Beyond ageism: teaching feminist gerontology.

Few women's studies programs offer separate courses on aging. Scholars and teachers in the field have other interests; most students are under fifty; and the new field of age studies has yet to influence our thinking. Internalized ageism may also play a role in deflecting attention from the subject of women's aging. At the National Women's Studies conference in Seattle in 1985, Barbara Macdonald excoriated feminist scholars and writers for overlooking aging and old age. Twenty years later, a plenary and two panels on aging were presented at NWSA. In 1985, feminist interest in aging focused on ageism. While that topic still deserves scrutiny, women's aging has become a subject of much broader scope.

Women and Aging, a course I have taught at the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine, examines the social construction of age. Here I will describe methods for engaging students' interest, course goals, difficult issues for feminists to tackle in the class, and typical outcomes for students who complete the course.

First, since aging is an unfamiliar subject for nearly all students who choose the class, I use a technique called "clustering" from Gabriele Rico's book Writing the Natural Way. Students free associate around the nucleus word of "aging" or "old age." The exercise is done quickly to engage the right brain, and the circles we draw out from the nucleus insure that ideas are not ranked. Don't censor, I urge. At the end of the semester, we repeat the exercise so that students can gauge what differences mark their understandings of late life. I want them to be less frightened of aging than they were at the beginning of the class and to be much more aware of women's aging's many facets.

Another strategy is to use changes in my own body to illustrate the physical process of aging. I come to class the first night in shorts and a tee shirt. I point out sagging upper arm skin, upper lip wrinkles, a thickening middle, stubby fat thighs, decreased manual dexterity, a small dowager's hump, easily bruised skin, slightly decreased hearing ability, and some loss of foot padding. I mention but do not show disappearing pubic hair and underarm hair. A colleague once asked, after the first class, "how did they like your cellulite?"

The aim here is to present aging changes as simple facts, to de-mystify them. I balance this display by noting that I no longer have to buy tampax, worry much about others' opinions of me, or pay $3.50 to use Maine state parks and beaches. If I appear vigorous and athletic, that is all to the good, although I may delude myself in thinking that I do.

Besides illuminating our cultural fear of aging, I encourage students to think about age in ways that counter mainstream attitudes. We discuss ways aging has been medicalized in the U.S. to an extreme degree, regarded as a burden, and subjected to questionable prescriptions such as "successful aging" and "productive aging." These terms insidiously embed aging with marketing and competition. Who is equipped to do well in old age? Those with class privilege.

When aging is taught in women's studies, two difficult issues arise. The recent feminist concern with bodies ill suits our purpose because aging is largely culturally determined, and body emphasis can obscure that fact. On the other hand, it is crucial to consider bodies because old women's bodies are usually invisible. From a medical standpoint, old women's bodies are defined by illness and ailments, by unfixable problems. From the perspective of feminist gerontology, the obstacles to better health for women are not primarily biological but cultural. The heaviest penalty for Americans' lack of national health care is paid by old women.

A second difficult issue is that fostering self-acceptance and pride in being old is common among feminists but too much emphasis on age identity can be limiting. Since our culture overemphasizes chronological age, feminists may reinforce conventional thinking by making age a primary identity. It is more useful to see old age as a stage of the life course, to interweave old with other identities, or to highlight differences in the ways women experience aging.

If ever we have a movement of old women to empower ourselves/themselves, stressing a common or fixed identity may be good strategy, but it is not good ideology. Wrestling age stigma to the ground is a noble goal, but it is so pervasive in our culture that making age a primary identity carries the psychic risk of encasing us in angry victim-hood. Invigorating anger at ageism will serve us well; corrosive anger will not.

By the end of the semester, students typically see old women not as frozen in old age but as having both a past and a future. Aware of the limits of the grandmother role, they are now more likely to see their own grandmothers outside of the prescribed role. Students understand the paradox that aging is both within their control and beyond their control. They understand, finally, that aging is far more than a personal, bodily, individual experience; it happens in a cultural context. The more clearly they see that context--the inequalities structured into our current ways of aging, for example--the less an irrational fear of aging will grip them.

Margaret Cruikshank

University of Maine