Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives^*

* We have chosen to spell 'ageing' with an 'e' in this issue but 'aging' is equally acceptable and we have retained this spelling where used in the criticism and references.

As Penelope Lively puts it in her memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time: ‘One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here’ (2013, 3). Lively is part of a growing number of women writers and artists who are not only productive in their later years but who provide valuable accounts both fictional and autobiographical -of their own ageing. They follow in the footsteps of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir (1970), Susan Sontag (1972), Germaine Greer (1992), Betty Friedan (1993), Lynne Segal (2013) and Ashton Applewhite (2016), motivated to write about their ageing by their need to bridge the gap between the lived experiences of growing older and the dominant cultural narrative of ‘old age’ as a negative thing to be avoided and disguised.¹ This negotiation is especially pertinent with regard to women, who, to this day, face ‘a double standard of ageing’ (Sontag 1972, 31) and for whom ‘aging casts its shadow earlier than for men’ (Woodward 1999, xiii). In view of the limited positive role models for ageing women, the desire to communicate one’s own authoritative report from the unknown territory of old age is shared by older women from all walks of life and there is an increasing need to have their diverse voices heard and acknowledged. Therefore, the focus of this special issue is on the ways older women’s life narrative redefines culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to get older. Drawing on research from cultural gerontology and critical age studies, the authors acknowledge, explore and contextualise women’s experiences of getting older, thus counterbalancing the mainly one-sided, negative representations of ageing as perpetuated by dominant cultural discourse. In doing so, they focus on diverse forms of life writing including memoirs and (auto)biography, digital and visual forms of life narrative as well as autoethnographic accounts.

With the focus on older women’s life writing in this issue we endeavour to address an appeal by Germaine Greer to generate spaces wherein a woman ‘could give an account of her own strategy for coping with old age’ (2017, 325). Attending to the rich catalogue of women who are active in writing about their own and other women’s older age in memoir and fiction, Greer, in her afterword to our collection Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, notes that the volume considers ‘ageing women as depicted in literature and visual culture’ but not ‘older women who are active in literature and visual culture’. As she states,

Yet I, who am seventy-eight, have been invited to write an afterword to the volume. In a true spirit of aged cantankerousness, then, I propose to remind readers that aged women themselves have been explicit and eloquent in memoir and in fiction about their condition. In far too many cases, though their works have been successful in their time, they are now forgotten (2017, 323).

The collection Greer refers to engages with symbolic aspects of women and ageing in literature and visual culture, and the power these constructions exert over public and private conceptions of older age. It stems from a project which began as an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives’, organised by us and Cathy McGlynn at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2015.² Following Greer’s call, this special issue of Life Writing shifts the focus from cultural representations to the subjective experiences and diverse voices of older women, exploring the tensions between their private meaning versus their social lives.

Margaret M. Gullette (1997) has shown that the dominant cultural narrative about ageing tends to be a one-sided, linear ‘decline narrative’, which associates older age mainly with the loss of cognitive and physical abilities. This master narrative of decline has been particularly debilitating for women, whose value in western consumer societies is often conflated with their youthful appearance so that their ‘[s]igns of age are read as failure’ (Twigg 2004, 61). Older women’s bodies are thus rendered both ‘invisible and hypervisible’ (Woodward 1999, xvi), either overlooked or reduced to their visible signs of ageing. In contrast, life writing provides older women with the opportunity to counterweight such negative associations and bring their own voices to bear on the cultural narrative of ageing, thus rendering this narrative more complex, subjective and diverse. A realisation central to this type of cultural and personal work is that identity formation and personal growth continue well into deep old age. In this regard, Gullette’s concept of ‘critical age autobiography’ (1997, 220) insists that it is possible to challenge dominant cultural narratives and stereotypes about ageing by countering and complementing them with our own individual stories. This concept is further explored by Ruth E. Ray, who notes that ‘[a] mark of individual growth is the deliberateness with which one writes about one’s self, moving beyond positions in which one has been “storied” by others to positions in which one reflects, reconsiders, modifies, rewrites, and “restories” oneself’ (2000, 28). In restorying themselves, older women are empowered to resist ‘the cultural forces that attempt to story our lives, especially in terms of age, throughout the life course’ (2000, 30).

