese young adults have neither room for their parents to live with them nor time to care for them. This has now become a crisis in Japan.
In our culture, we don’t have useful language to talk about the relationship between generations. Our ideas about independence and dependency lead us to see the world in an either/or way. Older women fear being dependent and children want to be independent. Neither one of these concepts reflects reality. In fact, we are all interdependent all of the time.
If we could think of ourselves as interdependent, as people who are both cared for and care for others, then we could reconceptualize the interactions between the old and the young. Younger people would be more appreciative of what we have to offer. Older people could see themselves as part of a circle of caring that begins with our oldest living relatives and flows down to the youngest baby.
Many older people have almost no contact with the young and vice versa. This is unfortunate for individuals, families, and the culture as a whole. When generations interact, cultures tend to flourish. The different age groups inspire and energize each other. When we understand our interconnectedness, we value each other’s gifts. Otherwise, we base our opinions on the stereotyped stories that abound in our culture. A great deal of potential is lost.
There are notable exceptions to age-related segregation. Many of us have young friends. Some people are not ageist. We often experience younger people stepping up with offers to help. On a recent trip to Chicago, young men and women offered to put my carry-on luggage overhead in the plane and, later, to take it down for me. On the crowded train into the city, a teenager immediately offered me his seat. Walking up a long flight of stairs into my hotel lobby, I was stopped by a young woman who offered to carry my suitcase up the stairs. This kindness and respect for the old always brings me to tears. I am so grateful. So honored.
Many older women report that, as they shop, work, volunteer, or exercise, they are simply not noticed by younger people. An attorney friend told me that, when she is in line for customer service or to order food, younger people often walk in front of her up to the counter. If she is with her husband buying appliances, furniture, or a car, sales clerks address him. She said, “I’m invisible now. I could take off all my clothes and walk through the courthouse and I’m not sure anyone would notice.”
Parenthetically, invisibility is not always unpleasant. It can sometimes be freeing. When we are not noticed, we can behave however we want. We can be good observers of what is going on around us. With invisibility, we have permission not to worry so much about appearances or proper behavior. We can be silly, quirky, and free to do as we please. If we aren’t working, we don’t need to dress for success. As Emma from Denver put it, “I don’t have one pair of pants that I bought in this millennium.”
If we want to, we can live in sweatpants and T-shirts. We can skip events that we don’t care to attend. But while invisibility may sometimes work in our favor, ageism never does, especially when we possess it ourselves.
I interviewed Suzanna in the cafeteria at the hospital where she worked. She was a tall, angular woman dressed in a mustard-colored suit with matching shoes. We had lived in the same community for years, but this was our first meeting. I had heard her described as “the most confident woman I know” and “a natural leader.” Suzanna had a friendly smile, but a brisk manner that signaled, “Let’s get to work.”
We jumped right into a discussion of stereotyping. Suzanna said that she worked on an administrative team where she was the oldest woman in her group. She found herself hiding her age and signaling that she was as young as her co-workers. She said, “I want to own my age. However, if I reveal how old I am, it comes with so much baggage.”
She confessed that, even though she was sixty-nine, she held the same negative image of older women that young people did. When she read in the obituaries that someone had died at age sixty-nine or seventy, she would think, “Well, at least they were old.” But then, she would realize, “No. Wait. Holy crap, that’s my age. I am not ready to die.”
Suzanna noted that in the past few months she had felt less confident when she gave presentations in large meetings. She wondered if she had as strong a voice or as energetic a performance as she once had. She looked at me quizzically. “Am I crazy to feel that way?” We both laughed, but not gleefully.
She lifted her coffee mug with both hands and took a slow sip. Then she told me her job was meaningful and she liked working; however, the hospital required mandatory retirement at age seventy. Suzanna was accustomed to being recognized for her work and she wondered how she would feel when that recognition was gone. She said, “My retired friends do not receive much praise. I guess their validation must come from within.”
Suzanna had become a strong feminist in college. Even though she was in a decades-long relationship with an artist named Walt, her identity was never centered on attractiveness or her relationship with a man. She belonged to a community of close women friends and delighted in all kinds of activities. She felt curious about her many new emotions and identity issues, such as the fact that she was now the oldest woman in her neighborhood. She laughed, “Somehow, I always felt that growing old happened to other people.”
