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The Embodiment of Old Women: Silences Author(s): Barbara Hillyer Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, Identity, the Body, and the Menopause (1998), pp. 48-60 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347132 . Accessed: 18/09/2013 21:57
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Barbara Hillyer

of OldWomen:Silences The Embodiment

In 1994, for the firsttime, I found myselfattendingcloselyto the embodiment of two old women, myselfand my mother.I was just enteringyoungold ageat our bodiesrequired our sixty,and she old old age at eighty.More significantly, attention.Gradually, year,Motherbecamefrail,and then duringthe preceding her kidneys,lungs, and heart began to fail. Abruptly,I fell, brokemy elbow, Both of us whichwas slow to heal, and thus discovered that I had osteoporosis. and unpredictable backpain.I wascaringforMotherin hospihadosteoarthritis tals, in her home, and then in a nursinghome until she died, a yearlater.Inaware of the limitationsof my own, tenselyattunedto herbody andfrustratingly I did what I alwaysdo, triedto think aboutwhatwe wereexperiencing through the feministtheorythat is my lifework. What I have discovered duringthe past threeyearsas I have pursuedmy of old of feministliterature aboutthe embodiment newlypersonal investigations of women'sembodimentin women is a seriesof significantsilences:discussions of agingthat focuson menowhich old women arenot mentioned;discussions aging"that pauseas the crucialbodily event;storiesof old women's"successful asif old bodieswerenot a factor; oldwomen's andachievement emphasize activity to that referto their/ourbodiesas if they wereunimportant personalnarratives is whatever told. story being in everycentralfactors wereterribly My body and my mother's important, or hide it. My intenthingwe might do. The silencesdiscountthat significance tion here is to examinethe silencesas a first step towarddevelopinga feminist of the embodimentof old women. This essay,my notes towarda femianalysis nist theoryaboutold age as an embodiedphenomenon,movesthroughanalysis of silencetowardtheoretical speech. I had paid considerable work on disability, Before 1994, in my scholarly how little of the attentionto the embodimentof women, but I had not realized Editorial Collective @1998 byFrontiers Copyright

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substantial feminist theory about women's bodies focuses on or even gives a sidelong glance at old women.' Some important books on women's bodies don't even mention old women or aging in their indices. Instead they have usually emphasized either the body concept of women in the reproductive years (and, recently, in menopause) or cultural objectification, especially of young women. Kathy Davis'sbook about plastic surgery,Reshapingthe FemaleBody, for example, mentions face-lifts, eyelid surgery, and liposuction, without situating these procedures in relation to age, aging, or ageism.2The book is mainly about breast augmentation and reduction, which is probably the form of plastic surgery least related to old women's experience, though we cannot know that for certain until old women tell us their stories. Listening to Our Bodies, a collection of essays, is subtitled The Rebirth ofFeminine Wisdom.3Despite the long and multicultural traditions associating wisdom with age, "feminine wisdom" in this book is not seen as wisdom that comes with age and experience. Similarly,Minding the Body, anotheranthology, includes only three essayson aging, two by middle-aged women and only one by an old woman.4 The several feminist books on female beauty and the beauty myth do mention aging in their indices, but the indexed passages are very brief references to such things as the existence of some cultures that honor age or to women who were fired for looking "too old."'5 Wendy Chapkis'sdiscussion of "The Politics of loose does include skin, a sagging body, graying, wrinkling, and Appearance" gaining weight, and makes the important connection between acceptance of these physicalsigns in (presumablymiddle-aged) women and acceptanceof old women.' Chapkis uses direct quotations from many different women as the basis of her analysis, including some from women who draw attention to their age. Only one of these women, aged seventy-nine, is "old."The others are middle-aged (forty and fifty-five). Surely the body-awarenessthat pervades our culture has as serious implications for old women as it does for young. Although face-lifts and tummy-tucks may begin in middle age, the pressures they represent derive from stereotypes about old age as much as from the compulsory nature of youth. The first woman I knew of who died of anorexia nervosa was an old woman, yet anorexia is frequently described as primarily a disease of adolescence. The woman's sister, who told me about her death, said, "She starved herself. It was like anorexia." The word "like" reflects the (probably medical) assumption that anorexia does not occur in old women. Anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating, and chronic dieting are discussed as if only young women had such experiences, yet we know that malnutrition is a serious problem for some old people. Curiously, those who