The first three articles collected in this special issue focus on how such cultural forces have impacted on and have been resisted by literary writers and celebrities in diverse cultural contexts. While Emily Hind looks at the ways in which Mexican women writers and artists have succumbed to or resisted ageism in the course of their careers, Ieva Stončikaitė’s article retraces and analyses the trajectory of one iconic North American writer, Erica Jong, whose literary explorations of gender and age stereotypes have inspired generations of readers. Lucinda Rasmussen’s article juxtaposes this journey of artistic development with the toll that is taken on the female celebrity who seeks to remain visible in public life as she ages. Specifically, this article explores intersections of ageing, illness and agency in auto/biographical narratives about seventies icon Farrah Fawcett. All three articles remain attuned to the personal and artistic exaction that derives from inscribing the self within a social order that celebrates youthful femininity and frustrates feminist art, while they emphasise the cultural power of restorying one’s own life.

The first article included here, “Contemplation as Resistance to Ageism, and Its Historical Context: Mexican Writers Carmen Boullosa, Guadalupe Nettel, and María Rivera” by Emily Hind, historicises issues of women, ageing and life writing. Her initial question is, ‘What was it like to be a “death’s head” in a time when nearly no one identified the problem as such?’ Hind refers here to Gullette’s claim that ageing is culturally associated with narratives of decline to the degree that ageing women become ‘deaths’-heads’ (Gullette 2017, 14). In exploring this question, Hind contextualises autobiographical essays by Mexican writers Carmen Boullosa, Guadalupe Nettel and María Rivera, reading their narratives alongside a selection of earlier Mexican women artists who also faced issues of ageing, namely Nellie Campobello (1900), Frida Kahlo (1907), Griselda Álvarez (1913), Elena Garro (1916), Clementina Díaz y de Ovando (1916), and Guadalupe Amor (1918). Consulting the archives on the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Center for Writers, 1951–2006), Hind illuminates the ageism exerted on such women, and their methods of counteracting ageist pressures. For example, she attends to ‘creative age mathematics’ as a ‘habit among celebrities from the last century’, and dying one’s hair, a strategy employed by Clementina Díaz y de Ovando, as practices adopted by women to veil their age in the public eye. And yet, such attempts to pass as younger effectively undermine a breadth of accomplishments only achieved with age. Thus, Hind considers how, ultimately, ‘lying downward about age leads to feminism devoid of experienced feminists’. In the works of recent writers, she finds methods which sidestep this conundrum, as Nettel, Boullosa and Rivera elude the embedded narrative structures of age as decline, eschewing linear stories, incorporating sexuality-related moments, and emphasising process rather than pathology. Rivera, for example, ‘suggests that ageism can be overcome in part by exiting the narrative arc of autopathology in favor of release in meditation’. Therefore, Hind points to the critical importance of recognising historical and cultural contexts while also searching for new ways of articulating the self, with mindful contemplation of the present moment arising as one such outlet.

Anne Wyatt-Brown asserts that ‘[o]nly by combining research with novels and memoirs can we begin to comprehend the varieties of ageing experience in our time’ (2010, 57). Ieva Stončikaitė’s article “Ageing, Creativity, and Memory: The Evolution of Erica Jong’s Literary Career” takes its cue from this insight as she retraces the celebrated writer’s trajectory from her bestselling novel Fear of Flying (1973), written when the author was in her early thirties, to novels and autobiographical writings published in her midlife and later years. In doing so, Stončikaitė’s study tackles the prevailing myth that conflates artistic creativity with youth. As her contribution shows, looking at a fictional writer’s work in conjunction with their autobiographical writings can yield fruitful insights into an author’s creative processes in older age, in particular with regard to the narrative construction of a mature sense of self. This is especially pertinent with regard to Jong, who has acknowledged her ‘fear of writing’ and her reticence in asserting a female point of view in her early writings owing to culturally ingrained perceptions of women’s writings and experiences as somehow lesser than men’s. Jong has commented on her sense of liberation as an older writer who, confident in her own voice, no longer seeks approval and affirmation, in that sense becoming ‘fearless’. This fearlessness is perhaps also reflected in her blurring of genre boundaries, notably life writing and fiction, thus defying cultural and readerly expectations. As Stončikaitė’s article demonstrates, the writer’s process of growth, facilitated precisely by Jong’s continual reflections on her writing practice and her place in society as a woman writer past and present, effectively challenges the pervasive narrative of ageing as decline, thus turning her into a role model for younger writers in particular. As such, Jong is part of a number of iconic second-wave feminists such as Greer and Segal, who embarked on the process of exploring their older age, thereby helping to move the theme of ageing from the margins to the centre of feminist discourse.

