Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging

By Margaret Cruikshank

Book Overview

What does it mean to grow old in America today? Is successful aging our responsibility, and what will happen if we fail to grow old gracefully? Especially for women, the onus on the aging population in the U.S. is growing rather than diminishing. Gender, race, and sexual orientation have been reinterpreted as socially constructed phenomena, yet aging is still seen through physically constructed lenses. This book helps put aging in a new light, neither romanticizing nor demonizing it. Feminist scholar Margaret Cruikshank looks at a variety of different forces affecting the progress of aging including fears and taboos, multicultural traditions, and the medicalization and politicization of natural processes. Through it all, we learn a better way to inhabit our age whatever it is.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847698491
• ISBN13: 9780847698493
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 1.1" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Being Old

If presenting unvarnished truth appears to be "sometimes overly strident", so be it. Ageism is indeed rampant unless one happens to be a white male political or corporate figure, and this book gives one the data that supports this truth.As a physician, I find the chapter "Overmedicating Old Americans" extremely important and timely, and I feel that this book can be easily read by the general public and should be taken very seriously by Health Care and Social Service professionals.