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Barbara Hillyer makethis point neverconsiderthat it might be relatedto the beautymyth or to in old chronicdietingwhen the symptomsappearin old women. Malnutrition as is attributed to different such interaccauses, entirely poverty,drug people in discussions of antions, or mentalconfusion,which arenot often considered do not orexiain young people.Again,as with beauty,bookson eatingdisorders haveagingor old women in theirindices.7 in girlsandyoungwomen, of anorectic behavior several centuries Summarizing in that fashions "the anorexic out "there are Joan Jacobs Brumberg points diagnosis": a American has social address."' socipopulation Contemporary highly specific in youngwomen perhaps anorexia too frequently, as "wasting" may ety diagnoses be a symptomof many otherdiseases.Becauseit is expectedin girls,it maywell in older disorders ascompulsive beignored women,whilesuchothereating overeating in women. be Nevertheless,the silence about old may expected middle-aged women'sbeauty-induced with food is pervasive. It is as if at sixty a relationships lifetimeof culturalindoctrination about the body disappears. doesmentionaging,almostalwaysin a way thatis inciDisabilityliterature with peoplewho dentalto the issuesunderdiscussionand to advocatealliances thatdoes areor will be disabled as theyage.The one recentbook aboutdisability discussionis SusanWendell'sThe not treatagingas incidentalto its theoretical stressesthat culturalinsensitivityto disability Body,which repeatedly Rejected of old people'sexperience and chronicillnessreinforcemisunderstandings and are themselves often insensitiveto indithat young(er)people with disabilities in old age.' Nevertheless, book is about of disability Wendell's vidualexperience in stories arenot and old women's own and disability young people, middle-aged cited. to the trendof ignoringold womenaltogether Anotherimportant exception when speakingof the body is Margaret Gullette's Decliningto Decline,which is aboutagingas a culturally constructed disease.'1Gullettesetsforthan important of age and proposesan age theorydistinctlydiffertheoretical, politicalanalysis ent fromthe culturally constructed narrative aboutagingthatwe aretaughtfrom thesisis that the ideologyof deof decline.Gullette's childhood-the narrative cline culminatesin middle age.The subtitleof Decliningto Declineis Cultural To readthisbookwhilethinkingbeyondmidlife Combat andthePolitics ofMidlife. to old ageraises The argument aboutageideologyis persuatroublingquestions. sive, but the experienceof people who reallyare declining is excludedby the basishasyet beenworkedout for distinfocuson middleage,and no theoretical have who have not experienced condiwho and those guishingamong people narrative. This tions trulyin the body and not solelyin the culturally prescribed

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Barbara Hillyer is not to discountGullette's of our own bodies is culpoint that our experience turallymediated,but to suggestthatstill missingis a theoryaboutthe experience of old women who areunableto be conventionally activeor productive. It maybe thatthesetwo feministbooksspeakrespectfully of the old woman's because that is not the focus of concern. That is, old body precisely primary women'sbodieswill bearscrutinyas supportingmaterialfor theoryon another, relatedgroup (disabledpeople or middle-agedpeople), which might be more To attend didifficultto sustainif they werethe sole subjectto be considered. of to the disabilities women raises the very old about rectly questions disturbing to the ideologyof decline. age ideologythat Gulletteproposesas an alternative no one is and Gullette Wendellmay well be as yet ready Apparently (although look to at and as are bywomen in old they age) ability disability they experienced no in in a way that Or one has looked at old women rather, yet ability age. includesan ordinary of theirembodiment. understanding We know that disability with age, that physicallimitationsassociincreases ated with aging tend to be chronicor recurrent, and that the longer a woman in the more she is to be a lives, likely physicalspace." Susan narrowing living PfisterandMolly Doughertyattendto old women'sembodimentin an excellent detailedsummaryof the physicalchangesassociatedwith aging, categorizing them as "(a)loss of functionalcells/tissue,(b) diminishedefficiencyof an organ or system,or (c) reductionin reserve of the body."12 These physical capabilities with aginginvolveall organsandsystemsin the body to some changesassociated While are notintrinsically (andarenot in themselves they symptoms degree. disabling the of "disease"), contribute to down" that most peopledescribeas they "slowing in old age,sometimebetweenagessixtyandninety.As SusanWendell happening observes,"Unlesswe die suddenly... most of us will live partof our liveswith bodiesthathurt, that movewith difficultyor not at all, that depriveus of activities we once took for granted."13 Again and again,old women'spersonalnarraof jointsandon dimintivesmentiona fearof fallingthatis basedon the stiffness in winter,andto ishedphysical mobility,especially strength, leadingto decreased at even when are otherwise individuals home, they healthy.14 Healthy staying be to drive and thus be more confined to home and unable may may neighborhood than healthstatusalonewould predict.15 Flaggingstrengthmay preventa womanfromwalkinghalfa blockto a mailboxor pickingflowersin the garden.16 Chronic illness furthernarrowsthe ordinaryspace of one's daily life. In "adin volunvancedage,"churchattendance becomesless regular, andparticipation In women to withdrawal declines.17 younger taryorganizations (fifty sixty-four),
is directly correlated with perception of poor health.'" Especially among work-