Yet, as Lucinda Rasmussen’s article reveals, biographical work on seventies icon Farrah Fawcett is situated within a reactionary discourse precisely undermining second-wave feminism. A postfeminist culture perpetuates conservative gender norms, including ageism, by naturalising and amplifying control of women. This culture is exemplified in the beauty industry, wherein practices of commodification centring on the body package and sell idealised, youthful femininity as a form of power. Exploring the effects of such conflations of youth and success, age and illness, Rasmussen refers to Sally Chivers, who writes that within celebrity culture, ‘old age is akin to disability in the ways that they are socially constructed […] as bodily, threatening, and signalling failure’ (2011, 23). In this context, Rasmussen examines a trajectory which takes place across auto/biographical narratives by and about Fawcett, demonstrating how Fawcett’s celebrity persona, constructed as perpetually young and beautiful, serves as an impediment in her later years, drawing indictments of the ‘grotesque’ as she seeks to maintain it. Turning to an illness narrative entitled Farrah’s Story (2009), a documentary depicting Fawcett’s experiences with terminal cancer, Rasmussen opposes critical tendencies to interpret Fawcett as a victim of contemporary celebrity culture. This narrative, Rasmussen argues, with reference to Gullette, ‘is inevitably yoked to a set of naturalized ageist rhetorical and visual practices’. Countering this trend, Rasmussen instead locates the strategic self-representation that provides for Fawcett to question celebrity culture, an invasive media and their brutal treatment of older women. In Rasmussen’s reading, Farrah’s Story represents a deliberate and powerful life narrative.

Three of the articles in this collection adopt autoethnography wherein, using self-reflection and qualitative research, the researchers’ personal narratives are expressed through the embodied experience of performance (Anne Webster-Wright), meaning-making through objects (Hannan et al.) and reflecting on films (Ferris-Taylor et al.) to explore the subjectivities of older women and in connection critique wider social and cultural representations. Integral to this approach is the idea of ‘thinking with age’, which as Rita Ferris-Taylor, Jane Grant, Hannah Grist, Ros Jennings, Rina Rosselson and Sylvia Wiseman set out in their article on old age and care encounters in film, provides for exploring and speaking back to cultural scripts by way of harnessing a repository of life course experiences. Thus, the articles collected here seek to overcome the distance between the researchers and the subjects of research, so that older women exploring personal experience, both resembling and diverging from cultural representations, produce new critical evaluations. The experimentation and agency represented in these articles opens out new and exciting possibilities for the stories and experiences of older women to contribute to our understanding of women and ageing, private meaning and social lives, by intervening in the silences and taboos which often surround issues of old age.

Anne Webster-Wright’s article ‘Grace and Grit: The Politics, Poetics and Performance of Ageing as a Woman’ harnesses an autoethnographic approach to explore what the author calls ‘the poetics and potential of ageing’ and to find an answer to the basic question: ‘How am I to live my life as an older woman?’ Eschewing the bio-medical perspective that tends to foreground decline, Webster-Wright draws together insights from feminist and philosophical works, notably Simone de Beauvoir and Paul Ricoeur, recent research in cultural gerontology, as well as her own experiences of ‘restorying’ her life upon turning sixty. As Webster-Wright argues, in view of the demographic shift towards an ageing population in most Western societies, the dominant decline narrative needs to be replaced with alternative visions of ageing that allow for creative agency and growth. Her argument that the demographic group of ‘Baby Boomer’ women currently in their sixties are in the process of transforming ‘the face of ageing’ just as they once altered ‘the makeup of the workplace’, is illustrated by her own experiences of tapping unknown creative resources when joining a dance group for older women. As she writes, ‘my newly found creative agency […] has taken the philosophical idea of an embodied storied self to a new visible form. I’ve moved from theories and frameworks to action and protest, and in doing so, I’ve come alive again’. Webster-Wright’s vivid description of performing with the WaW Dance group also gestures towards performative aspects of ageing in general, suggesting how the ways older women ‘perform’ their age are often influenced by negative cultural stereotypes, which in turn can be challenged by reinventing and ‘restorying’ their lives.

