Shame and the aging woman

SHAME AND THE
AGING WOMAN
Confronting and Resisting Ageism
in Contemporary Women’s Writings
J. Brooks Bouson

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J. Brooks Bouson

Shame and the Aging
Woman
Confronting and Resisting Ageism in
Contemporary Women’s Writings


J. Brooks Bouson
Loyola University Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
ISBN 978-3-319-31710-6
ISBN 978-3-319-31711-3
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31711-3

(eBook)

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PREFACE

Shame and the Aging Woman is a book about a dreadful cultural secret
that, as I show, is hidden in plain sight. In Shame and the Aging Woman, I
offer an unapologetic—even shameless—analysis of the horrible cost that
gendered ageism exacts on older women in our graying society. To openly
discuss this topic in our anti-aging and age-phobic twenty-first-century
society is to break social taboos, since even the words “shame” and “old”
can discomfort and offend people. Yet we live in a shame-based and ageist
culture in which the intense focus on, and even obsession with, all things
youthful leads to a pervasive shaming of aging and old women.
The recent and contemporary North American and British women
authors that I examine in Shame and the Aging Woman dare to disclose
this secret through their relentless exposure of the myriad ways that our
culture shames older women. As these writers make visible the hidden
shaming of older women that goes on in our society, they expose the
high human and emotional price exacted on women in later life in our
youth-oriented and appearance-driven culture. In Shame and the Aging

Woman, I bring together the research findings of contemporary feminist
age studies scholars, feminist gerontologists, and narrative gerontologists,
and I also draw on the work of shame theorists as I explain the affective
dynamics of sexageism and what I call the “embodied shame” that afflicts
older women: that is, women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and
the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. As I examine both fictional and nonfiction works in
Shame and the Aging Woman, I show how sexageism functions as a deeply
embedded shaming ideology that oppresses older women, and as I offer a
v


vi

PREFACE

sustained analysis of the various ways in which sexageism can devalue and
damage the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our
graying culture, I use shame theory to explain why sexageism is so deeply
entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to
it.
The fact that women’s studies scholars involved in age studies have
admitted, again and again, that there can be something deeply unsettling,
if not terribly disconcerting, about the study of gendered ageism points
to the difficulty of the task that I have undertaken. Yet as I have worked
on this project, I have had the good fortune to teach students who have
become passionately, and also compassionately, involved with the issues
surrounding the stigmatized bodies and socially devalued identities of
older women in our society. In particular, I have been cheered and invigorated by the goodwill, earnestness, and enthusiasm of the many women
students that I have taught in my undergraduate and graduate courses
devoted to the study of women writers at Loyola University Chicago and

also in my courses focused on the topic of shame in literature. Just as I have
worked over the past few years to bring the study of emotions back into
the analysis of literature, so I have felt it part of my mission as a literature
professor to introduce my students to the developing fields of twenty-firstcentury age studies and feminist gerontology in my courses devoted to the
study of recent and contemporary women’s literature. Because ageism has
become deeply entrenched within feminism over the years, there has long
been a feminist avoidance of the issues surrounding gendered ageism and
the social devaluation of the identities and bodies of aging and old women
in our culture. But many of my young women students view the ageist
oppression of older women as an important social justice and feminist
issue, and the passion and fervor of my students gives me hope that they
will continue to engage with this issue as they move forward in their lives.
During the time that I have spent working on—and sometimes struggling with—Shame and the Aging Woman, I have been gratified by the
impassioned responses of my students and also heartened by the interest
of my colleagues in this project. I am especially grateful to Professor Joyce
Wexler, the Chair of Loyola’s English Department, for her long-standing
and collegial support of my work and to the administration of Loyola
University for granting me a research leave and a summer grant while I
was working on this project. I have other debts to acknowledge as well.
Special thanks are due, as always, to Joseph Adamson, for his vital support and for the inspiration of his example as a pioneer in the study of


PREFACE

vii

shame and literature. And I owe special thanks to Brigitte Shull at Palgrave
Macmillan Press, for her interest in my project, and I especially want to
thank Ryan Jenkins, my Palgrave editor, for his encouragement and generous support of my work and for his wonderful patience and good humor
as he dealt with my various inquiries as I worked on this book.

