Women Over 50 Psychological Perspectives
A woman’s middle age had traditionally been regarded as a time of loss and decline. But in the wake of the women's movement and other societal and cultural events, a profound shift has taken place. Far from being marginalized, midlife women stand at the f
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Psychological Perspectives VARDA MUHLBAUER EDITORS
•
JOAN C. CHRISLER
Women Over 50 Psychological Perspectives
Women Over 50 Psychological Perspectives
Edited by
Varda Muhlbauer Netanya Academic College Netanya, Israel
and
Joan C. Chrisler Connecticut College New London, Connecticut, USA
Joan C. Chrisler Department of Psychology Connecticut College 270 Mohegan Avenue New London, CT 06320 USA Email: [email protected]
Varda Muhlbauer Netanya Academic College Kiryat Yitzhak Rabin 1 University Street Netanya, 42365, Israel Email: [email protected]
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938388 ISBN-10: 0-387-46340-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-387-46340-7 eISBN: 978-0-387-46341-4
Printed on acid-free paper.
C 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC., 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.
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Foreword
It is truly remarkable that so little has happened in feminist studies in the last 20 years to rectify the dearth of psychological literature on older women. So it is with great pleasure that I note the publication of this book, which addresses so many of the needs that have gone begging for so long. But before I go forward to laud this volume, I’d like to go back in time to my own first reckonings that there was a great gap in the developmental story related to women’s lives. As I celebrated my 40th birthday and finished my graduate studies in the late 1970s, I became especially sensitive to the issue of women and aging. I was embarking on my dissertation research, which involved studying people between the ages of 65 and 100, most of whom were women, who were living either in their own homes, in retirement villages, or in nursing homes. As I did my literature review, I was struck by the paucity of research on women once they had reached a certain age. Like old soldiers, older women just seemed to fade away. From the time they had left puberty and found a life mate, the developmental psychology story had fewer and fewer episodes in each succeeding decade. What little was written tended to focus on loss—appearance, reproductive capacities, meaningful activity, sexual interest, mental stability, marital relationships, and, finally, cognitive capacities. Women were said to endure the pain of the “empty nest,” menopause, loneliness, widowhood, and depression. It seemed that there was nothing nice to sa
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