{"id":3618,"date":"2018-03-08T22:11:29","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T03:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=3618"},"modified":"2018-04-01T08:39:42","modified_gmt":"2018-04-01T12:39:42","slug":"martha-holstein-feminism-and-the-future-of-aging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2018\/03\/martha-holstein-feminism-and-the-future-of-aging\/","title":{"rendered":"Martha Holstein: Feminism and the Future of Aging"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is the next in our series on the future of aging: interviews with people who are experts in their fields and are also visionaries. We\u2019re asking them to talk about what they believe will happen in the years ahead to change the experience of aging.<\/em><\/p>\n

Martha Holstein, PhD, is a leading voice in the field of feminism and aging. Thoughtful and outspoken, Holstein challenges assumptions about what later life should be\u2014and what it is\u2014particularly for older women.<\/em><\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom doesn\u2019t mean much to Martha Holstein, PhD. \u201cI never set out to be a devil\u2019s advocate,\u201d she says. She just happened to be one. \u201cI always saw the opposite of what other people saw.\u201d<\/p>\n

So when she stumbled into a career in the field of aging, Holstein did not go along to get along. Instead, she became a dogged groundbreaker\u2014and ultimately one of America\u2019s preeminent scholars on feminist gerontology.<\/p>\n

Holstein has spent more than 40 years as\u2014at various times\u2014professor, researcher, speaker, author and consultant. She\u2019s taught at Loyola and Northwestern universities. She\u2019s worked at a think tank and as an activist. And that just scratches the surface.<\/p>\n

Now semiretired, Holstein continues to challenge assumptions about getting older. One difference is, she\u2019s now older herself. This adds a richness to her expertise that makes conversing with her fascinating and thought-provoking, whether you agree with her or not. She is passionately liberal; a self-described pessimist; and, she insists, a product of great luck.<\/p>\n

Out of the In Crowd<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a speaker and writer, one of Holstein\u2019s main goals today is to get women to embrace being old\u2014the good, the bad and the in-between. But the ways she wants them to embrace it go against the cultural tide\u2014and often against leading, fellow gerontologists.<\/p>\n

Tell Holstein 70 is the new 50, and she\u2019ll say 50 isn\u2019t all roses, and what\u2019s wrong with 70 anyway? Call her \u201cnot old\u201d at 76 and she\u2019ll insist that she is too. (Tip: don\u2019t argue.)<\/p>\n

Many of her views are unpopular in the academic world and even prompt teasing from her friends, she admits. She preaches \u201cown your old\u201d so much that people call her a broken record. But unpopularity is old hat to Holstein. She\u2019s spent most of her entire academic career not being agreed with.<\/p>\n

She actually never planned to go into the field of aging. In 1973, Holstein, in her early 30s, was teaching the history of Western civilization at a community college in largely conservative Orange County, CA. She\u2019d just finished working on the presidential campaign of George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam War Democrat who lost to Richard Nixon, when she happened across a job listing for someone to coordinate \u201csenior volunteers.\u201d She applied and, to her surprise, was hired.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, this was the same year that the federal government created Area Agencies on Aging, local organizations that connect older people with services to help them live independently. Out of curiosity, Holstein got involved with those. \u201cOne thing led to another, and that is the beginning of this career in the field of aging,\u201d she says. \u201cIt would have been totally impossible to do it now, where people get degrees in gerontology. But in 1973, it was possible.\u201d She got her own PhD, in medical humanities, in her mid-50s.<\/p>\n

During the early years of her scholarly work, \u201cMartha was going upstream against at least two currents,\u201d Mark Waymack, PhD, said via email. He\u2019s the chair of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and has worked with Holstein on various projects. First, aging just wasn\u2019t a popular topic. \u201cSecond, Martha is a woman and expressing a feminist voice. And in those earlier years, the feminist voice was also very much a scorned and devalued voice in academia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has shown courage in standing up to some of the most traditional influential scholars on aging and ethics,\u201d emailed Jennifer Parks, PhD, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago who\u2019s also worked with Holstein. Even today, Holstein \u201cis one of maybe a small handful of scholars working on aging from a feminist perspective. I take her work in this regard to be unique and to be a major contribution to ethics and aging.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she is still speaking, writing and teaching one quarter a year at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, Holstein is also learning what it\u2019s like to be an older woman, not from an academic standpoint but from a real-life one. Some things are challenging. The former runner (who now does yoga and Pilates) has lost some physical agility and lives with chronic lower-back pain. But many other things are rewarding\u2014like having leisure time. \u201cI love my life now,\u201d she says. \u201cI was a workaholic. I always had an endless to-do list.\u201d<\/p>\n

We talked with Holstein\u2014whose most recent book is Women in Late Life: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Age<\/em> (2015)\u2014about the issues that most concern her today and where she sees the future of aging headed, particularly for women.<\/p>\n

SCF: Though you\u2019ve focused on aging for over 40 years, has anything about the experience of getting older surprised you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> What interests me is how, despite all these efforts to change images of aging\u2014all this great push of what I call the rah, rah version of aging\u2014\u201c70 is the new 50\u201d and \u201cyou\u2019re only as old as you feel\u201d\u2014I encounter ageism all the time. I encounter salespeople calling me young lady. And when I say I\u2019m an old lady, they say, \u201cNo, you\u2019re not.\u201d They don\u2019t even let me be old.<\/p>\n

SCF: You embrace that word, \u201cold.\u201d You want other older women to call themselves that too\u2014and to resist the effort to see old age as an extension of midlife. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> If we adopt this notion that young or middle age is universally good and old is universally bad\u2014therefore we have to deny that we\u2019re old\u2014I think we just reinforce the kind of ageist notions that dominate in our society today.<\/p>\n

And you hear people regularly say, \u201cOh, I\u2019m not really old,\u201d or, \u201cI\u2019m so busy I don\u2019t have time to do anything; my children say I\u2019m busier than they are.\u201d We\u2019re always emphasizing the things that make us like<\/em> a young person instead of emphasizing the things that make us special and different, which is a certain amount of freedom to get up every day and say, what do I want to do today? We may not pay sufficient attention to the opportunities and the possibilities of old age and may even feel guilty that we\u2019re slowing down.<\/p>\n

SCF: Along those same lines, you reject the \u201c70 is the new 50\u201d idea and the so-called new old age. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> If I say that at 76 I\u2019m just like I was at 56, then I have to accept all the things that I did at 56\u2014work late into the night, work every weekend. You can\u2019t just have the good parts. You must accept the bad things that go along with it.<\/p>\n

And again, it doesn\u2019t break the power relationships between young and old. It still says young is better than being old.<\/p>\n

SCF: In your book Women in Late Life<\/em>, you\u2019ve pointed to many social inequalities older women face. What are the most critical ones?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> The social inequalities are in part economic issues, because women have worked in a gendered workplace. We don\u2019t have family leave policies. Women have more dropout years or reduced earnings when they take care of family members, so they have lower Social Security benefits\u2014as well as increased out-of-pocket costs. In our system\u2014particularly now in the neoliberal state\u2014caregiving is viewed entirely as an individual responsibility. There\u2019s no place for the public sector. So playing the kind of gendered role [of caregiver] that\u2019s expected of women in our society often leaves us financially much more insecure than men when we are old.<\/p>\n

The other place that there\u2019s a lot of social inequality is\u2014we\u2019ve just seen all these reports about how often women are silenced, that women are interrupted far more often than men, that when women make a point it\u2019s ignored, and then when a man makes a similar point, it\u2019s applauded. So when you combine gender and age, women have far less role to play in public life. There is that kind of persistent ageism that discounts women as we get old.<\/p>\n

SCF: You mentioned the neoliberal state. What do you mean by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> It\u2019s a revival of sort of 19th century classical liberalism, which is not political liberalism as we think about it today. That\u2019s why it\u2019s called neoliberalism. It is basically the dominance of the market\u2014that the private sector can do everything better than the public sector. So whatever you can commodify, translate into a good that could be sold for a profit, is really the desirable end. The people who fit into this kind of society are entrepreneurs, are consumers, are workers, are all the things that many of us who are old are not.<\/p>\n

SCF: How should society fix the social inequalities you talked about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> If I knew that, I probably would win a Nobel Prize. I think part of it is for us to be proudly old. And I think we need more and more intergenerational groups where we are with people who can see [that] just because we have gray hair doesn\u2019t mean our brains are fried or that we have no cognitive capacity at all.<\/p>\n

And the other thing\u2014for women, it is that dual intersectionality between gender and age. So you have to break gender norms since our life is framed by gender.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no single answer. The way the gerontological community tried to do it with this \u201cnew aging\u201d\u2014you know, with \u201cproductive aging\u201d and \u201csuccessful aging\u201d\u2014just kind of played into it and said, in order to be a successful old person, it means you just don\u2019t have to grow old at all. You can age without aging. And that\u2019s a myth. None of us are going to get old without aging.<\/p>\n

And the more we talk about all these positive developments, we leave out the mass sadnesses that people feel. It\u2019s like it\u2019s not OK to mourn the loss of capacity, to recognize that you can\u2019t play tennis anymore or you can\u2019t play golf anymore. It\u2019s not OK to have these losses associated with aging.<\/p>\n

SCF: You just mentioned successful aging\u2014the idea that you\u2019re aging \u201csuccessfully\u201d if you\u2019re healthy, happy and active. Elsewhere, you\u2019ve said that this concept has amounted to a moral judgment. Instead of \u201csuccessful\u201d aging, what should the emphasis be on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> There should be no adjective. We don\u2019t have successful middle age. We don\u2019t have successful childhood. Successful aging is a concept that says there\u2019s a bad way to age, and there\u2019s a good way to age. So I don\u2019t want any adjective except to recognize that being old is as diverse and as interesting or boring as any age.<\/p>\n

SCF: You\u2019ve also spoken against emphasizing productivity as a measure of an older person\u2019s value. What other values should be emphasized more, especially when it comes to older women?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> It\u2019s hard because finally when we\u2019re old\u2014if we are not impoverished and not worrying about where our next meal comes from, which almost half of women are\u2014but if we\u2019re lucky, we finally have the chance to make choices about our life. We finally have to decide how we want to live. And the last thing I want is somebody to tell me that to be a good old person, I have to be productive, that I have to keep on working or that I have to volunteer or I have to do something.<\/p>\n

Does ever a time in our life come where we can assess our own lives and decide how to live? Have we not paid\u2014most of us\u2014paid our dues, either working full time, taking care of our family, working in our community? Don\u2019t we ever get a chance to\u2014let\u2019s say I just want to write poetry all day?<\/p>\n

SCF: You\u2019ve said you don\u2019t think we can eliminate ageism in society. Why not?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> In some ways, it\u2019s because it\u2019s everywhere and nowhere. It\u2019s everywhere in that when I go to the cosmetic counter, she wants to tell me that I\u2019m not an old lady even though I insist that I am. Well, that\u2019s ageist. That\u2019s saying to me that it\u2019s not OK to be old. So it\u2019s everywhere.<\/p>\n

And you go look at images of old women in greeting cards. If you just change it and make that a black person or brown person, with all the negative imagery, there would be hell to raise.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what I mean that it\u2019s sort of everywhere and nowhere, because it happens, and people are not held accountable for it.<\/p>\n

SCF: There\u2019s been much talk in the media about how boomers will change the experience of aging. Is there truth in this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> I\u2019m not a student of boomers. But the first observation I\u2019ll make: boomers are not all white, middle class people who are spending a lot of time defying that they\u2019re old. There are a lot of impoverished boomers. There are a lot of people living in terrible conditions who are boomers.<\/p>\n

You want to generalize the things that make you feel good: everybody\u2019s doing great, everybody\u2019s really affluent, we\u2019re healthier than usual. If you break that down by race, class, gender, ethnicity, the picture isn\u2019t all that rosy. But that serves a critical political agenda that says, oh, we can cut Social Security because people are rich; they\u2019re affluent.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t know that the boomers are going to change everything like a lot of sociologists tell us they should.<\/p>\n

Obviously, I\u2019m not a very optimistic person, and I\u2019m very political, and I see the grip of neoliberal politics, which want to undermine the fact that most of us need public assistance. The average woman\u2019s Social Security is $1,200 a month. Most women don\u2019t have pensions; 401(k)s primarily serve people earning over $100,000 a year.<\/p>\n

So my optimism about the future is bleak as long as this neoliberal ideology that undermines the role of government in providing the necessary supports for us to then build our lives\u2014as long as that\u2019s the dominant ideology, it\u2019s kind of hard to change things.<\/p>\n

SCF: What does the term \u201cold woman\u201d mean to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MH:<\/strong> Being an old woman, to me, means trying to live as consciously as I possibly can, knowing that I don\u2019t have an endless amount of time left. There\u2019s an element for me of urgency about, how do I live every day?<\/p>\n

Some people wisely call it conscious aging, that we live with this kind of awareness. My friend [radio journalist] Connie Goldman said, \u201cWho am I when I\u2019m not who I used to be?\u201d So who am I now? So that\u2019s, for me, really important.<\/p>\n

This interview was edited for clarity and length.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conventional wisdom doesn\u2019t mean much to Martha Holstein, PhD. \u201cI never set out to be a devil\u2019s advocate,\u201d she says. She just happened to be one. \u201cI always saw the opposite of what other people saw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Martha Holstein: Feminism and the Future of Aging<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

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