“The natural response to shame is hiding, and hiding breeds silence
which further deepens shame,” as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman tells
us. Refusing to be silent or to hide in shame, the authors I include in
Shame and the Aging Woman may discomfort us. But as they expose the
various and often insidious ways that sexageism shames and wounds older
women, they also seek to raise awareness of the plight of the older woman
in our graying society. As the new emphasis on successful aging in recent
times has led to an ever-intensifying dread of aging and a denial of bodily
age-related changes, older women are being told, in effect: “Be quiet!
Hold your tongue! Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell.” The feminist gerontologists and age studies scholars and women authors that I assemble in
the following pages refuse to follow this cultural mandate. As they expose
a painful cultural affliction that is hidden in plain sight by making visible the ubiquitous presence of shame in the daily lives of older women,
they seek to develop our age consciousness and to help us find ways to
resist the body politics that devalues and disrespects the lives of so many
older women in our age-phobic and anti-aging contemporary culture of
appearances.



CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

Aging Women and the Age Mystique: Age Anxiety

and Body Shame in the Contemporary Culture
of Appearances

1

The Mask of Aging and the Social Devaluation
and Sexual Humiliation of the Aging and Old Woman

39

Facing the Stranger in the Mirror in Illness, Disability,
and Physical Decline

93

Confronting and Resisting an Unlivable Age Culture

143

Works Cited

193

Index

205

ix

CHAPTER 1

Aging Women and the Age Mystique: Age
Anxiety and Body Shame
in the Contemporary Culture
of Appearances
Shame and the Aging Woman deals in a frank and unapologetic way with a
distressing cultural affliction and unspeakable secret hidden in plain sight in
contemporary Western society and first identified as a serious social issue by
Simone de Beauvoir in 1970: the terrible toll that sexageism and what I call
“embodied shame”—that is, shame about the aging female body—exacts
on older and elderly women.1 Even those aging women who self-identified
as feminists during and after the second-wave feminist movement, which
promised women relief from their objectified body-based identities, find
themselves succumbing to sexageism, a deeply entrenched and shaming
ideology that devalues the bodies and identities of older women in our
youth-loving and age-phobic culture. Because older women have learned
that to get old is to become old and ugly, it is not surprising that they
commonly express open disgust for their own aging bodies and the bodies of other older women or that they attempt to mask the aging process
and pass as younger—that is, hide their shame—by dyeing their hair and
using cosmetics and plastic surgery to try to minimize or erase the signs of
aging on their faces. Older women have learned that they are hypervisible
because they bear the visible signs of aging—gray hair, wrinkled skin, sagging bodies—and yet they are socially and sexually invisible and their lives
are devalued and discredited. Older women have learned that, because
old age is stigmatized in our culture, they may be treated with disrespect

© The Author(s) 2016
J.B. Bouson, Shame and the Aging Woman,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31711-3_1

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J.B. BOUSON

in public spaces and that younger people view them—if they see them at
all—as little old ladies, as old bags, as useless nobodies. Sexageism, then,
is an oppressive ideology, and internalized sexageism and the deep shame
attached to it is a felt, lived experience for far too many older women in our
twenty-first-century graying culture. As the demographers in Britain and
the United States tell us, whereas in Britain ten million people, or around
one-sixth of the population, are over sixty-five, in the United States there
are forty million people, or around 13 % of the population, over sixty-five,
and these numbers will continue to grow as the population ages. Yet as
society grays, old age remains stigmatized. Indeed, the increase in life spans
has “amplified rather than diminished social antipathy” toward the aging
population even at a time in which there is an “aversion towards the very
topic of ageing” (Segal, Out of Time 2).
The social shaming of aging and elderly women is a pervasive and insidious practice in our culture. Yet to name “shame” so openly, as I have
just done, is to break a social taboo and thus may seem insensitive, even
deliberately offensive, since even the word “shame” discomforts people
in our shame-phobic culture. For although we live in what shame theorist Gershen Kaufman describes as a “shamed-based” culture, shame is
“hidden” and “under strict taboo” (Shame 32). A “multidimensional,
multilayered experience,” shame is an individual phenomenon but also
a cultural phenomenon, and “each culture has its own distinct sources as
well as targets of shame” (Kaufman, Shame 191). Yet because of the taboo
on shame, shame is described as a “recently rediscovered feeling state”
(S. Miller, Shame xi) since not until the 1970s did psychologists, psychoanalysts, and sociologists start to investigate and describe the shame experience. Interestingly, just as shame induces secrecy and a hiding response,

