The world of the old, and especially of the very old, is predominately female. One of the most important differences between men and women in the United States is that of longevity. As yet unproven explanations for this phenomenon include genetic factors, male life stresses, male war casualties, women's greater utilization of health care, and the purported biological weakness of males when compared with females.
On average, women live seven years longer than men in the United States and have a substantially lower rate of death at any age. Life expectancy at birth is 71.5 years for men and 78.3 years for women. For those who survive until 65, men can expect to live on the average 14.9 more years and women 18.6.
The gender imbalance in aging is accelerating. In 1960 there were 82 U.S. men per 100 women over 65. By the year 2000 there will be 65 men per 100 women over the age of 65. In the 85-plus age group, there were 67 men per 100 women in 1960. By the year 2000 there will be 38 men per 100 women who are over 85. The gender imbalance is even greater for Black women, Latinas, Asian Pacific women, and Native American women.
Black women have a lower life expectancy than white women because they suffer more poverty and poorer health care. Black women live on the average 73.6 years as compared with white women, who live 79.4 years. The Indian Health Service in Rockville, Maryland, has two figures on life expectancy for Native American women, both from 1990. One is 78.8 years for twelve areas and another of 74.7 for some remaining areas. However, this longevity may be inflated by the fact that funeral directors may be recording Native American women who die younger under the categories of other ethnicities because of their non-Indian names and dress, while older Native American women who are more traditional are more often recorded at death as Native Americans.
By 2025 15 percent of U.S. old are expected to be nonwhite. In the culture of many nonwhite and recent immigrant groups, older women are more respected and utilized than in mainstream United States. Generations more often live together, as in Native American cultures, and grandmothers play a needed and valued child-care role. This can be a burden rather than a blessing.
Ironically, though women fear aging because of internal and external ageism, older women are one of the most rapidly growing categories in the United States in terms of percentage. In 1990 people over 65 composed 12.5 percent of the population, but by 2050 that figure is expected to be 22.9 percent. Women now represent 60 percent of the 32 million Americans aged 65 and over. The so-called baby boomer women, born between 1946 and 1964, are now at midlife and considered older women by a society that labels women old before they do men.
Because men generally marry women younger than themselves, women experience even more years of widowhood than differential gender longevity alone would indicate. At age 65, 36 percent of U.S. women are already widows. Women widowed between ages 45 and 54 have only a 22 percent remarriage rate after 15 years. Among women who divorce between ages 45 and 54, only 59 percent remarry after 15 years. The remarriage rates are much higher for widowed and divorced men. After age 65 there is one widower for every four widows. Over age 65, more than three-fourths of men are married and more than half of women are widows.
There are no accurate statistics for the number of old lesbian women but estimates are about 10 percent of the older women population. Some lesbians who are now old have remained celibate or closeted because of discrimination while others have been out all along. Because of today's more accepting climate, some lesbians come out late in life. Some women who were married to men in their youth come out as lesbians in old age because of formerly suppressed orientation.
In the past several decades, the number of national organizations for lesbians has increased. Local groups have also sprung up around the country. They provide support and advocacy and confront ageism in the gay, lesbian, and mainstream communities. There are few bereavement support groups for lesbians who have lost lifetime partners because the many widows' support groups often are not accepting of lesbians.
In addition to the aging world being predominately female, more women than men work in the gerontology field, a field that does not pay well but does appeal to nurturing women. With few exceptions, women are the nurses, assisted-living attendants, paid homemakers, home health aides, social workers, recreational workers, senior center directors, psychologists, physicians, occupational and physical therapists, and volunteers who work with the old. Family caregiving of frail elders is also usually done by wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, and other women relatives.
Not surprisingly, a recent book on older women was titled Women on the Front Lines: Meeting the Challenge of an Aging America. Women are on the front lines of aging for other reasons than their numbers and employment in the field. Old women are also poorer than old men, with lower savings and social security and fewer pensions. Women have generally worked for substantially lower wages than men and took time from paid work for childbearing, raising children, and caring for aged family members. Displaced homemakers have difficulty reentering the work force, especially for good wages. In 1990 only 24 percent of retired women received pensions compared with 46 percent of men. Women's pensions were also lower.
Women make up 71 percent of the elderly poor. This poverty is clustered among older women living alone, and those never married, separated, divorced, or widowed. One in four women past 65 living alone is poor. A third of women past 65 have incomes close to the poverty line. Black women compose 23 percent of the female elderly poor even though they now constitute only 9 percent of elderly women. Over 40 percent of elderly Latinas are also poor. About three-quarters of those receiving SSI (Supplemental Security Income) because they do not have enough earnings are women. The base SSI payment is slightly over $400 monthly; that is the sole income for numerous old women.
