Women as They Age


Book Description

The focus is on the crucial economic, social, and health issues facing older women today: widowhood, longevity, feminization of poverty, employment discrimination, inadequate social programs, and chronic health problems. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.




Women Coming of Age


Book Description

Offers advice on diet, exercise, sexuality, and self-image for middle aged women. Includes the Prime Time Workout.




Women as They Age


Book Description

Explore the needs of older women and ways to provide for them! Written by women, about women, and for women, Women As They Age, Second Edition highlights the realities of being an aging woman in a youth-oriented, male-dominated society, in which socioeconomic and gender stratification are the norm. In the eleven years since the publication of the original Women as They Age, there has been a great deal of research on the subject. This second edition is inclusive and current, providing valuable information on the needs and accomplishments of our present and future older population. Here you'll encounter women from the mainstream and minorities of all kinds, and come to a better understanding of their personal and family relationships, their sexuality, their concerns, and their feelings about death and dying. Public policies towards aging women are discussed, as are psychological and sociological perspectives. In its focus on older women, Women As They Age, Second Edition, highlights the challenges that these women present to professionals whose job it is, directly or indirectly, to provide assistance to the vast array of aging and aged women. This valuable multidisciplinary book--aimed at students, practitioners, administrators, and educators--addresses crucial issues in social work, nursing, psychology, sociology, gerontology, and economics. New subjects covered in this edition include: grandmothers raising grandchildren long-term care for aging women the current status of public policy as it pertains to older women older women's changing perspectives on sexuality new issues surrounding death and dying Women as They Age, Second Edition explores state-of-the-art and developmental perspectives across the professions of sociology, psychology, social work, and nursing. Also provided is a close examination of the unique issues facing older women--including public policy, employment discrimination, and social program adequacy and equity; the relationship of older women to family; sexuality and intimacy; and special concerns of minority women. This volume includes a practical resource guide that explores the services available to older women. While addressing the troublesome situations of older women worldwide, Women As They Age, Second Edition also celebrates their triumphs, accomplishments, and contributions.




The Ways Women Age


Book Description

The story of how and why some women choose to use, while others refuse, cosmetic intervention. What is it like to be a woman growing older in a culture where you cannot go to the doctor, open a magazine, watch television, or surf the internet without encountering products and procedures that are designed to make you look younger? What do women have to say about their decision to embrace cosmetic anti-aging procedures? And, alternatively, how do women come to decide to grow older without them? In the United States today, women are the overwhelming consumers of cosmetic anti-aging surgeries and technologies. And while not all women undergo these procedures, their exposure to them is almost inevitable. Set against the backdrop of commercialized medicine in the United States, Abigail T. Brooks investigates the anti-aging craze from the perspective of women themselves, examining the rapidly changing cultural attitudes, pressures, and expectations of female aging. Drawn from in-depth interviews with women in the United States who choose, and refuse, to have cosmetic anti-aging procedures, The Ways Women Age provides a fresh understanding of how today’s women feel about aging. The women’s stories in this book are personal biographies that explore identity and body image and are reflexively shaped by beauty standards, expectations of femininity, and an increasingly normalized climate of cosmetic anti-aging intervention. The Ways Women Age offers a critical perspective on how women respond to 21st century expectations of youth and beauty.




Women Rowing North


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, a guide to wisdom, authenticity, and bliss for women as they age. Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, and loss. Yet as Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy and filled with gratitude for the gifts of life. Their struggles help them grow into the authentic, empathetic, and wise people they have always wanted to be. In Women Rowing North, Pipher offers a timely examination of the cultural and developmental issues women face as they age. Drawing on her own experience as daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, caregiver, clinical psychologist, and cultural anthropologist, she explores ways women can cultivate resilient responses to the challenges they face. "If we can keep our wits about us, think clearly, and manage our emotions skillfully," Pipher writes, "we will experience a joyous time of our lives. If we have planned carefully and packed properly, if we have good maps and guides, the journey can be transcendent."




Women in Late Life


Book Description

Contemporary old age is fraught with contradiction and complexity—women portrayed either as incompetent and cuddly grandmothers or as young women trapped in old bodies, images that rarely reflect how women actually see themselves. Women in Late Life explores the thorny issues related to gender and aging, including prevailing but problematic cultural expectations, body image, ageism, the experience of chronic illness, threats to Social Security and the very possibility of a secure retirement while challenging a long-term care system that disadvantages women. Author Martha Holstein writes from a critical feminist perspective, drawing on her many years of experience in gerontology, as well as interviews and personal experience as a woman now in her seventies. The book highlights how women’s experience of late life is shaped by the effects of lifelong gender norms, by contemporary culture—from gender stereotypes to ageism—and by the political context. The book blends critique with proposals aimed at resisting damaging inequities resulting from being simultaneously old and a woman. She focuses on changes needed on multiple levels—societal, cultural, political, and individual. This interdisciplinary look at key questions around gender and aging is nuanced and beautifully written.




Women as They Age


Book Description

The focus is on the crucial economic, social, and health issues facing older women today: widowhood, longevity, feminization of poverty, employment discrimination, inadequate social programs, and chronic health problems. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.




No Stopping Us Now


Book Description

The beloved New York Times columnist "inspires women to embrace aging and look at it with a new sense of hope" in this lively, fascinating, eye-opening look at women and aging in America (Parade Magazine). "You're not getting older, you're getting better," or so promised the famous 1970's ad -- for women's hair dye. Americans have always had a complicated relationship with aging: embrace it, deny it, defer it -- and women have been on the front lines of the battle, willingly or not. In her lively social history of American women and aging, acclaimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries. From Plymouth Rock (when a woman was considered marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age"), to a few generations later, when they were quietly retired to elderdom once they had passed the optimum age for reproduction, to recent decades when freedom from striving in the workplace and caretaking at home is often celebrated, to the first female nominee for president, American attitudes towards age have been a moving target. Gail Collins gives women reason to expect the best of their golden years.




Women Working Longer


Book Description

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.




Facing Age


Book Description

The first book in the new series Diversity and Aging, Laura Hurd Clarke's Facing Age examines the relationship between aging and women in a culture obsessed with youthfulness. From weight gain, to wrinkles, to sagging skin, to gray hair, the book explores older women's complex and often contradictory feelings about their bodies and the physical realities of growing older. Although the women in the book express discontent about their aging visage, they also emphasize the importance of functional abilities and suggest that appearance becomes less central in later life. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted over a ten year period, Hurd Clarke brings alive feminist theories about aging, beauty work, femininity, and the body. The book also discusses medicine and the aging appearance, with interviews from medical providers and women about treatments such as Botox injections and injectable fillers. This book makes an important and timely contribution to the discussion of gendered ageism and older women's experiences of growing older in a youth-obsessed culture.