so the study of shame has long been neglected even in those disciplines
devoted to the study of emotions. As psychologist Carl Goldberg notes,
only in recent times have the “emotional workings of shame” begun to
receive “careful psychological investigation.” Indeed, “there has been a
shame about studying shame in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic
fields,” and as a consequence of this, shame is one of the “most seriously
neglected and misunderstood emotions in contemporary society” (x).
Because there is shame about shame and thus a natural tendency to look
away from the other’s shame, telling the story of the older female body-inshame is a risky, even unsavory, business, and yet, as shame theorists insist,
the alleviation of shame first requires an awareness of shame’s ubiquitous
presence in our society. While Beauvoir dared to take this risk, there has


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3

been a long cultural silence, even among feminists, about what Beauvoir
described as our society’s dread of old age. Describing this feminist avoidance, age studies scholar Kathleen Woodward writes that although “the
body has been the locus of attention for many years” in academic circles,
“the older female body has been significant only in terms of its absence….
Ageism pervades American culture, and feminism in all its forms, as well
as cultural studies in general, have not been exempt from it” (“Performing
Age” 162). In a similar way, social gerontologist Julia Twigg observes that
while the body is the “master theme of gerontology,” social gerontology
has “tended to avoid the topic of the body,” in part because “emphasizing the bodily can seem demeaning,” in particular to women who have
long been degraded in Western society by being associated with the body
(“Body, Gender” 70, 60). But as Twigg remarks, “Aging ultimately is not
optional, however much we may want to resist its more malign cultural
meanings” (“Body, Gender” 63). Although the female body—in particular the aging female body—is the “site upon which many cultural anxieties

are played out” (Bazin and White ii), there has been an odd invisibility of
older women in our culture, who are doubly othered by both their gender
and their age. Shame theory, as I will show, helps us understand the affective roots of this feminist avoidance of and cultural amnesia about what
Beauvoir described as the “shameful secret” of old age—a secret hidden
in plain sight. The recent and contemporary North American and British
women authors that I examine in Shame and the Aging Woman dare to
disclose this secret, even at the risk of shaming us and making us wince,
as they expose to public view the impact of “learned cultural shame” on
aging women—that is, the internalized sexageist shame that grows out of
ageist decline ideology and the social denigration of the bodies and identities of aging and elderly women in contemporary culture.

THE FEMINIST AVOIDANCE OF THE “SHAMEFUL SECRET”
OF OLD AGE
Like the investigation of shame, the study of old age is not for the fainthearted or for those unwilling to break social taboos because they are
afraid of offending others. When Beauvoir began to write about old age,
she knew she was exposing a deep and dreadful cultural secret. Now viewed
as a wise feminist foremother for her well-known, indeed, seminal analysis
of women as “the second sex,” Beauvoir drew on her ideas about women


