Crimes against aging women are committed every
minute, and women are taught we de- serve such devaluation and erasure.
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Ageism: The Perpetuation of Violence Against Crones I
work with old women (at the Notre- Dame de Grace Senior Citizens' Council).
Some of the women I've met and learned from include professionals, world
travelers, writers, homemakers, mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers,
dancers, bakers, clerks, assembly-line workers, seamstresses, carpenters, and
even a female wrestler. Some have gone from riches to rags, some manage on a
limited income, some have their money managed for them, a few are financially
comfortable. Some of these women live in apartments, some in houses, or foster
homes for senior citizens. Some wear badges against nuclear arms, in support of
ecology, or others that say "How dare you presume I'd rather be young?". Many
of the women I work with are Canadian born but many have come from around the
world. Some have survived the holocaust, others have survived their children.
Some women are healthy, others are frail. Some enjoy the thrill of a downhill
ski, some just a good hot cup of tea.
Yet the strengths and diversity of this community of older women
remains invisible. Invisible in present government, health, social welfare and
income policies, in sociological and social gerontological literature, in much
of the literature on women and in most people's minds:
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Our numbers and our presence receive only limited
attention from researchers and policy makers. Most of the geriatric literature
focuses on men. Research on women is done primarily in institutionalized
settings such as nursing homes and chronic care hospitals, yet only 8% of older
women are institutionalized. It is not surprising that the evidence depicts us
as frail, unbalanced and objects of sympathy. What of the other 92% of older
women, the poorest in our society? (6) |
The experiences, knowledge and power of old women are actively
erased, silenced, marginalized, and denied. The lack of any systematic
knowledge of older women's need and experiences, of policies and positive
images that support and celebrate us, erases our presence and our worth, our
unique and collective contributions to society as a whole. This silencing is a
form of violence. This erasure continues to make (older) women dependent on
sources of power outside of our own "knowing" and "knowledge-able" selves. It
also fragments the whole community of women into "us," the young ones, and
"them," the old ones.
Our invisibility often forces us to de- value and to doubt our
own inner authority and each other since most of us have not learned about our
collective herstories, our chronologies. Invisibility feeds the cycles of
dependency on sources of power outside of ourselves and this is a form of
violence. The more dependent we are forced to become - on doctors, husbands,
family and/or the state - the more at risk we are.
Macdonald and Rich have argued that "ageism is a point of
convergence for many repressive forces in our society" including:
- the violence of men against women and against weaker, less
powerful men;
- the life-long economic and social status of women;
- capitalism's definition of productivity and who can engage
in it, and its indifference to those it forces to be unproductive;
- contempt for the physically challenged;
- enforced and institutionalized heterosexuality and the
family which [can] confine women to male-defined roles and economic
dependencies;
- and, inevitably, racism [where, for example], 41% of Black
women aged 65 or over, lived in poverty in 1977 [in the USA] while 8% of white
men in this age group were poor. (8)
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