The health care for many older women is not good. Cancer and heart disease rates are high, as are arthritis and other chronic illnesses. Although Medicare is available to most women over 65, the average out-of-pocket expense for women past 65 was $4,000 a year in 1990. Many women cannot afford supplementary Medicare insurance or out-of-pocket payments and go without health care or use it only in a crisis. In addition, women from 45 to 65 often have no health insurance at all because they had been covered by the insurance of a deceased or divorced spouse or their health insurance had been tied to a job now lost.
Two now-deceased California women, Tish Sommers, a divorcée, and Laurie Shields, a widow, started the Older Women's League in the 1970s to fight for medical insurance for uninsured older women. Their efforts have been largely unsuccessful.
Married women often exhaust savings to care for a husband during his final illness and have no financial cushion for their own health care or other needs. Nursing homes are primarily occupied by never-married or currently uncoupled old women.
Although younger women hope their finances and health care will be better in old age, women's wages are still lower today than men's. Women today often still move in and out of the labor market, work part-time, or subordinate their careers to accommodate their husband's. Therefore, it is likely that poverty and insufficient health care insurance will continue to affect substantial numbers of old women. In 1993 67 percent of women aged 45 to 64, compared with 54 percent of men, reported in a survey that they worry about retirement finances.
Despite the somewhat gloomy situation depicted above, there is good news about women and aging. Amazing numbers of old women are redefining old age by carving out new roles for themselves and learning how to survive and thrive despite limited financial resources. They find late-life jobs, volunteer, become politically active, advocate, and express themselves through the arts. They enroll in college, attend Elderhostels and Senior Venture programs, travel using American Youth Hostels, write poetry, enhance their spirituality, and inspire younger women not to fear aging. They walk outdoors in good weather and in malls in bad weather, take up sports, and exercise.
There has been both a national and a grassroots movement to encourage older women to engage in active lifestyles and to empower them. Maggie Kuhn's Gray Panthers have advocated for older women for over twenty years. In 1990 the American Association of Retired Persons' Women's Initiative published, with the International Federation on Aging, a sixty-page booklet, Empowering Older Women.
Many advice books for older women were published in the 1990s. Old women have also developed their own magazines as vehicles for expression, information, and inspiration. Unfortunately, in 1993, after twenty years, the pioneering Broomstick magazine from Oakland, California, folded for lack of funds.
Still flourishing is Hot Flash, a newsletter for midlife and older women started in 1981 by the National Action Forum for Midlife and Older Women in Stony Brook, New York. Hot Flash's founder and editor in chief, Jane Porcino, has been active in the movement to help older women seek housing alternatives, since housing is usually the greatest expense for the 36 percent of older women who live alone. In 1988 a scholarly journal, Women and Aging, was started by J. Dianne Garner, D.S.W., and continues under her editorship.
Friendship networks are strong among many old women. Older women are also the chief consumers of programs at senior centers. Many love the poem "When I Am an Old Women I Will Wear Purple," by Jenny Joseph, from the book by that name, edited by Sandra Martz. The book has sold over one million copies since its first printing in 1987. Wearing purple T-shirts, women from sixty on up are having a good time, working for their causes, and staying out of rocking chairs and kitchens. But frail women in nursing homes and poor women who need help should not be neglected.
Organizations working for aging women and providing resources include: Older Women's League (OWL), Washington, DC; Gray Panthers, Washington, DC; Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), New York, NY; National Association for Lesbian and Gay Gerontology, San Francisco, CA; National Caucus and Center on the Black Aged, Washington, DC; Women's Initiative of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Washington, DC; Associacion Nacional Pro Peronanas Mayores (National Association for Hispanic Elderly), Los Angeles, CA; National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, Seattle, WA; Old Lesbian Organizing Committee (OLOC), Houston, TX; Families International, Inc., Milwaukee, WI.
Jessie Allen and Alan Pifer, eds., Women on the Front Lines (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1993); Paula B. Doress-Worters and Diana Laskin Siegalin cooperation with the Boston Women's Health Book Collective , , The New Ourselves, Growing Older (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Be An Outrageous Older Woman: A R.A.S.P. [Remarkable Aging Smart Person] (Manchester, Conn.: K.I.T. Press, 1993).
Ruth Harriet Jacobs
See also
Age Stereotypes.