4

J.B. BOUSON

as the marginalized Other in formulating her ideas about old age as she
attempted to come to terms with her own dread of aging. Beauvoir’s own
body loathing is evident in her description, when she was in her mid-fifties,
of her age-altered face: “I often stop, flabbergasted, at the sight of this
incredible thing that serves me as a face…. I loathe my appearance now:
the eyebrows slipping down toward the eyes, the bags underneath, the

excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth
that wrinkles always bring” (Force of Circumstance 656). Beauvoir’s monumental but neglected book Old Age was originally published in French
in 1970, when Beauvoir was in her early sixties, and was later translated
into English and published in 1972 under the “euphemistically blurred”
title The Coming of Age (Segal, “Forever Young” 42). The shame drama
surrounding the publication of the English translation of Old Age is telling. For although Beauvoir’s stated intention in writing her book was to
“break the conspiracy of silence” surrounding the taboo topic of old age,
the title The Coming of Age used euphemism to partially hide the shameful
subject matter of Beauvoir’s book and thus defend against shame (Old Age
8). In her book, Beauvoir describes old age as the “Other” but also “that
which we must become,” and yet old age remains a “forbidden subject”
and “shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention” (316, 10, 7). To age
is to undergo the shame-inducing process of self-othering: “Within me it
is the Other—that is to say the person I am for the outsider—who is old:
and that Other is myself” (316). Striking at the very core of identity, the
otherness of old age is deeply disturbing. “Thinking of myself as an old
person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone
else as another than myself,” writes Beauvoir. “Every metamorphosis has
something frightening about it” (11). Because to men “a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object, when she grows old and ugly she loses
the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites
revulsion and even dread” (138). That Beauvoir’s study has been largely
“ignored by mainstream readers, feminists, and even scholars of Beauvoir”
(Woodward, Introduction xi) is a sign of just how taboo the subject of
aging remained years after Beauvoir set out to break the silence surrounding the “shameful secret” of old age in our culture. While Beauvoir focused
on the damaging impact of aging on both men and women, cultural critic
Susan Sontag, in a 1972 essay entitled “The Double Standard of Ageing,”
offered an early account of the gendered experience of the aging process.
“Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a
social pathology—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much

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more than men,” asserted Sontag. “It is particularly women who experience growing older … with such distaste and even shame” (72).
Yet while authors like Beauvoir and Sontag dared to speak about the
“shameful secret” of old age, there has been what Leni Marshall aptly
describes as a “larger social amnesia” surrounding the issue of old age,
which is reflected in the “limited size and influence of aging studies’
academic repertoire” (“Aging” viii).2 Cultural critic and literary scholar
Kathleen Woodward, whose work is foundational to age studies, recalls
how she was met with an “awkward silence” when she told people that she
was working on a book about aging (Aging 21). Determined to break this
silence and expose the social pathology intrinsic to ageism, Woodward, in
her 1991 book Aging and Its Discontents, focused on the anxiety and fear
that surround old age in our youth-oriented culture, explaining how “in
the West our representations of old age reflect a dominant gerontophobia” (Aging 7). In Freudian psychoanalysis, which is “embedded in the
fundamentally ageist ideology of western culture,” Woodward noted that
“the preoccupation with the body, which in old age is figured in terms of
incontinence and decline, is complicit with the general emphasis—if not
obsession—in western culture on the appearance of the body as the dominant signifier of old age” (Aging 10). In the introduction to her 1999
critical collection Figuring Age, Woodward set out to break the silence
once again not only in her remarks on our society’s denial of old age
but also in her account of how “lethal” ageism can be for women in our
society where “ageism is entrenched within feminism”—where feminists,
too, have internalized the culture’s “prejudices against aging and old age”
(Introduction xi). Like Woodward, feminist scholar Barbara Hillyer, in her
1998 essay “The Embodiment of Old Women: Silences,” expressed concern about the feminist avoidance of the experiences of older women, noting how, by the mid- to late 1990s, there remained “significant silences”
about the embodiment of old women in the developing feminist theory

about the body (48). Emphasizing the need for a “feminist theory about
old age as an embodied phenomenon,” Hillyer asserted that the “bodyawareness that pervades our culture” is an important issue and has “serious implications” not only for young women but also for older women
(48, 49). But she also recognized that it is risky for older women to speak
out and break the silence about their aging bodies since “to speak is to
name oneself declining.” Thus many older women “remain silent” about
aging “in some pretense that change is not occurring or is shameful” (53).