Similarly, in their article ‘“A View from Old Age”: Women’s Lives as Narrated Through Objects’, Leonie Hannan, Gemma Carney, Paula Devine and Gemma Hodge point to the issue that though the ageing population are often in the news, reports tend to oscillate between care home horror stories and neoliberal dismissal of older people as a financial burden on the young. This group are furthermore polarised in the popular imaginary into categories of wise old age or fragility and decline. The result of such one-dimensional reasoning and occlusion is that those with experience of living a long life are not represented in public forums about them and their needs. In light of this misrepresentation, the authors developed a collaborative cross-disciplinary project inspired by Penelope Lively’s memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time, in which Lively proposed that ‘people’s possessions speak of them’ (2013, 199). Accordingly, in their project, the researchers asked a cohort of Northern Irish men and women over sixty to choose six objects in their possession that said ‘something of who I am’. The resulting article included here uses interview data from three women over sixty to analyse their narration of their own biographies. The chosen objects shed light on the complex and contradictory experiences of women’s ageing and provide insights into the ways in which an individual’s personal history mirrors the historical and social changes they have lived through. One aspect which comes to the fore through objects as a means of communication is the significance of relationships. ‘In tracing their life histories’, the authors note, ‘relationships with others formed a central focus—both as a means of creating narrative structure and as a way of making sense of the self’. Fostering a close collaboration between researchers, practitioners and participants, this project culminated in the sharing of objects, quotations and interpretations in a public exhibition entitled ‘Something of Who I Am’.

One aspect recently highlighted by cultural gerontologists and critical age scholars is the importance of care work in later life. This concerns members of the so-called ‘fourth age’ in need of care as well as the younger generation, often women, who either work as professional carers or tend to their frail family members. In recent years a number of films have explored the emotional, physical and psychological implications attached to a situation dreaded by most: being old, frail and dependent on care. Films such as Amour (Haneke 2012), Chronic (Franco 2015) and A Woman’s Tale (Cox 1991) narrate much-needed, partly controversial stories about end-of-life care from the perspectives of both the elderly and their carers. Aiming to read these three films through an autoethnographic lens, two researchers, Hannah Grist and Ros Jennings, from the Centre of Women, Ageing and Media at the University of Gloucestershire, UK, teamed up with four women from diverse social, cultural and national backgrounds who were, at the time of writing, members of the Brent University of the Third Age Older Women in Film Group. Their co-authored article included here, ‘Reading Film with Age through Collaborative Autoethnography: Old Age and Care, Encounters with Amour (Haneke, 2012), Chronic (Franco, 2015) and A Woman’s Tale (Cox, 1991)’ is the outcome of this exciting intergenerational collaboration. Their project as outlined in this article foregrounds the idea of ‘thinking with age’ and by doing so privileges the individual voices and perspectives of older women as they provide nuanced readings of the films, and by extension the themes of care and old age, inflected by their own experiences and life stories. In bringing together experiential and academic analyses, this innovative project not only provides a model of how older women’s voices can be inscribed into the discourse of old age and care but also highlights the importance of intergenerational dialogue and collaboration as a catalyst for personal growth and cultural change.