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Barbara Hillyer

ing-class people, social isolation and inactivity are associated with "young"old age (sixty-two and over).19Furthermore, old people's concern with avoiding a nursing home may cause individuals to "stayhome," to be more confined than they would be if a less restrictive environment could be conceptualized.20 When a nursing home becomes necessary, a woman's personal living space contracts usually to half a room.21 I emphasize these changes not to reinforce an inappropriate narrative of decline but to suggest that we are unlikely to resist such narratives,when they are inappropriate, if we are unable even to recognize, let alone accurately evaluate, changes in our bodies and social environment that are authentically connected with or caused by aging. Decreased flexibility, slower response time, and a decreased capacity to recover from stress are not markers of disability, but they do challenge the person experiencing them to reexamine such priorities as speed and undifferentiated activity or at least to plan one's time more carefully and perhaps to change factors contributing to poor health (smoking, lack of exercise, poor nutrition). May Sarton says, "It'sa strange transformation of a person who used to be quick and volatile and who now has to become slow and careful."22 Doris Grumbach, less ill but generally more conscious of age limitation in contrast to illness, says, "PrivatelyI still war against my elderly condition of weakness, frailty, powerlessness, but now I accept its inevitability. Publicly, I am quieter about And Betty Friedan, relentlessly optimistic about the positive aseverything."23 pects of aging, nevertheless advocates knowing the body's limitations: "Real aging changes in body tissues have to be taken into account if older persons are not to be under- or overtreated [medically]."24 1would suggest that under- or overreacting to one's own changing body is equally likely if one is not fully aware of what those changes are. Like adolescence, young old age is a time of very rapid physical change. In the absence of illness or such high risk behaviors as smoking, alcohol abuse, and poor nutrition, one might expect these changes to be very interesting indeed to the one whose body is involved. Adolescents are expected and even encouraged to find their body changes interesting. There should be an expectation that old women will be as interested in these changes as younger women are interested in menarche, pregnancy, and menopause or young athletes in tendonitis, carpal tunnel problems, and sprains. Being interested in, and talking about, the physical changes associated with aging should be considered a normal developmental way of caring for oneself. Here we encounter another public silence about the embodiment of old women.

