“Age and gender hierarchies shape female lives across the life course in specific social and historical contexts” (1). Why devote a chapter in a book on women’s mental health specifically to the psychosocial challenges facing older women? With increasing life expectancy in developed countries there is a burgeoning literature on adaptive processes in later life, but until recently this research has lacked a gender-specific focus. And yet, women dominate the population of older people, are known to suffer from greater psychological morbidity in later life, and are more likely than men to spend their later years living alone, and with less financial security (2). Much has been written about sexism and ageism as forms of societal oppression; older women are vulnerable to a double jeopardy in this regard. For women of minority ethnic groups, racism can be a further compounding factor, which contributes to their marginalization and disempowerment (3). It is not surprising then that gender and age politics have been powerful forces shaping a widespread negative perception of aging womanhood. This is not to deny that ageist practices do not impact on men, but they are to an extent buffered by the power relations implicit in the gender hierarchy.

The recognition that later life is a developmental stage in its own right has greatly expanded the theoretical discourse on aging, so that the focus is no longer solely on issues of loss and decline. Erik Erikson’s epigenetic theory of human development has been seminal in this regard. He describes the psychosocial challenges that characterize the sequential stages of the life span, continuing to shape later life with the potential for mature creativity and the attainment of wisdom (4). Fundamentally, according to
Erikson’s model, the successful negotiation of the challenges of each life stage is dependent on the maturational building blocks of previous life stages. For example, adolescents’ specific developmental task is defining their individual identities so as to achieve healthy separateness from their families of origin. This is not simply about moving away from the parental home but requires the adolescent to identify with and internalize positive childhood role models. The person who fails to achieve this maturational task will inevitably struggle with subsequent adult developmental challenges. These include forming intimate relationships, creating a satisfying role in society, and maintaining a sense of meaning in their later years. However, while this theoretical framework has been heuristic in its depiction of a more positive culture of aging, overly simplistic interpretation of Erikson’s later life-stage developmental tasks has resulted in a tendency to homogenize the experience of aging.

More recent writers have expanded the focus in social gerontology to include an exploration of the importance of gender, time, and place in shaping an individual’s later years. In particular, the far-reaching historical events and societal changes during the course of the twentieth century have necessitated a closer examination of the impact of these factors on individual development. In Western societies, increased longevity and pluralization of lifestyle options have resulted in greater personal choice and responsibility for the individual in determining their own future. And yet, are older women today better able to actualize their developmental potential than their mothers and grandmothers? Their life expectancy is now twice as long as for women in the late nineteenth century, when less than 50% of the population survived beyond adolescence (5). But what about the quality of these additional years, which, pessimistically, could be regarded as just lengthening the time that women have to endure ageist and sexist societal attitudes? For example, the association of female worth and attractiveness with youthfulness is a prominent ageist stereotype in Western culture. This pervasive social myth powerfully reinforces women’s preoccupation with the physical signs of aging long before they need to be concerned about other aging-related issues, such as functional decline and loss of independence. Now that Western women can reasonably expect to live into their late 70s or early 80s, they are likely to be subjected to socially sanctioned negative images of female aging over many decades. As a consequence, aging women are vulnerable to feeling marginalized as they struggle with the populist notion that their attractiveness, and by implication also their worth, is dependent on maintaining a youthful appearance (1).

If Western women are growing old in a cultural paradigm characterized by negative representations of their physical maturation, from where do they draw their resilience? Will the vocal generation of baby boomer women challenge these entrenched female stereotypes? In order to answer these questions, we need to look beyond the one-dimensional portrayal of aging as physical and mental decline. We need to examine the resources that enable older women to maintain a coherent, unified sense of self and identity in the face of adversity. The following sections examine the themes of older women’s roles in family life, the workforce, and the broader community. The term “being older” will not be specifically defined in terms of chronologic age because of the subjectivity and diversity with which women view themselves, and others view them, with regard to the aging process. As a consequence the discussion will include women from more than one generation—older female baby boomers, their mothers, and their grandmothers, who are now the very old. Only now, with an increased life span for women in developed countries, can this transgenerational appraisal of aging be undertaken and cohort-specific issues examined. What is most striking when the three generations of women who might now be
considered older are compared as separate cohorts is that their early developmental paths were intersected by very different major historical events. These included world wars and dramatic sociodemographic shifts in the structure of the family unit and women’s involvement in the workforce.

Today’s very old women were born in the early years of the twentieth century, were adolescents during the First World War, young homemakers during the years of the Great Depression, and then had to endure another world war. Their lives have spanned a century of remarkable change, and to have survived and adapted must say a great deal about the resilience of their psychosocial resources. They are truly the experts on aging as society has decreed them as being old for the greater proportion of their adult lives. The next broad cohort of older women comprises those who would generally regard themselves as now being in the phase of later life, but perhaps are still struggling with this adjustment. This cohort were young women during the Second World War, and like their mothers, were subjected to the untimely deaths of brothers, fiancés, and husbands. They also experienced the emancipation and responsibility that went with maintaining a male-depleted workforce. However, after the war, they were expected to return quietly to the traditional role of homemaker. They received little recognition for their wartime achievements and sacrifices, and regardless of their aspirations, they were expected to relinquish paid employment to the returning men. In contrast, their baby boomer daughters grew up during postwar economic prosperity. This was also a time when new patterns of family life were emerging, and female participation in the labor force became acceptable once again and not just as a wartime measure. Although all three cohorts had exposure to the turbulence of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, this occurred during the late adolescence and early adulthood of the early female baby boomers. This cohort would have been most impressionable and likely to embrace a philosophy of radical change in the way women perceived their role in society and their sense of control over their own destinies.

These three successive generations of women all share the experience today of being categorized as older women. However, very different sociohistorical contexts have shaped each generation’s collective developmental trajectory. One consequence may be that the older generations’ practical knowledge and accumulated wisdom have become less relevant for subsequent generations (5). Examining this issue, Grob et al. (5) compared the biographical narratives of three cohorts of Swiss women—a group born between the world wars (1920-1925), a group who were early baby boomers (1945-1950), and a group from “Generation X” (1970-1975). They found that the three generations of women shared traditional developmental concerns and were similar in the broad construction of the chronology of their lives. The three groups differed in that, although the Generation X cohort mostly expected to have children, only a minority expected to marry. In contrast, most of the early baby boomer participants in the study had married and borne children. Subsequently though, about half divorced, highlighting the increasingly transitory phase that marriage appears to occupy in women’s lives today. Overall, there was a progressive shift for younger participants to be more preoccupied with issues of lifestyle, relationships, and personal freedom. They expected to be able to exert more control over their destinies but were also more uncertain about being able to achieve happiness because of the range of choices to be made. The older subjects were profoundly affected by their experiences during the Second World War, whereas no single historical event had shaped the lives of the two younger cohorts. The authors of this study suggest that their findings illustrate the importance of examining developmental issues within a sociohistorical context. They conclude that aging is not simply a matter
of advancing chronologic age, but the aging process for women is greatly influenced by cohort-specific differences that shift the social context of role definitions and norms from generation to generation.