When her mother was alive, Suzanna befriended many of the residents at the assisted living facility where her mom lived. Now twice a month she drives there to lead a bingo game. This experience has challenged her stereotypes of older people. She described one older woman who occasionally nods off during bingo. Suzanna had considered her senile, but now understands that, when this woman is awake, she converses with animation and humor.
As we finished our coffees, we returned to the great disconnect between stereotypes and what she thinks and feels. She said, “Walt and I just saw a movie with great singing and dancing, but, with a cast of hundreds, there was not one older woman actor. It was as if the ideal world would not have us in it.”
I agreed, “No wrinkles or arm flab in that movie.” We shared another mirthless laugh as she waved goodbye.
Suzanna is doing her best to cope with cultural ideas about older women. Even with her feminist background, leadership role, and community work, she has discovered that fighting ageism, even in herself, is a tough slog.
In Reviving Ophelia I wrote about America’s stories for teenage girls. The reality of their lives is so much more complicated and interesting than the cultural scripts that define them. Unlike adolescents, who are just entering the broader society, we older women have lived in it for decades. Our brains are fully mature and most of us have developed skills in analyzing, advocating, and educating. But even with our maturity, we must see our constraints in order to break free from them.
Meridel Le Sueur wrote, “Survival is resistance.” Because our current cultural stories about how we should behave are useless, we have great freedom to throw off our chains and resist definition by the broader culture.
My favorite story of resistance comes from a book called Two Old Women by Velma Wallis. In it she retells the legend of the Athabaskan tribe in Alaska. One cold winter when their community was starving, two ancient women were left behind. The male elders felt they could not feed people who were unable to work. The women had nothing but their clothing, a leather bag for boiling food, and a hatchet that one of the women’s grandsons secretly had left for her. The women expected they would die soon. The old ones always did. But the younger woman argued, “Why don’t we try to stay alive? Maybe we can make it. I’d rather die trying.”
The older woman agreed and the two women become self-sufficient. They struggled with hunger, freezing temperatures, and lack of shelter, but managed to walk to a slough that they remembered as children. They camped along this slough, fished, and hunted for rabbits and squirrels. Not only did they survive, but eventually they were able to catch and dry many fish. After several weeks, their starving tribe happened upon their hut and the old women were able to share their stash of supplies. After that, the women were much revered by the Athabaskans and their story was told for generations. It’s a beautiful true story about what determined women can do.
We can claim our power and secure respect for older women in three primary ways. First, we can take responsibility for educating other people about both the negative stereotypes and the reality of our lives. We can resolve not to criticize ourselves or other women or make negative remarks about aging or appearance. We can state out loud, “I don’t like mother-in-law jokes” or “What you just said about older women doesn’t mesh with the women I know.”
We can be advocates for women of all ages, working to create the institutions and policies we require to live healthy, social, and productive lives throughout the life span. We can dismantle ageist policies and practices with lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, legal action, and protests. There is nothing that grabs the attention of the press more quickly than older women demonstrating with props such as rocking chairs or bouquets of wildflowers. We can write, speak out, or utilize music, art, and theater to change the way we are treated and perceived.
Finally, we can converse with people of all ages. We can visit with whomever we meet as we run errands or take a walk. We can compliment parents when we see them doing a good job. We can praise young workers in restaurants or grocery stores on their work ethic. If they are doing a good job, we can ask, “Who taught you how to work this way?”
Younger and older women working together is a great way to facilitate mutual respect, empathy, and understanding. We can unite with younger women around particular causes or projects. We can form educational groups together and study what we need to learn to be more effective advocates. We can go together to legislators and other policymakers to lobby for causes of importance to all of us.
Especially when we act together, we can create power out of thin air. Advocacy for a broader understanding of women in our life stage will not only benefit us, but it will benefit all generations to come.
The culture shapes us and we shape it. In a society that values young female beauty, older women lose status as they gain years. As our bodies grow old, we must find new ways to stay engaged and empowered. We must both care for our aging bodies and teach the culture to care about us. Let’s push into the current and row.