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Physical limitations increase body awareness. Such body consciousness and a cultural beauty standard based on youth and fitness combine to create a dilemma for an old woman attempting honesty about her body/her self. If she acknowledges the physical changes that do, in fact, characterizeage, and if she escapes the societal pressure to deny limitation and mimic the appearance of youth, she will at once be faced with the cultural stereotype of old women as whiny complainers.To be interestedin one's body while resisting a simple-minded narrativeof decline requiresthoughtful attention to the ways in which a change of skin or muscle tone, of complexion or hair color, of coordination or flexibility, is just a change, not an emblem of death or of social inadequacy. To pay such careful attention and then not talk about it is to resignify the subject as unspeakable or at least beneath notice. But to speak is to name oneself declining, less competent, or unable to take life's minor challenges in stride (a youthful, vigorous stride). A young old woman like me, then, looking for old women's representations of their/our embodiment, must learn to read past two opposing cultural pressures that shape old women's narratives:the pressure to present oneself in what Gullette names a narrativeof decline and the pressureto present oneself as "successfully" aging. In popular conceptions of old age the two narrativesare often intertwined so that they convey something like this: I accept my decline, which is no big deal, and then I live an active, apparentlyyouthful, life. One of the many complications that surround the reading (or hearing) of such a narrative is the difficulty of figuring out exactly what physical situation is being described. Cindy Patton, writing about the bodies of people with AIDS, says "Attention and surveillance, silence and the relinquishing of control over one's own meanings are discursive effects symptomatic of relations of power."25If we are forced to observe our bodies through the controlling magnifying glass of ageism, to allow the narrative of decline to control its meaning, or instead to remain silent in some pretense that change is not occurring or is shameful, then we are indirectly acknowledging the power of those who define us and our own fear of losing power if we are observed to be declining and, worse, to be admitting it publicly. So a woman, not yet disabled, but interested in discussing how her body has changed, perhaps how her joints are stiff in the morning or her gait uncertain on decorative brick pathways, instead of thinking about how she integrates these realizations into her life, must consider whether she will be seen as too frail to participate in other aspects of her busy life or too slow to accomplish whatever it is she is expected to do. She must also consider whether she is violating some

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group norm, such as the assumption that all women aresupposed to be exhausted and overworked, or that the only way to reach a goal is to rush toward it. She must consider whether mentioning any limitation will cause others to believe that they are being asked to take care of her or to listen to her "whining." Small wonder, with all these things to consider, that old women often choose not to speak openly about their bodies. Of course, some women do. May Sarton, Doris Grumbach, and Florida Scott-Maxwell come immediately to mind. It is notable that all three are diarists. Although their journals/memoirs are written for publication, the genre itself is a private one and thus a suitable location for personal observations of publicly inappropriate ideas. These three also write about others' responses to their perceived complaints. Grumbach, in her 1991 memoir Coming into the End Zone, included many passagesdescribing her negative feelings about the bodily changes of her sixties alongside detailed descriptions of those changes.26In her later volume, ExtraInnings (1993), she recounts the many negative responses to her earlier "complaints."Readersreprimandher for not rejoicing in what remainsto her instead of observing the body's decline. Grumbach replies: "I needed to set my own record straight, unpalatable as it might be to some readers."Not to do so, she says, would be "dishonestly cheerful."27 Similarly,Scott-Maxwell, citing Dr. comment that one's is asking for pity and praise, says, troubles Johnson's telling and You often need deserve both "Verygood. pity and praise. Perhapsyou need to share your weakness .... But it is more than that. You ask to be met at the point of your reality."Elsewhere, Scott-Maxwell says that she will attempt the silence that her listeners probably prefer to her energy-draining "excessivetalk," but the need "to be met at the point of your reality"accounts for her willingness in the diary, and thus eventually in print, to describe her particular old old (but not always ill) body. 28 Sarton, even as she describes her physical reality,asserts, repeatedly,that her limitations are not age related. Presumably,were she not ill, she would be physiologically much the same as in middle age. Sarton is an acute observer of other changes that come with age (for example, reduced emotional volatility), but, in resisting the cultural assumption that old people are weak and sick and withdrawing toward death, she refuses to see any such characteristics in her aging body-they are only in her sick body. To understand the subtlety of this distinction, one has only to remember that Sarton was a lifelong smoker and so could of not be expected to know what her body was like in the absence of the "cause" her illness. When she speaks of the things her body will not do, she does not notice the ordinarychangesso crucialto Grumbach:loose teeth, loose skin,wrinkles,

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Barbara Hillyer

"the pull of gravity on the soft tissues of my breasts and buttocks," thinning bones, "watereddown" muscles, the softened walls of her abdomen.29 Even if Sarton had not smoked, she would surely have died. In a deathdenying culture, the very fact that old people do eventually die makes the rest of us uncomfortable. Scott-Maxwell says, "With one friend of my own age, we cheerfully exchange the worst symptoms, and our black dreads as well. We frequently talk of death." However, she feels prohibited from doing so with anyone else: "Talking of one's health, which one wants to do, is generally full of risks." The result of avoiding such risks, of making the listener uncomfortable or of being negatively judged, she says, is a "false cheerfulness."30Like Grumbach, Scott-Maxwell understands that dishonest cheerfulness is requiredby others and that it discounts one's reality. For an old woman to speak of what is happening in her experience of her own body, she must defy the cultural prescription of false cheerfulness. She could, of course, be genuinely cheerful, but if that were so, the good humor would not be prescriptiveand externally imposed, nor would it be predicated on denial that bodily change had taken place. If she is not genuinely amused, she need not expect us to be. For us to hear the full range of old women's stories, we must abandon some of our expectations. For example, the daily details of using a cane, being cautious about falling, or experiencing weakening vision and hearing will defy our expectation that an old feminist continues to be superwoman or is always optimistic about the activities of old age. Further, such revelations about the everyday here and now challenge the expectation that the wise old woman should demonstrate her wisdom only by telling stories about what her life was like as a girl or young woman. Such expectations are limiting for healthy old women; they are disastrous for the frail elderly who cannot present themselves as "productive,"busy members of a product-oriented society. Inactivity is interpreted so negatively for anyone of any age in our society that there is no margin of acceptance for those who must be inactive. The disability rights agenda is based on the premise that with certain accommodations a person with a disability can be as productive as other citizens.31Thus, these potential allies of an old person who is frail and inactive, having based their political movement on a productivity standard, have no basis on which to value that person's noncontribution.32 Seeing frail old people as nonproducers reinforces ageism and has public policy implications, for example in health care rationing. It is no surprise that in order to avoid being stereotyped as old, weak, and worthless women present themselves as old but young at heart, old and strong.

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Internalized ageism can lead to a woman's devaluing her own frailty, and thus her own embodied self. She may silence her own body narrative not only because "complaints"cause problems, but also because her internalized ageism makes it impossible for her to recognize the meaning of her body's experience. Another possible reason that we hear so few old women's stories about their own embodiment may lie in the wisdom that comes with life experience. After sixty years of colds, flu, sprained ankles, sore muscles, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, insect bites, allergic reactions, and so on, having aching joints or a protruding belly may not rank as an experience worthy of mention. The accommodations one makes to such ordinary physical events are precisely that: ordinary. In writing one's life narrative, she might not mention aches and pains or the effects of medication because these are seen as simple background facts of life. We may know less than we might wish about the embodiment of old women because old women take it for granted. Developmentally, it is appropriate and even necessary for women to take their bodily changes into consideration. This does not mean that one who finds her skin less elastic or her hearing less acute than before, her metabolism more sluggish or her energy level reduced, should not be concerned with nutrition and exercise; rather, that her consciousness of these changes can contribute to the self-knowledge that underlies growth at any developmental stage.33 The fact that I cannot go to the libraryand easily find old women's accounts of their own embodiment does not mean that old women are not talking about it, just that the accounts are not being published. Some may avoid publication because they are unwilling to be stereotyped as complainers or negative thinkers. Some may want to be seen as young(er) or more active, as achievers, workers, leaders (as if leaders never have disabilities or gray hair). Some may write and not find a publisher or find a publisher who edits out the referencesto embodiment. Young(er) readers may not want to know what old(er) women's bodies are like. Gerontologists are not interested in physical experiences that are not symptoms or diseases or social problems or treatment issues. But old women are talking, not to gerontologists but to each other. My best friend and I (at seventy-four and sixty-three) meet for lunch once a week to talk about everything. Every discussion includes one or more bodily topics, on which one of us will subsequently do a little research. Our talks describe what is happening to each of our bodies and to those of our close friends. We know a lot about the process of aging. I have not read any discussions similar to these. The only one I know of that comes close is Mary Meigs's essay about a talk among four friends, all young old women, about the changes that come with

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age.34They speak-and laugh-about forgetfulness, memory blanks, hands less accurate than they used to be, slight weaknesses or quivers that require new strategies for doing familiar tasks, tiring easily, going to bed early and waking in the night. More importantly, they describe these ordinary changes in ways that suggest how they live with them and how they may be able to use the changes to their advantage. Meigs says that her art may become freer because her hand is less controlled and controlling. Memory loss, a common experience of old age and one of the ones most feared, is summarized by Geri Berg and Sally Gadow as This captures a truth when "the memory winds around and restructuresitself.""5 of my friends' and my own experience:The memory is not "lost," but one must access it in a different way. The same is true of other apparent losses, from mobility to reading. One restructuresone's way of using a changed ability. Wendell's response to chronic illness is another representation of the way a life may be restructured when one accepts the reality of physical change: "It [recognizing herself as disabled] also required reimagining my life with a new, much more limited, and perpetually uncomfortable body, and then reorganizing my work, home and relationships to make this different life possible."36 When these discussions are among friends who have no inclination to distrust each other, we get a sense of the significant impact of minor changes without having to see them as more-or less-important than they are. I am looking for old women's narrativesabout their embodiment, and I am not finding quite what I am looking for. I find short stories by young women about what they think their grandmothers are like, or what they think the world might be like to an old woman. I find essays by people who are concerned about the impact of old women's disabilities on their caregiving, middle-aged daughters. I find occasional sentences or subordinate clauses in longer narrativesabout something else, perhaps a memory of another time or an account of a current activity. I find defenses against ageism and claims of late life vitality. The silences about embodiment in these narrativesare difficult to interpret. For example, there are many clues in a collection of interviews with old women, On: Women Talk AboutOldAge.37Several women's stories contain a SixtyYears sentence or two about limited mobility or recent illness, and the editors' introductions sometimesmention thesemattersand such issuesas fearof falling.However, it is not clear whether the interviewers asked about bodily changes or whether the occasional sentences were all that the women had to say about their changing bodies. The editors say that the interviews were edited to eliminate repetitions. The reader cannot tell if referencesto embodiment were repetitious or if repetitions, if any, might have revealed more details or different attitudes.

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Gullette argues that women should not talk publicly about "anything alleged to be a 'symptom'except in an unrecordedconversationwith another woman or man who loves you reciprocally."38 Otherwise, she says, such symptoms will be used against us. I believe this warning must be taken very seriously.After all, our writings about menopause and premenstrual syndrome have been used against us, as have any other statements that could be interpreted to imply weakness. However, such fears, such prudence, need not silence us. Instead, I suggest that we continue to speak to those intimate confidantes, but also to each other in the larger women's studies community, not because feminists can be trusted not to be ageist or committed to a narrativeof decline, but because this has for thirty years been the arena for our earliest and most intensive consciousness raising. I do not believe that any of the silences, indirections, or partial revelations demonstrate that old women's embodiment is like their own at middle age or is unimportant to them. But as I search for the comments and clues that they do provide, I understand that the place to find the existing record is in those occasional sentences scattered through other stories, and the place to find whole embodiment narratives,beyond diariesof famous women like Sarton and Grumbach and Scott-Maxwell, is in the future, when all of us feminists who have lived to be old decide to raise consciousness on this point as we have on so many others before now.39

Notes
1. Barbara and Disability(Norman:University of OklahomaPress, Hillyer,Feminism 1993), 168-73. 2. KathyDavis, Reshaping the FemaleBody:TheDilemmaof Cosmetic (New Surgery York: Routledge,1995). to OurBodies: TheRebirth Wis3. StephanieDemetrakopoulos, Listening of Feminine dom (Boston:Beacon,1983). 4. Patricia Writers on Bodyand Soul (New York: Foster,ed., MindingtheBody:Women Doubleday,1994). AreUsedAgainst Women 5. NaomiWolf, TheBeauty (New Myth:HowImages ofBeauty York: WilliamMorrow,1991). 6. WendyChapkis,Beauty Secrets: Women and thePolitics (Boston:South ofAppearance End Press,1986). is available to aboutwomen'snutritionin old age, according 7. Almostno information KathleenM. Merchantand KathleenM. Kurz,"Women's NutritionThroughthe in TheHealthofWomen: A Global LifeCycle:Socialand Biological Vulnerabilities," ed. JudithTimyan and Jill Gray(Boulder: WestviewPress,1993), 63Perspective, 90.

