Learning to Be Old: gender, culture, aging
AgeVenture News Service, 12-18-02
Margaret Cruikshank's new book, "Learning to Be Old"
offers an approach to maturity that experts are calling innovative and creative. Many of her ideas are essential for fully understanding the personal and
societal aging experience. She intergrates ways to help yourself age successfully with the larger social, and economic questions.
Well-thought out.” Laura Katz Olson, Lehigh University.
“Exciting and important...this pioneering work addresses an area that is desperately in need of critical analysis.”
Virginia Gillispie, R.N.
"The American view of aging is dominated by cultural myths, simplistic media portrayals, and public relations science. In this
confusion, strong voices are needed to help us reflect on important issues. Learning to Be Old is a strong critique of the views of
aging contained in our culture, and it is a very welcome addition to the growing humanities literature in the field."
Dr. Robert C. Atchley, Naropa University.
"Through its underlying feminist perspective, Learning to Be Old raises the promise of a transformative approach to the paradoxes of
aging. Margaret Cruikshank argues that aging is socially constructed and therefore we can (and must) change, un-learn, or rethink
what is accepted as the 'truth' about aging in order to learn to age comfortably."
—Nancy R. Hooyman, University of Washington School of Social Work
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.
Margaret Cruikshank is a lecturer in women's studies and a faculty associate of the Center on Aging at the University of Maine.
"Learning to Be Old", October 2002, 200 pages, (paper $22.95, cloth $60), Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD.
image credit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
See related book reviews in AgeVenture's "Aging America" newsletter.
See related articles in the AgeVenture archives.
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