As the articles in this collection demonstrate, the figure of the older woman is often veiled by the expectations of dominant discourse. Thus, the project of foregrounding women, ageing and life writing calls for stylistic experimentation and the reconsideration of generic hierarchies. G. Thomas Couser writes about how the rise of the terms ‘life writing’ and ‘life narrative’ might appear to imply a decline in the notion of genre, yet this usage ‘reflects the vitality of life writing generally and the recognition of hitherto overlooked kinds of life writing (and new forms, like weblogs)’ (2005, 142). This broadening of genre is particularly pertinent to providing for forms in which to inscribe subjective experiences of identity formation in later life, thereby evading traditional constructions of older age fixed in dominant modes of expression. Thus, the contributions in this collection by Elisabeth Hanscombe and Cathy Fowley respectively harness the reflective nature of the essay genre to chronicle the authors’ experiences of growing older and finding a voice in the context of the bonds of family and friendship, as Hanscombe explores her relationship with her mother, and Fowley reflects on connections formed with women in an online community in the early days of the world wide web. Hanscombe, in ‘Now That I’m Old: Life Writing, Women and Ageing’, explores how her mother’s reluctance to give voice to certain memories and her idealisation of the past in her memoir impacted on Hanscombe’s own life writing, compelling her to searching self-reflection and the resistance of self-censorship or nostalgia. Fowley, in ‘Writing Life and Death Online’, documents how as a member of a community of older women formed through life writing in a shared forum, Women2women, she found mentors in ageing and a space to express emotions in writing, beyond everyday life and the immediate worlds of friends and family. A connection may be read between these essays in the sense of release informed by life writing, as an undertaking which is private yet also socially engaged, and which contributes to personal meaning-making as one grows older. For Hanscombe, the voice of her mother, as her internal critic, encourages her to follow her thoughts and frees her to release her memories as she ages. For Fowley, writing her life in connection with other women involved deep engagement with others’ narratives of illness, dying and grief, as the group collectively aged. What ultimately comes to the fore in both Hanscombe’s and Fowley’s narratives is compassion through the negotiation of loss, and patterns of meaning in older age across space and generations.

In putting together this special issue, we are indebted to the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Gender Arc, and the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies for funding support and a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to facilitate our ongoing collaboration and enable us to host a research symposium on ‘Women, Ageing and Life Narrative’ at the National University of Ireland, Galway in May 2018. We would also like to thank Maureen Perkins for her enthusiasm and support for this special issue, and the peer reviewers for their invaluable guidance, indispensable especially in the context of such an interdisciplinary endeavour. Finally, we express our heartfelt thanks to the contributors for their scholarship, dedication and goodwill. As the articles in this collection demonstrate, life writing by and about older women often necessitates opening out literary forms and modes of critique, searching for narrative and performative strategies, and creating spaces in which to inscribe subjective experiences. Relationships, intergenerational connections, and visual and material cues are often integral to these analyses, which assert the richness of older women’s life narratives that all too often risks being obscured by persisting cultural stereotypes. It is our hope that in bringing studies of women, ageing and life writing together, this special issue will contribute to the ongoing work of inserting personal, lived experiences into broader social discourses as part of effecting positive change.

Notes on contributors

Margaret O’Neill researches twentieth-century and contemporary Irish women’s writing. She is currently Project Coordinator for the Gender Arc research consortium in the University of Limerick. Recent publications include a feature article on Irish writer Kate O’Brien from a medical humanities perspective in a special issue of the Irish University Review on Kate O’Brien, and an article on Emma Donoghue and Marian Keyes in a special issue of Literature Interpretation Theory on ‘Recessionary Imaginings: Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing’. Together with Cathy McGlynn and Michaela Schrage-Früh she has edited Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Contact: [email protected]

Michaela Schrage-Früh is lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published widely on modern and contemporary poetry and fiction, and is the author of two monographs, Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian (WVT, 2004) and Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is co-editor, with Borbála Faragó, of The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems by Medbh McGuckian (Winston-Salem: WFU Press, 2015). Together with Cathy McGlynn and Margaret O’Neill, she has edited Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Contact: [email protected]

Notes

* We have chosen to spell 'ageing' with an 'e' in this issue but 'aging' is equally acceptable and we have retained this spelling where used in the criticism and references.

1 de Beauvoir (1972); Sontag (1972). NZ.org: Periodicals, Books and Authors. http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1972sep23-00029; Greer (1992); Friedan (1993); Segal (2013); Applewhite (2016).

2 This conference was funded under the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme and held at the University of Limerick, Ireland, with support of Gender Arc, the Centre for German-Irish Studies and the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. It has given rise to the Women and Ageing Research Network and ongoing collaborations including Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, edited by Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), this special issue of Life Writing, and a forthcoming special issue of the journal Nordic Irish Studies on ‘Women and Ageing in Irish Literature and Film’, edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh.