The pairing of ageism and sexism creates stereotypes against older women that are among the most vicious in society. Even if stereotypes are false, they are powerful and can be harmful because they influence public opinion and action. Throughout history negative images of older women have resulted in dislike, denigration, and outright persecution. Older women are lumped together as if their only identity is age and as if age somehow disqualifies their sexuality and value. Because of these stereotypes men, employers, and younger women discriminate against older women.
Older women themselves internalize the negative stereotypes. As they age, some women have diminished self-esteem. Instead of being proud of their age, they deny their aging to others and even to themselves. Many try to hide the signs of aging, as if aging is shameful, and often lie about their ages. Stereotypes stigmatize older women at much earlier ages than men and result in what Susan Sontag first called the double standard of aging.
By contrast, in Native American cultures, older women are generally well-respected members of the community. They are listened to, their counsel on important matters is sought, and they are well incorporated into the community and family. In some tribes, women cannot become healers or medicine people until after menopause. Being called an Elder is an honorific word, not one that calls forth a negative image.
In medieval times, old women were stereotyped as witches and suffered cruel punishments. Fairy tales and other stories characterized old women also as nuisances, mean, selfish, and shrews. According to Jane Mills's research in Womanwords: A Dictionary of Words, the following stereotypes are often applied to old women: anile, bag, battleaxe, beldam, biddy, dame, dowager, girl, gorgon, gossip, hag, haggard, hen, jade, maid/maiden, mother, mutton, spinster, and witch.
"Anile," which comes from the Latin word anus, means old woman and, as Mills points out, the word "entered English in the mid 17th century with grotesque, misogynistic connotations. Dictionary definitions include a doddering old woman, old womanish, imbecile, a silly old woman." "Anile" was used more in England than in the United States, according to Mills, who lives in England. However, most of the other terms continue to be used in the United States. In the 1890s the word "bag" referred to a middle-aged or elderly slattern, notes Mills. In the United States "bag" has come to refer to a woman with an old uterus or to a postmenopausal, nonfertile older woman.
In the United States older women are also stereotyped as witches, bitches, nags, and crones. Older feminists are reclaiming the word "crone" as an honored appellation by creating croning ceremonies to celebrate the coming of maturity. Despite this, "crone" is still used to describe old women negatively. Numerous dictionaries, for example, define crone as "an ugly, withered old woman."
Even the seemingly neutral word "grandmother" also may be used as a stereotype. As Barbara Macdonald points out in her book with Cynthia Rich, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism, even women who never marry or who are childless are stereotyped as grandmothers once they are older and are often expected to serve and nurture others, including younger feminists whose feminism fails to embrace old women as worthwhile.
This author's research demonstrates that not only are older women stereotyped by others but also that many self-stereotype by adopting a peapod lifestyle characterized by the seven Ps: adhering to patriarchy, propriety, politeness, perfectionism, passivity, patterning, and mourning prettiness. The older women's movement has sought to substitute more positive Ps such as pride, power, passion, and proactivity.
When women become mothers-in-law, they suffer from cruel stereotypes claiming that all mothers-in-law are possessive of sons, manipulative, mean to daughters-in-law, and so on. Older mothers themselves are the butt of many jokes that stereotype them as demanding, whining, enveloping women who are unable to give up control. Such stereotypes can be most cruel to Jewish older women.
Many lesbians, now old, suffered terribly in youth from homophobic stereotypes. Now, in somewhat more accepting times, they suffer from the double stigmatization of being old women and being lesbians. Even within the lesbian women's community, young lesbians are not immune to the ageism that permeates society.
Despite some notable exceptions, movies, television, and the print media stereotype older women as silly, stupid, senile, screechy, and stubborn. For example, Sophia, the old mother in the long-running situation comedy The Golden Girls, had some endearing qualities but nevertheless perpetuated ageist stereotypes. Although many people loved the portrayal by Ruth Gordon of feisty eighty-year-old Maude in the film Harold and Maude, this film also stereotyped old women as useless. Maude committed suicide at age eighty because she saw no further role for herself.
The stereotype that older women are nonsexual has had profound consequences both for women, who have feared what would happen to them, and also for older men, who have eschewed older women to bed or have wed women much younger than themselves. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut has referred to the "new cookie syndrome" of men dropping their midlife and old wives for younger women.
Women who are unmarried at later ages are often called old maids and considered to be petty, peculiar, prudish, or pests. Married, single, widowed, or divorced older women are sometimes referred to as "girls," which infantilizes them and denies their wisdom and life experience.
Despite the marvelous new roles some older women are carving out, the stereotype of the old woman knitting in a rocking chair persists. According to this author's research, when people are asked to write anonymously what comes to mind when they hear "old woman," they generally write words such as cranky, lonely, sad, wrinkled, messy, poor, or infirm. Younger women fear aging because of these negative images and often fail to include old women in their friendship and organizational networks or relegate them to serving refreshments, as Barbara Macdonald has pointed out.
A leading opponent of ageist stereotypes has been Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers. This organization began when Kuhn and some of her friends were forced to retire because of the ageist stereotype that they could no longer function well after sixty-five. The myths about older women, embodied in stereotypes, were also combated as early as the 1970s by Robert Butler, M.D., in his book Why Survive: Being Old in America. Despite nearly twenty years of combating stereotypes by these and other leaders, ageist stereotypes remain prevalent in U.S. society.
In the 1990s, with the focus on the U.S. health care system, old women, who tend to live longer than do men, became stereotyped as costly consumers of health care, including long-term care. They were blamed for rising health costs and rationed services when the problems in the health care system obviously resulted from other causes.
Research also has demonstrated that many physicians discriminate against older women. Rather than spending time and effort for diagnosis, advice, and treatment, many physicians often rush older women out of the office or overmedicate them with psychotropic medications. Perhaps the negative stereotypes of older women in many physicians' magazines influence the doctors. For example, Geriatrics, a journal read by many physicians, is full of pharmaceutical companies' color advertisements that depict menopausal women and old women as cranky, depressed, frail, confused, and silly. Even when the women's illnesses, such as arthritis, were the same as men's, the old women were portrayed in the journal as unkempt, passive, and incompetent, while the men with the same diagnosis appeared neat, well dressed, and active.
Perhaps it was accurate that the 1994-95 television series Chicago Hope, in one of its first shows, portrayed a young male physician who overlooked appendicitis in an old woman, then yelled at a female intern for interrupting him and asking him to look at "an old woman with arthritis." The patient might have had terrible arthritis (his stereotype of old women), but she also ended up with a burst appendix because of his stereotypical thinking.
Stereotypes hurt old women and can even kill if old women are neglected as a result. There are homeless old women on U.S. streets who are pictured as senile when what really troubles them is poverty and the lack of affordable housing. One old woman in a housing project for the elderly keeps a basket of marbles outside her apartment. When asked why she does this, she explains, "I want to show I haven't lost my marbles," which is her joking way of counteracting the stereotype. However, on the whole, many old women in the United States feel powerless to counteract the stereotypes against them.
Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Be An Outrageous Older Woman—A R.A.S.P. [Remarkable Aging Smart Person] (Manchester, Conn.: K.I.T. Press, 1993); Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism (San Francisco: Spinsters, Inc., 1993); Jane Mills, Womanwords: A Dictionary of Words About Women (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
Ruth Harriet Jacobs
See also
Aging.
