Women Studies

Women Studies

The label "resilient" has often been conferred on aging women who display competence in spite of unrelenting adversity as well as on aging women who rebound from psychological harm. How aging women respond and adapt to a difficult situation may at times be functional and at other times dysfunctional. In reality, aging women living in high-risk situations will slip and fall before finding their direction. Age as a concept of analysis for women's past is problematic for a number of reasons. Descriptions of aging as a process -- maturing through various stages of life from birth to death -- have not traditionally occurred in histories of women. Nor have historians delineated how the process applies to women's lives in histories of childhood or old age. Scholars of women's history have overcome such voids by establishing new sets of categories or definitions that relate explicitly to women's experiences. Those analyzing women's contributions to the history of art have emphasized such alternative media and skills as quilting or the use of multiple and unorthodox materials; those focusing on women in science have stressed women's private experimentation at home, the role of chemistry in cooking, and the duty of housewives in earlier periods to provide medical treatment for families and neighbors; and those focusing on politics have examined women's "gossip circles" and neighborhood organizing. These have been studied even when men's informal and family connections were most important to their success and when a female monarch and female advisors existed as clear examples of women's political standing. In short, scholars have studied a range of topics in a framework of gender stereotypes (both for women and men) outside the contributions women have made to mainstream "male" institutions.

Throughout much of history and across cultures, we have been told that aging women have ...