- Email: [email protected]
A feminist confronts ageism
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152 – 157 www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging
A feminist confronts ageism Toni Calasanti Department of Sociology, 648 McBryde, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, United States Received 8 August 2007; received in revised form 11 October 2007; accepted 12 December 2007
Abstract As a feminist sociologist and gerontologist, I am aware that life and work intersect, with one arena providing fodder, challenge, or impetus for reflection upon the other. I explore those links consciously in this essay, finding some of the earlier tensions that have marked my intellectual and personal life resolved while others maintain their importance. In particular, I have experienced greater acceptance of feminist work and feel a part of a community of scholars; at the same time, I continue to struggle with the deeper levels of ageism in society, both within the disciplines in which I work and within myself. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Feminist gerontology; Gender; Bodies
As a sociologist, I find that daily life interweaves with the research process, providing material to examine and insights about it, as well as the impetus for teaching and service. Schooled in traditional norms of objective science, I have only grown aware of these links over time. I entered graduate school in sociology because of my fascination with group behavior and my desire to study inequality and to promote social justice. These interests had some roots in my working-class, thirdgeneration Italian and Catholic background and in growing up in a relatively diverse environment in California. All of my grandparents were Italian immigrants, and they worked in foundries, sold ice (before refrigeration), ran restaurants, and peddled produce in outdoor markets—work that wouldn't accumulate wealth but could keep one out of poverty and even lift one's children into the middle class. That ethic of hard work and the belief in possibilities, combined with the
E-mail address: [email protected]. 0890-4065/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2007.12.009
religiosity passed from my maternal grandmother, convinced me that everyone ought to have a fair shot at living the “American dream.” Having attended an all-girls' Catholic high school in the early 1970s, I had not regarded gender as a major axis of inequality. I knew that women didn't go to medical school very often and never became presidents of the U.S.; but the 1970s saw such increases in opportunities for women that I worried little for our futures. I saw girls take on the leadership roles in my school and assumed that they would do so as adults. Liberal feminism had taken root, even if I didn't know its name. As the first in my family to graduate college, I felt that all I needed was an opportunity and my own determination. Though aware of the influence of my working-class background on my college pursuits, I remained unaware of other connections between the personal and the professional. For instance, typical graduate education in the 1980s taught us to see ourselves as a generic “human;” thus, I didn't notice the lack of women's experiences and theories of gender within sociology until I studied
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
the feminist literature growing in that field. Only then did I realize that so much of what sociologists studied was about men. This realization spawned one of the first of many connections between research and teaching. Having noticed the homogeneity among research subjects in sociology, I have since incorporated diversity into my courses, in the hope that all students can see themselves and one another in what they learn. I do not save discussions of race for one week of a semester's course but examine its impact on each topic that we cover. For instance, in my Sociology of Aging class, we discuss how minority group membership influences retirement incomes, and what financial privileges accrue to being white. Unexplored territory I entered graduate school in 1977 to study inequality, and I began by focusing on theory. When it came time to conjure a thesis topic, other students warned me not to focus on theory because future employers would be more concerned with research skills. Needing a project and having taken an aging course, I decided to apply new theories of work and social class to data on retirement. Thus began my crab walk down a path toward social gerontology. With its focus on the workplace, my thesis started me thinking about gender as well, but feminist sociology made few inroads into my graduate program before I began my dissertation in the mid-1980s. This period became a critical juncture in my career. First, my marriage and the birth of my first daughter brought home the difficulties of combining career with child raising and how different those experiences could be for women and men. My experience of gender inequities in paid and unpaid work increased my interest in exploring the topics, as did the birth of my second daughter. Parenting took up all the “free” time I had, and my daughter's inability to sleep through the night until age ten (among other things) also meant that the work time I had available was often not focused or used very effectively. And if I took any time to go to the office and work on weekends, my then-husband demanded compensation in the form of equal time for recreation. Second, I was stunned by the lack of sociological interest in old women's work lives. I found, to my amazement, that the only longitudinal data set on retirement excluded women as primary respondents; they were interviewed only if their husbands had died between interview waves. Researchers still regarded retirement as a man's experience, even in households where women had been employed full-time. As a result,
153
I decided to add 60 interviews with male and female retirees to my quantitative analysis of national survey data. I did not anticipate my first breakthrough in this research. With no background in feminist theory, but drawing on theories of work and retirement and some mainstream liberal feminist common sense, I had expected that differences in men's and women's retirement would be based upon varying paid work experiences. That is, if men and women shared similar job structures, I expected that they would have similar experiences in retirement. Instead, I found that women posed questions for which I was unprepared and could not answer. Borrowing some of my questions from the survey used by the National Opinion Research Center, I asked my respondents about their “satisfaction with non-work activities.” Women, but not men, asked, “Do you mean housework?” I didn't know; I hadn't thought about it. Did I mean housework? Was I looking for men and women to answer questions the same way or not? Did it matter that women thought about housework and men did not? How would I then compare their answers? My struggle to understand what I was hearing reflected ambiguities in my own life, as I sought to assert my equality with male colleagues while carrying the burden of domestic labor at home. Results of my quantitative analysis of a national data set were also ambiguous. I found, as I had expected, that workplace structures influenced retirement experiences: workers who labored in jobs with low autonomy and task diversity sought different sources of retirement satisfaction than did those with high autonomy and task diversity, regardless of whether they were men or women. But gender exerted its own force. I found that being married contributes to men's life satisfaction but not to women's; many other factors that affected life satisfaction differed in their influence by gender, as well. In my own workplace, I was startled the first time I met my department head in the women's restroom. I had never had a supervisor of my own sex before, and my surprise brought home to me the daily differences between myself and my male colleagues, as well as how taken for granted gendered structures are. I had come to expect and accept that students would address me in familiar and informal ways, question my credibility, treat me paternalistically, expect that I treat them in a nurturing fashion, or assume that I was the secretary. I had come to learn as well that colleagues would think that the two new assistant professors (and only women) were “conspiring” when we sat together at departmental meetings and that I would have to show I was a “good sport” about sexist bantering.