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8. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History ofAnorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13-14. Brumberg's index does not include aging or old, but it cites fifty-seven pages on adolescents, with cross-referencesto "Fasting Girls and College Women." Brumberg'slatest book, The Body Project:An Intimate History ofAmerican Girls (New York:Random House, 1997), is about the development of body awareness in girls. What happens to that awareness fifty years later remains to be seen. 9. Susan Wendell, The RejectedBody: Feminist Philosophical Reflectionson Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996). 10. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics ofMidlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 11. Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, eds., Womenwith Disabilities: Essaysin Psychology, Culture,andPolitics (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1988), 3; Elias S. Cohen, "What is Independence?" in Aging and Disabilities: Seeking Common Ground, ed. Edward F. Ansello and Nancy N. Eustis (Amityville, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing, 1992), 79; and Stanley J. Brody and Malcolm H. Morrison, "Aging and Rehabilitation: Beyond the Medical Model," in Ansello and Eustis, Aging and Disabilities, 41. Ansello and Eustis describe disability in old age, 3-4; as do Janet Ford and Ruth Sinclair, ed., Sixty YearsOn: Women TalkAbout Old Age (London: The Women's Press, 1987), 3. Most of the stories in this book reiterate this theme. Although she does not mention old women, Karen P. DePauw suggests that spatial analysis will be an important basis for disability theory in "'Space:The Final Frontier':The Invisibility of Disability on the Landscape of Women's Studies," Frontiers:A Journal of Women's Studies 17:3 (1996): 19-23. 12. Susan Pfister and Molly Dougherty, "Growing Older," in Women's Health: A RelaA. Lewis Bernstein Across the and ed. (BosJudith tionalPerspective Life Cycle, Judith ton: Jones and Bartlett, 1996), 193. The summary, a dense list, is 193-95. 13. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 18. 14. Ford and Sinclair, Sixty YearsOn, passim. 15. Ford and Sinclair, Sixty YearsOn, 3. 16. Stephen Robitaille, "Writing in the Upward Years:May Sarton," in Conversations with May Sarton, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 193-94; and May Sarton, Endgame:A Journal ofthe Seventy-Ninth Year(New York:W. W. Norton, 1992). 17. BarbaraPayne and FrankWhittington, "Older Women: An Examination of Popular Stereotypes and Research Evidence," in The Older Woman:Lavendar Rose or Gray Panther, ed. Marie Marshall Fuller and Cora Ann Martin (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1980), 20-26. 18. Letitia T. Alston and Jon P Alston, "Religion and the Older Woman," in Fuller and Martin, The Older Woman,271. 19. Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Communal Life-Styles for the Old," in Fuller and Martin, The Older Woman,201-2.

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Barbara Hillyer

20. Elias S. Cohen, "What is Independence?" in Ansello and Eustis, Aging and Disabilities, 95. 21. Lucy Bregman and Sara Thiermann, First PersonMortal: PersonalNarratives of Illness,Dying and Grief(New York:Paragon House, 1995), 25. 22. Sarton, Endgame, 67. 23. Doris Grumbach, Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir (New York:W W Norton, 1991), 184-85. 24. Betty Friedan, TheFountain ofAge (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1993), 424-25. 25. Cindy Patton, InventingAIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3, cited by Jacquelyn Zita, "Heresy in the Female Body," in The Other Within Us:Feminist Explorations of Womenand Aging, ed. Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 109. 26. Grumbach, Coming Into the End Zone, passim. 27. Doris Grumbach, Extra Innings:A Memoir (New York:W. W. Norton, 1993), 12627, and passim. 28. Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days (New York: Penguin, 1968), 4445, 125. 29. Foster, Minding the Body, 77; and Grumbach, Coming Into The End Zone, 80-81. 30. Scott-Maxwell, The MeasureofMy Days, 31-32. 31. For a discussion of the unwillingness of disability theorists to classify disabled people with the frail elderly, see Wendell, The RejectedBody, 18, 206. 32. For a full discussion of the relationships of disability, productivity, and pace, see Hillyer, Feminism and Disability, 46-71. 33. Zalman Schachter-Shalom and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing:A Profound New Vision of Growing Older (New York:Warner, 1995), 16. 34. Mary Meigs, "Memory is as Uncertain as Grace,"in Fierce with Reality:An Anthology ofLiteratureon Aging, ed. MargaretCruikshank (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1995), 111-17. 35. Geri Berg and SallyGadow, "TowardMore Human Meanings ofAging" in Cruikshank, Fierce with Reality,226. 36. Wendell, The RejectedBody, 26. 37. Ford and Sinclair, Sixty YearsOn, passim. 38. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 108, 12 39. See also, Friedan, The Fountain ofAge; and Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1994), 249-83.

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