Crimes against aging women are committed every minute, and women are taught we de- serve such devaluation and erasure.

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:

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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