154
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
My concern about such gendered patterns drove my research over the next several years. I began to develop a feminist framework for understanding how retirement experiences differ by gender: for women, it does not signal a cessation from work. It did, however, make their lives easier by reducing their workload; they enjoyed the fact that they no longer had to set aside special days for doing laundry in order to ensure it got done. Further, women's continued performance of domestic labor and their services as liaison to family and friends provide key elements in their spouses' life satisfaction. Without this work that women did, men had tougher times in old age (Calasanti, 1993, 1996, 1999; Calasanti and Slevin, 2001). This realization served as a first step in my understanding of how gender relations influence experiences of old age. Adopting and honing feminist approaches was both terrifying and energizing. I was in new territory, building a theoretical framework to explain gender-based differences (and similarities) that had been documented but not theorized. Understanding gender relations opened my eyes to the ways in which men's and women's experiences are linked by the power relations between them. Men's privilege depends upon women's subordination; women's work affects men's satisfaction. Each matters to the other in a way not revealed merely by attention to ways in which men and women differ as groups. This understanding of power relations has informed my work not only in relation to gender and aging, but in terms of other social hierarchies as well— including age relations. My work explaining the power-based interrelations between men's and women's experiences has helped me to understand how other inequalities intersect with gender, resulting in divergent experiences of old age. This came in handy as my career path turned toward both gender and aging, and I confronted how marginalized such work can be within the field of sociology. Working at the margins The market was tight in the late 1980s when I began to search for a tenure-track job. My fellow job-seekers assured me that I enjoyed an advantage in the market and beyond because I had been trained in a burgeoning field; soon “all those baby boomers” would become old and would need scholars of aging. My success was assured, they told me. But today, I still wait for this demand to develop in mainstream sociology. To be sure, I received interview requests and job offers. However, I was to be the only person in the area of aging at any of the institutions at which I interviewed,
and many of my early experiences made clear to me the low standing of gerontology within the discipline. In my first year on the job, one colleague told me how little he thought of the study of aging—that the field was so theoretically bereft that he had been able to teach a course on aging with no training. Others warned me that, if I hoped to earn tenure, I would need to prove that I was a “real” sociologist, not merely a gerontologist, and that I should publish work recognizable to them in mainstream sociology journals. The fact that my work was also concerned with gender made it all the more suspect, especially in a department that had never awarded tenure to a woman and in an intellectual environment in which many of the men still felt that feminist research lacked objectivity. Marginalized by my work in both aging and gender, concerned to receive tenure, having given birth to a second child and become a single parent via divorce, I made the strategic decision to publish in sociology journals by framing retirement as a matter of work and social class rather than age. I published by those means, though my focus on older populations seems to have limited the number of colleagues who wished to respond to my work. I experienced not hostility but indifferent silence. Scholars in feminist sociology and women's studies likewise ignored my work in aging. I have since come to understand these responses, as my life and scholarship continue to interconnect and I discover in myself a clue to the implicit ageism that keeps social gerontology so marginal. Ageism in an aging scholar From the time I took an interest in gender relations, I knew that feminism was viewed as biased by its conscious concern with women and that my use of this approach would limit my standing in both sociology and gerontology. What I have only recently understood, however, is the deeper level of ageism that leaves even those of us conscious of age discrimination adding to the constraints upon us. My professional engagement with theories of power relations have helped me to reflect upon my professional and personal experiences and thus to make sense of this unconscious, structural ageism. I had my first inkling while teaching both “Sociology of Aging” and “Introduction to Women's Studies” one semester. I suddenly became aware of how I was behaving in my sociology class—not what I was teaching, but how I was teaching it—because the Women's Studies teacher applied her knowledge of power relations to listen to and critique the Sociology of Aging teacher. I began to see that, even though I advocated for old
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
people in that Sociology of Aging course, I maintained a subtle ageism. I avoided saying “old” in the classroom and heard myself say “older people” instead. Upon reflection, I saw that I was trying to soften students' rejection of old people, encouraging them to see old people as like themselves. I stressed sameness, as if that would mute difference and make aging more acceptable. It was like the sexism of saying that an admirable woman has the qualities of a man, or the racism of comparing a well-regarded black person to whites. The fact that old age is a political location—just as being a woman, a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, or a homosexual are—had not sunk in until I heard myself referring to old people in a similar manner. My realization concerning the depth of ageism, as well as its social acceptability, was further spurred by other interactions with students. For instance, I often ask them to tell me “how we know when someone is old,” what criteria we use. They begin to answer with such benign descriptions as “gray hair” or “wrinkles.” But then someone mentions slow drivers, unfashionable clothes, or that “they smell funny.” Others laugh; students grow bolder, more pejorative, and come up with more humorous indicators. Like most of us, these students understand this most obvious level of ageism. They know that they have spouted negative stereotypes, though they still laugh at them. When pressed, they define ageism as acting as if the stereotypes were true, as not giving individuals a chance to show that they are, in fact, “young.” “‘Old is in your mind,” they tell me; and some old people are not “old” because they “still act young.” This latter stance, I have come to realize, reflects a deeper level of ageism, one less visible because it is so deeply entrenched. It includes “age-blindness”—the belief that “age doesn't really matter, and we should ignore age.” But age does matter: bodies do change, old age is a social location burdened with the stigma of marginal status, and accumulated experiences do make a difference. Why deny this? I tested my observations by asking students to imagine that an old relative whom they love were to say that s/he was old, and imagine further what their responses would be. I have since posed this question to many groups in many venues, and the answer remains the same, word for word: “No, you're not!” But if we posit the reverse, a student saying to a grandparent, “Grandma, you know, I'm young,” no one thinks that the response would be, “No, you're not!” We acknowledge positives that accrue to youth and hope for their futures, despite the negative stereotypes concerning lack of maturity and experience that accrue to youth. But no
155
such positive content, or hope, accrues to being old in our society. As Molly Andrews (1999) puts it, though we know that all age categories are socially constructed, we hear of no hopes or plans to eradicate infancy, childhood, or adolescence—only the wish to be rid of old age. This realization marked my turn from a gender scholar who studies aging to a scholar of aging, someone who sees ageism—the stigmatization and exclusion of the old, the equation of aging with disease—as a form of inequality worthy of study in itself. I am still a gender scholar. But seeing and identifying myself as an aging scholar as well, without the modifier, is a political act. It is my attempt to give value to old age, in all its diversity, just as my use of “old” seeks to normalize the differences that accrue to later life. I know that my use of this term runs counter to the practice of many gerontologists, who generally refer to “older” people, sometimes “seniors,” but rarely “old” people. I do not dispute their intent; I know that sometimes gerontologists avoid “old” when trying to point to something “positive,” when talking about mental acuity, for example. But if we reserve “old” for discussion of those whose physical appearance or behavior is so marked that they could not “pass” for middle-aged, we reinforce the ageism that says that old people are only acceptable to the extent that they can be seen to be the same as those who are younger. In this latter view, being “old” is being “different,” and such difference is not acceptable. Gerontologists know the stigma that attaches to old age; but rather than fight the basis of the exclusion—the belief that difference is not acceptable—we often try to show that old people are really the same. As a feminist, I recognize the role of power relations in both constructing difference and its consequences, and I believe in the potential for difference to exist without leading to inequality. I have therefore chosen to construct my professional role in a way that fights the intersections of ageism with sexism and other social hierarchies. These intersections are moving targets in both my professional and personal work, and I continue to struggle with the implications in my daily life. Ageism and its intersections with other inequalities I have focused much of my current research on ageism and the ways in which it interacts with other hierarchies. This ageism is embedded in institutions, including our popular culture, political process, and social policies. Its presence in the humanities and sciences helps explain my earlier personal and professional experiences; it permeates not just sociology and
156
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
women's studies, but gerontology as well, through the unexplored ageism in our structures and practices. The revelation of this deeper ageism in my students and in my professional and personal life has provided me data for further discovery. For instance, the importance of the body as a marker for aging has promoted the growth of products and services designed to modify the body—not solely or even primarily to preserve health but to keep from looking old. We discipline our bodies to withstand the “ravages” of aging. We “stay active”; work out at the gym; use skin care products, hair dyes, and Viagra; and save money for a retirement full of traveling, gamboling on tennis courts, and gazing upon sunsets with drinks in hand. To be sure, this ideal depends upon class and racial privileges, and the physical strictures we face are gendered, too. But, for those of us who enjoy the privilege of choice, if we avoid these consumer options, we risk striking others as neglectful, having “let ourselves go.” The influx in my mailbox of unsolicited brochures and spam which market ways to stop aging has led me to examine popular culture that promotes ageless living and the booming “anti-aging industry” (Binstock, Fishman, & Johnson, 2006). I have analyzed several dozen web sites that promote products and lifestyle changes, which in turn promise to keep us from growing old. I analyze this discourse in terms of its gendered, ageist content, in view of what we know about how ageism affects men and women. For example, both sexes are denigrated if they are “old,” but women are targets at earlier stages in their lives. Further, the keys to staving off old age revolve around performance and virility (an active sexual stance) for men but appearance (passive sexual appeal) for women. In this fashion, we are told that the ways in which men and women fight aging celebrate and re-inscribe gender inequalities in later life (Marshall & Katz, 2006). Indeed, some ads make clear that for men, aging results from too much estrogen and too little testosterone, and old manhood is closer to womanhood than to the virility of masculine youth. I am interested not only in how such images are bound by gender as well as race and class, but also the extent to which different groups can approximate these paragons of agelessness. Who, for instance, is able to engage in body modification—cosmetic surgery, body toning, expensive product purchases and diets, Viagra prescriptions, and the like? The Sun City image of busy seniors dashing from event to activity amidst landscaped surroundings in luxury cars is available mainly to white, well-to-do men and their spouses (McHugh, 2000). Those of different classes, races and ethnicities, women not attached to such men, and non-heterosexual couples
are largely excluded. I have begun to conduct interviews with middle-aged people (like myself) to get a better idea of who is engaging in what kinds of anti-aging practices, and why. As I attempt to uncover the ageism that permeates our society, so too do I struggle with its impact in my own life, beyond the low status of age studies. As an aging white, middle-class, heterosexual woman for whom the scrutiny of the male gaze increasingly entwines with the pejorative gaze of youth (Twigg, 2004), I am aware of my decreasing “acceptability.” I struggle with the politics of gendered and aged appearance, trying to balance what I know about the importance of presentation of self (Goffman, 1959) with my knowledge of power relations. Where and how I choose battles changes as I grow; I strongly resisted the idea of a birthday party marking my entry into the next (fifth) decade, for instance. It is one thing to engage in this struggle privately, and quite another to announce it publicly. Even though my theoretical background helps me understand why my multiple identities as a women, feminist, and scholar of aging conflict, it doesn't necessarily make me feel better about it. A community of scholars Despite the initial silence that greeted feminism in gerontology, I have always enjoyed the encouragement of significant others. While my work differs somewhat from his own, my mentor (in graduate school and today) Joe Hendricks has consistently supported me; he asks not for conformity but for intellectual exchange, discovery, and integrity. I also benefited from the guidance of Beth Hess, a pioneering feminist in aging studies who took me under her wing when I was still a graduate student. Having the unwavering support of such scholars early on made a tremendous difference in my ability to continue my intellectual and personal growth. Thankfully, time and work have brought change not only to my body but to social sciences as well. Just as I am learning to embrace, rather than apologize for, my interests in both aging and gender, so do I find interest in my work within gerontological circles. To be sure, departments and universities value and reward productivity; but acceptance means far more than this. It means critical engagement with work, inclusion of it on syllabi and literature reviews, and consideration of the challenges that it poses to longstanding theories. I find my greatest comradeship among critical and (especially) feminist scholars of aging. A community of researchers with an interest in power relations has emerged over time, and I have found interaction with
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
them to be intellectually inspiring, encouraging, and nourishing. For the vast majority of my work, I have used feminism to inform both my life and gerontology. It is only more recently that I have used my understanding of aging to try to inform feminism and my own engagement with it. Recently, my co-editor Kate Slevin and I asked some of the brightest and best-known critical scholars of aging to contribute to a book titled Age Matters (2006) and geared toward feminists. Our goal was to demonstrate the importance of taking age relations as a form of inequality into account, by showing how it affects feminist theory, research, and practice. The response of these scholars provided the greatest indication of how far feminism has come within gerontology and of their commitment to feminist work. Each critical and feminist author whose work we solicited found time in busy schedules to provide us with and revise ground-breaking chapters in just a year's time. The result was a collaborative volume that received a glowing review in the Women's Review of Books (Marshall, 2007). I continue to be humbled and thrilled that the topic called for such dedication and commitment by such talented scholars. Though social gerontologists show increasing respect for theoretical revision, I can still see the more subtle forms of our cultural disdain for old people—our future selves—in the reception that my work often evokes from colleagues outside critical gerontology. Most people continue to keep their concern with the aging of our population at the abstract level, as few of us want to think about ourselves growing old. Feminist sociologists and women's studies scholars seldom study old people; most departmental curricula ignore old people and old age (a telling omission in a psychology department, for example, where it implies that development stops in later years). Scholarship on old people still does little to enhance one's status in the mainstream of our scientific professions. Here, at the intersections of my career success and middle age, I feel both the fact of ageism and our need to eradicate it. I see my bodily changes, the indifference that greets gerontology, my peers’ attempts to keep aging at bay, and my parents' efforts to make doctors take them seriously. All of these are data and impetus to
157
uncover and fight ageism. Taught that nothing positive accrues to growing old, we shun it where we can and pretend to control what we fear. Most people prefer to see aging as subject to personal control, with little concern, for example, for how Social Security privatization or other institutional policies could penalize most old people. I find that most people operate under the illusion that individuals should and can budget and save for the 20 or so years of retired life. This more hidden form of ageism, informed by our American individualism, hinders all of us, myself included. Unlike other forms of discrimination that grant people lifelong positions of privilege or subordination, ageism oppresses the people we will become, cuts off our options for collective action now, and arms us for battles we cannot win alone, while leading us to ignore that which binds us. References Andrews, M. (1999). The seductiveness of agelessness. Ageing and Society, 19, 301−318. Binstock, R. H., Fishman, J. R., & Johnson, T. E. (2006). Anti-aging medicine and science: Social implications. In R. H. Binstock, & L. K. George (Eds.), Handbook of aging and the social sciences (pp. 436−455)., 6th ed. San Diego: Academic Press. Calasanti, T. M. (1993). Bringing diversity in: Toward an inclusive theory of retirement. Journal of Aging Studies, 7, 133−150. Calasanti, T. M. (1996). Gender and life satisfaction in retirement: An assessment of the male model. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 51B, S18−S29. Calasanti, T. M. (1999). Feminism and aging: Not just for women. Hallym International Journal of Aging, 1, 44−55. Calasanti, T. M., & Slevin, K. F. (2001). Gender, social inequalities, and aging. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Calasanti, T. M., & Slevin, K. F. (2006). Age matters: Re-aligning feminist thinking. New York: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Marshall, L. (2007). The cartography of age. Women's review of books, 24. (pp. 10−12). Marshall, B. L., & Katz, S. (2006). From androgyny to androgens: Resexing the aging body. In T. M. Calasanti, & K. F. Slevin (Eds.), Age matters: Re-aligning feminist thinking (pp. 75−97). New York: Routledge. McHugh, K. (2000). The ‘Ageless Self ’? Emplacement of identities in sun belt retirement communities. Journal of Aging Studies, 14, 103−115. Twigg, J. (2004). The body, gender, and age: feminist insights in social gerontology. Journal of Aging Studies, 18, 59−73.
Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152 – 157 www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging
A feminist confronts ageism Toni Calasanti Department of Sociology, 648 McBryde, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, United States Received 8 August 2007; received in revised form 11 October 2007; accepted 12 December 2007
Abstract As a feminist sociologist and gerontologist, I am aware that life and work intersect, with one arena providing fodder, challenge, or impetus for reflection upon the other. I explore those links consciously in this essay, finding some of the earlier tensions that have marked my intellectual and personal life resolved while others maintain their importance. In particular, I have experienced greater acceptance of feminist work and feel a part of a community of scholars; at the same time, I continue to struggle with the deeper levels of ageism in society, both within the disciplines in which I work and within myself. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Feminist gerontology; Gender; Bodies
As a sociologist, I find that daily life interweaves with the research process, providing material to examine and insights about it, as well as the impetus for teaching and service. Schooled in traditional norms of objective science, I have only grown aware of these links over time. I entered graduate school in sociology because of my fascination with group behavior and my desire to study inequality and to promote social justice. These interests had some roots in my working-class, thirdgeneration Italian and Catholic background and in growing up in a relatively diverse environment in California. All of my grandparents were Italian immigrants, and they worked in foundries, sold ice (before refrigeration), ran restaurants, and peddled produce in outdoor markets—work that wouldn't accumulate wealth but could keep one out of poverty and even lift one's children into the middle class. That ethic of hard work and the belief in possibilities, combined with the
E-mail address: [email protected]. 0890-4065/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2007.12.009
religiosity passed from my maternal grandmother, convinced me that everyone ought to have a fair shot at living the “American dream.” Having attended an all-girls' Catholic high school in the early 1970s, I had not regarded gender as a major axis of inequality. I knew that women didn't go to medical school very often and never became presidents of the U.S.; but the 1970s saw such increases in opportunities for women that I worried little for our futures. I saw girls take on the leadership roles in my school and assumed that they would do so as adults. Liberal feminism had taken root, even if I didn't know its name. As the first in my family to graduate college, I felt that all I needed was an opportunity and my own determination. Though aware of the influence of my working-class background on my college pursuits, I remained unaware of other connections between the personal and the professional. For instance, typical graduate education in the 1980s taught us to see ourselves as a generic “human;” thus, I didn't notice the lack of women's experiences and theories of gender within sociology until I studied
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
the feminist literature growing in that field. Only then did I realize that so much of what sociologists studied was about men. This realization spawned one of the first of many connections between research and teaching. Having noticed the homogeneity among research subjects in sociology, I have since incorporated diversity into my courses, in the hope that all students can see themselves and one another in what they learn. I do not save discussions of race for one week of a semester's course but examine its impact on each topic that we cover. For instance, in my Sociology of Aging class, we discuss how minority group membership influences retirement incomes, and what financial privileges accrue to being white. Unexplored territory I entered graduate school in 1977 to study inequality, and I began by focusing on theory. When it came time to conjure a thesis topic, other students warned me not to focus on theory because future employers would be more concerned with research skills. Needing a project and having taken an aging course, I decided to apply new theories of work and social class to data on retirement. Thus began my crab walk down a path toward social gerontology. With its focus on the workplace, my thesis started me thinking about gender as well, but feminist sociology made few inroads into my graduate program before I began my dissertation in the mid-1980s. This period became a critical juncture in my career. First, my marriage and the birth of my first daughter brought home the difficulties of combining career with child raising and how different those experiences could be for women and men. My experience of gender inequities in paid and unpaid work increased my interest in exploring the topics, as did the birth of my second daughter. Parenting took up all the “free” time I had, and my daughter's inability to sleep through the night until age ten (among other things) also meant that the work time I had available was often not focused or used very effectively. And if I took any time to go to the office and work on weekends, my then-husband demanded compensation in the form of equal time for recreation. Second, I was stunned by the lack of sociological interest in old women's work lives. I found, to my amazement, that the only longitudinal data set on retirement excluded women as primary respondents; they were interviewed only if their husbands had died between interview waves. Researchers still regarded retirement as a man's experience, even in households where women had been employed full-time. As a result,
153
I decided to add 60 interviews with male and female retirees to my quantitative analysis of national survey data. I did not anticipate my first breakthrough in this research. With no background in feminist theory, but drawing on theories of work and retirement and some mainstream liberal feminist common sense, I had expected that differences in men's and women's retirement would be based upon varying paid work experiences. That is, if men and women shared similar job structures, I expected that they would have similar experiences in retirement. Instead, I found that women posed questions for which I was unprepared and could not answer. Borrowing some of my questions from the survey used by the National Opinion Research Center, I asked my respondents about their “satisfaction with non-work activities.” Women, but not men, asked, “Do you mean housework?” I didn't know; I hadn't thought about it. Did I mean housework? Was I looking for men and women to answer questions the same way or not? Did it matter that women thought about housework and men did not? How would I then compare their answers? My struggle to understand what I was hearing reflected ambiguities in my own life, as I sought to assert my equality with male colleagues while carrying the burden of domestic labor at home. Results of my quantitative analysis of a national data set were also ambiguous. I found, as I had expected, that workplace structures influenced retirement experiences: workers who labored in jobs with low autonomy and task diversity sought different sources of retirement satisfaction than did those with high autonomy and task diversity, regardless of whether they were men or women. But gender exerted its own force. I found that being married contributes to men's life satisfaction but not to women's; many other factors that affected life satisfaction differed in their influence by gender, as well. In my own workplace, I was startled the first time I met my department head in the women's restroom. I had never had a supervisor of my own sex before, and my surprise brought home to me the daily differences between myself and my male colleagues, as well as how taken for granted gendered structures are. I had come to expect and accept that students would address me in familiar and informal ways, question my credibility, treat me paternalistically, expect that I treat them in a nurturing fashion, or assume that I was the secretary. I had come to learn as well that colleagues would think that the two new assistant professors (and only women) were “conspiring” when we sat together at departmental meetings and that I would have to show I was a “good sport” about sexist bantering.
154
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
My concern about such gendered patterns drove my research over the next several years. I began to develop a feminist framework for understanding how retirement experiences differ by gender: for women, it does not signal a cessation from work. It did, however, make their lives easier by reducing their workload; they enjoyed the fact that they no longer had to set aside special days for doing laundry in order to ensure it got done. Further, women's continued performance of domestic labor and their services as liaison to family and friends provide key elements in their spouses' life satisfaction. Without this work that women did, men had tougher times in old age (Calasanti, 1993, 1996, 1999; Calasanti and Slevin, 2001). This realization served as a first step in my understanding of how gender relations influence experiences of old age. Adopting and honing feminist approaches was both terrifying and energizing. I was in new territory, building a theoretical framework to explain gender-based differences (and similarities) that had been documented but not theorized. Understanding gender relations opened my eyes to the ways in which men's and women's experiences are linked by the power relations between them. Men's privilege depends upon women's subordination; women's work affects men's satisfaction. Each matters to the other in a way not revealed merely by attention to ways in which men and women differ as groups. This understanding of power relations has informed my work not only in relation to gender and aging, but in terms of other social hierarchies as well— including age relations. My work explaining the power-based interrelations between men's and women's experiences has helped me to understand how other inequalities intersect with gender, resulting in divergent experiences of old age. This came in handy as my career path turned toward both gender and aging, and I confronted how marginalized such work can be within the field of sociology. Working at the margins The market was tight in the late 1980s when I began to search for a tenure-track job. My fellow job-seekers assured me that I enjoyed an advantage in the market and beyond because I had been trained in a burgeoning field; soon “all those baby boomers” would become old and would need scholars of aging. My success was assured, they told me. But today, I still wait for this demand to develop in mainstream sociology. To be sure, I received interview requests and job offers. However, I was to be the only person in the area of aging at any of the institutions at which I interviewed,
and many of my early experiences made clear to me the low standing of gerontology within the discipline. In my first year on the job, one colleague told me how little he thought of the study of aging—that the field was so theoretically bereft that he had been able to teach a course on aging with no training. Others warned me that, if I hoped to earn tenure, I would need to prove that I was a “real” sociologist, not merely a gerontologist, and that I should publish work recognizable to them in mainstream sociology journals. The fact that my work was also concerned with gender made it all the more suspect, especially in a department that had never awarded tenure to a woman and in an intellectual environment in which many of the men still felt that feminist research lacked objectivity. Marginalized by my work in both aging and gender, concerned to receive tenure, having given birth to a second child and become a single parent via divorce, I made the strategic decision to publish in sociology journals by framing retirement as a matter of work and social class rather than age. I published by those means, though my focus on older populations seems to have limited the number of colleagues who wished to respond to my work. I experienced not hostility but indifferent silence. Scholars in feminist sociology and women's studies likewise ignored my work in aging. I have since come to understand these responses, as my life and scholarship continue to interconnect and I discover in myself a clue to the implicit ageism that keeps social gerontology so marginal. Ageism in an aging scholar From the time I took an interest in gender relations, I knew that feminism was viewed as biased by its conscious concern with women and that my use of this approach would limit my standing in both sociology and gerontology. What I have only recently understood, however, is the deeper level of ageism that leaves even those of us conscious of age discrimination adding to the constraints upon us. My professional engagement with theories of power relations have helped me to reflect upon my professional and personal experiences and thus to make sense of this unconscious, structural ageism. I had my first inkling while teaching both “Sociology of Aging” and “Introduction to Women's Studies” one semester. I suddenly became aware of how I was behaving in my sociology class—not what I was teaching, but how I was teaching it—because the Women's Studies teacher applied her knowledge of power relations to listen to and critique the Sociology of Aging teacher. I began to see that, even though I advocated for old
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
people in that Sociology of Aging course, I maintained a subtle ageism. I avoided saying “old” in the classroom and heard myself say “older people” instead. Upon reflection, I saw that I was trying to soften students' rejection of old people, encouraging them to see old people as like themselves. I stressed sameness, as if that would mute difference and make aging more acceptable. It was like the sexism of saying that an admirable woman has the qualities of a man, or the racism of comparing a well-regarded black person to whites. The fact that old age is a political location—just as being a woman, a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, or a homosexual are—had not sunk in until I heard myself referring to old people in a similar manner. My realization concerning the depth of ageism, as well as its social acceptability, was further spurred by other interactions with students. For instance, I often ask them to tell me “how we know when someone is old,” what criteria we use. They begin to answer with such benign descriptions as “gray hair” or “wrinkles.” But then someone mentions slow drivers, unfashionable clothes, or that “they smell funny.” Others laugh; students grow bolder, more pejorative, and come up with more humorous indicators. Like most of us, these students understand this most obvious level of ageism. They know that they have spouted negative stereotypes, though they still laugh at them. When pressed, they define ageism as acting as if the stereotypes were true, as not giving individuals a chance to show that they are, in fact, “young.” “‘Old is in your mind,” they tell me; and some old people are not “old” because they “still act young.” This latter stance, I have come to realize, reflects a deeper level of ageism, one less visible because it is so deeply entrenched. It includes “age-blindness”—the belief that “age doesn't really matter, and we should ignore age.” But age does matter: bodies do change, old age is a social location burdened with the stigma of marginal status, and accumulated experiences do make a difference. Why deny this? I tested my observations by asking students to imagine that an old relative whom they love were to say that s/he was old, and imagine further what their responses would be. I have since posed this question to many groups in many venues, and the answer remains the same, word for word: “No, you're not!” But if we posit the reverse, a student saying to a grandparent, “Grandma, you know, I'm young,” no one thinks that the response would be, “No, you're not!” We acknowledge positives that accrue to youth and hope for their futures, despite the negative stereotypes concerning lack of maturity and experience that accrue to youth. But no
155
such positive content, or hope, accrues to being old in our society. As Molly Andrews (1999) puts it, though we know that all age categories are socially constructed, we hear of no hopes or plans to eradicate infancy, childhood, or adolescence—only the wish to be rid of old age. This realization marked my turn from a gender scholar who studies aging to a scholar of aging, someone who sees ageism—the stigmatization and exclusion of the old, the equation of aging with disease—as a form of inequality worthy of study in itself. I am still a gender scholar. But seeing and identifying myself as an aging scholar as well, without the modifier, is a political act. It is my attempt to give value to old age, in all its diversity, just as my use of “old” seeks to normalize the differences that accrue to later life. I know that my use of this term runs counter to the practice of many gerontologists, who generally refer to “older” people, sometimes “seniors,” but rarely “old” people. I do not dispute their intent; I know that sometimes gerontologists avoid “old” when trying to point to something “positive,” when talking about mental acuity, for example. But if we reserve “old” for discussion of those whose physical appearance or behavior is so marked that they could not “pass” for middle-aged, we reinforce the ageism that says that old people are only acceptable to the extent that they can be seen to be the same as those who are younger. In this latter view, being “old” is being “different,” and such difference is not acceptable. Gerontologists know the stigma that attaches to old age; but rather than fight the basis of the exclusion—the belief that difference is not acceptable—we often try to show that old people are really the same. As a feminist, I recognize the role of power relations in both constructing difference and its consequences, and I believe in the potential for difference to exist without leading to inequality. I have therefore chosen to construct my professional role in a way that fights the intersections of ageism with sexism and other social hierarchies. These intersections are moving targets in both my professional and personal work, and I continue to struggle with the implications in my daily life. Ageism and its intersections with other inequalities I have focused much of my current research on ageism and the ways in which it interacts with other hierarchies. This ageism is embedded in institutions, including our popular culture, political process, and social policies. Its presence in the humanities and sciences helps explain my earlier personal and professional experiences; it permeates not just sociology and
156
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
women's studies, but gerontology as well, through the unexplored ageism in our structures and practices. The revelation of this deeper ageism in my students and in my professional and personal life has provided me data for further discovery. For instance, the importance of the body as a marker for aging has promoted the growth of products and services designed to modify the body—not solely or even primarily to preserve health but to keep from looking old. We discipline our bodies to withstand the “ravages” of aging. We “stay active”; work out at the gym; use skin care products, hair dyes, and Viagra; and save money for a retirement full of traveling, gamboling on tennis courts, and gazing upon sunsets with drinks in hand. To be sure, this ideal depends upon class and racial privileges, and the physical strictures we face are gendered, too. But, for those of us who enjoy the privilege of choice, if we avoid these consumer options, we risk striking others as neglectful, having “let ourselves go.” The influx in my mailbox of unsolicited brochures and spam which market ways to stop aging has led me to examine popular culture that promotes ageless living and the booming “anti-aging industry” (Binstock, Fishman, & Johnson, 2006). I have analyzed several dozen web sites that promote products and lifestyle changes, which in turn promise to keep us from growing old. I analyze this discourse in terms of its gendered, ageist content, in view of what we know about how ageism affects men and women. For example, both sexes are denigrated if they are “old,” but women are targets at earlier stages in their lives. Further, the keys to staving off old age revolve around performance and virility (an active sexual stance) for men but appearance (passive sexual appeal) for women. In this fashion, we are told that the ways in which men and women fight aging celebrate and re-inscribe gender inequalities in later life (Marshall & Katz, 2006). Indeed, some ads make clear that for men, aging results from too much estrogen and too little testosterone, and old manhood is closer to womanhood than to the virility of masculine youth. I am interested not only in how such images are bound by gender as well as race and class, but also the extent to which different groups can approximate these paragons of agelessness. Who, for instance, is able to engage in body modification—cosmetic surgery, body toning, expensive product purchases and diets, Viagra prescriptions, and the like? The Sun City image of busy seniors dashing from event to activity amidst landscaped surroundings in luxury cars is available mainly to white, well-to-do men and their spouses (McHugh, 2000). Those of different classes, races and ethnicities, women not attached to such men, and non-heterosexual couples
are largely excluded. I have begun to conduct interviews with middle-aged people (like myself) to get a better idea of who is engaging in what kinds of anti-aging practices, and why. As I attempt to uncover the ageism that permeates our society, so too do I struggle with its impact in my own life, beyond the low status of age studies. As an aging white, middle-class, heterosexual woman for whom the scrutiny of the male gaze increasingly entwines with the pejorative gaze of youth (Twigg, 2004), I am aware of my decreasing “acceptability.” I struggle with the politics of gendered and aged appearance, trying to balance what I know about the importance of presentation of self (Goffman, 1959) with my knowledge of power relations. Where and how I choose battles changes as I grow; I strongly resisted the idea of a birthday party marking my entry into the next (fifth) decade, for instance. It is one thing to engage in this struggle privately, and quite another to announce it publicly. Even though my theoretical background helps me understand why my multiple identities as a women, feminist, and scholar of aging conflict, it doesn't necessarily make me feel better about it. A community of scholars Despite the initial silence that greeted feminism in gerontology, I have always enjoyed the encouragement of significant others. While my work differs somewhat from his own, my mentor (in graduate school and today) Joe Hendricks has consistently supported me; he asks not for conformity but for intellectual exchange, discovery, and integrity. I also benefited from the guidance of Beth Hess, a pioneering feminist in aging studies who took me under her wing when I was still a graduate student. Having the unwavering support of such scholars early on made a tremendous difference in my ability to continue my intellectual and personal growth. Thankfully, time and work have brought change not only to my body but to social sciences as well. Just as I am learning to embrace, rather than apologize for, my interests in both aging and gender, so do I find interest in my work within gerontological circles. To be sure, departments and universities value and reward productivity; but acceptance means far more than this. It means critical engagement with work, inclusion of it on syllabi and literature reviews, and consideration of the challenges that it poses to longstanding theories. I find my greatest comradeship among critical and (especially) feminist scholars of aging. A community of researchers with an interest in power relations has emerged over time, and I have found interaction with
T. Calasanti / Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 152–157
them to be intellectually inspiring, encouraging, and nourishing. For the vast majority of my work, I have used feminism to inform both my life and gerontology. It is only more recently that I have used my understanding of aging to try to inform feminism and my own engagement with it. Recently, my co-editor Kate Slevin and I asked some of the brightest and best-known critical scholars of aging to contribute to a book titled Age Matters (2006) and geared toward feminists. Our goal was to demonstrate the importance of taking age relations as a form of inequality into account, by showing how it affects feminist theory, research, and practice. The response of these scholars provided the greatest indication of how far feminism has come within gerontology and of their commitment to feminist work. Each critical and feminist author whose work we solicited found time in busy schedules to provide us with and revise ground-breaking chapters in just a year's time. The result was a collaborative volume that received a glowing review in the Women's Review of Books (Marshall, 2007). I continue to be humbled and thrilled that the topic called for such dedication and commitment by such talented scholars. Though social gerontologists show increasing respect for theoretical revision, I can still see the more subtle forms of our cultural disdain for old people—our future selves—in the reception that my work often evokes from colleagues outside critical gerontology. Most people continue to keep their concern with the aging of our population at the abstract level, as few of us want to think about ourselves growing old. Feminist sociologists and women's studies scholars seldom study old people; most departmental curricula ignore old people and old age (a telling omission in a psychology department, for example, where it implies that development stops in later years). Scholarship on old people still does little to enhance one's status in the mainstream of our scientific professions. Here, at the intersections of my career success and middle age, I feel both the fact of ageism and our need to eradicate it. I see my bodily changes, the indifference that greets gerontology, my peers’ attempts to keep aging at bay, and my parents' efforts to make doctors take them seriously. All of these are data and impetus to
157
uncover and fight ageism. Taught that nothing positive accrues to growing old, we shun it where we can and pretend to control what we fear. Most people prefer to see aging as subject to personal control, with little concern, for example, for how Social Security privatization or other institutional policies could penalize most old people. I find that most people operate under the illusion that individuals should and can budget and save for the 20 or so years of retired life. This more hidden form of ageism, informed by our American individualism, hinders all of us, myself included. Unlike other forms of discrimination that grant people lifelong positions of privilege or subordination, ageism oppresses the people we will become, cuts off our options for collective action now, and arms us for battles we cannot win alone, while leading us to ignore that which binds us. References Andrews, M. (1999). The seductiveness of agelessness. Ageing and Society, 19, 301−318. Binstock, R. H., Fishman, J. R., & Johnson, T. E. (2006). Anti-aging medicine and science: Social implications. In R. H. Binstock, & L. K. George (Eds.), Handbook of aging and the social sciences (pp. 436−455)., 6th ed. San Diego: Academic Press. Calasanti, T. M. (1993). Bringing diversity in: Toward an inclusive theory of retirement. Journal of Aging Studies, 7, 133−150. Calasanti, T. M. (1996). Gender and life satisfaction in retirement: An assessment of the male model. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 51B, S18−S29. Calasanti, T. M. (1999). Feminism and aging: Not just for women. Hallym International Journal of Aging, 1, 44−55. Calasanti, T. M., & Slevin, K. F. (2001). Gender, social inequalities, and aging. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Calasanti, T. M., & Slevin, K. F. (2006). Age matters: Re-aligning feminist thinking. New York: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Marshall, L. (2007). The cartography of age. Women's review of books, 24. (pp. 10−12). Marshall, B. L., & Katz, S. (2006). From androgyny to androgens: Resexing the aging body. In T. M. Calasanti, & K. F. Slevin (Eds.), Age matters: Re-aligning feminist thinking (pp. 75−97). New York: Routledge. McHugh, K. (2000). The ‘Ageless Self ’? Emplacement of identities in sun belt retirement communities. Journal of Aging Studies, 14, 103−115. Twigg, J. (2004). The body, gender, and age: feminist insights in social gerontology. Journal of Aging Studies, 18, 59−73.