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J.B. BOUSON

As second-wave feminists themselves started to grow older only
to find that they were being devalued and marginalized, even by
younger feminists, because they were aging women, scholars in the
emerging field of age studies continued to investigate the damaging impact of ageism3 on society in general and on women in particular. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a scholar who first called for
the development of the field of “age studies” and referred to herself
as an “age critic,” commented in works like her 2004 book Aged
by Culture on the necessity of the emerging field of age studies to
combat the lethal effects of ageism, which Gullette described as a
“cultural assault” (Aged 137) growing out of the shame- inducing
aging-as-bodily-decline script. In a similar way, cultural critic and
age studies scholar Margaret Cruikshank, in the second edition of
her 2003 book Learning to Be Old, published in 2009, pointed to
the insidious ways in which ageism works to make old women feel
“ashamed of their age” (153). “We in women’s studies have averted
our gaze from women over sixty, even if we are over sixty ourselves,”
wrote Cruikshank. Noting the lack of scholarly interest in age studies,
Cruikshank speculated that women’s studies scholars were “unconsciously avoid[ing] the topic, knowing that old people, especially
women, are stigmatized. Internalized ageism may afflict us, in other

words. Like others, feminists resist physical changes and the diminishment of our social power, and thus aging has not seemed to be
a promising subject for study” (181). Feminist gerontologist and
sociologist Toni Calasanti, in her 2008 essay “A Feminist Confronts
Ageism,” also acknowledged the impact of ageism on women’s studies as she recalled the silence of other scholars and her own marginalization when she first began her work on aging and gender. “I am
learning to embrace, rather than apologize for, my interests in both
aging and gender,” remarked Calasanti, who, despite finding a sense
of “comradeship” among other feminist scholars of aging, remained
aware of the ways that ageism had fed into the marginalization of age
studies even among women’s studies scholars (156).4
It is telling that the works of feminist age studies scholars like
Woodward, Hillyer, Gullette, Cruikshank, and Calasanti have been met
with silence or have been noticed but then ignored, for the same thing
happened when Beauvoir, years before, brought to public awareness
what she called the “shameful secret” of old age. Feminist and critical gerontologist Martha Holstein, in her 2015 book Women in Late


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Life: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Age, sounds a more hopeful
note as she reviews recent feminist work on women and aging. Although
“old women, understood through feminist lenses, have not been well
attended in gerontology or women’s or gender studies,” writes Holstein,
the “situation is beginning to change, slowly” and thus there is a “growing interdisciplinary literature on gender and aging” (17). Yet in her
book, Holstein documents extensively just how difficult it is for aging
women—and feminists—to resist ageism and to proudly own the label
“old woman.” While it may be “tempting” for aging women in our
youth-loving culture to “assert that seventy is the new fifty, it is inevitably a failing strategy,” comments Holstein, who argues that “by denying
age we actually call attention to its salience” and “join in the denigration

of who we are” (16). In a similar way, feminist scholar Lynne Segal, in
her 2013 book Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, calls
attention to our graying culture’s fear of aging. “‘You are only as old as
you feel,’ though routinely offered as a jolly form of reassurance, carries
its own disavowal of old age,” writes Segal (3). And yet Segal confesses
to her own reluctance to discuss her age. “How old am I? Don’t ask;
don’t tell. The question frightens me. It is maddening, all the more so
for those like me, feminists on the left, approaching our sixth or seventh decade, who like to feel we have spent much of our time trying to
combat prejudice on all sides. Yet fears of revealing our age … are hard
to smother” (1). Why is it so difficult, as Segal and Holstein admit, for
aging women—and aging feminists—to resist ageism and proudly profess themselves to be “old women” or even to admit their age to others?
And why has it been so difficult for feminist scholars to break the social
and academic silence surrounding the plight of the older woman in our
graying culture? One of my aims as I bring together shame theory and
feminist age studies is to uncover the affective sources of this cultural
need to deny—or hide from awareness—the deep shame attached to
the bodies and identities of aging and old women in our culture. That
growing old, as Sontag remarked, is “mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology” that primarily afflicts women
will become evident in the following pages as I draw on representative
post-1960 writings by North American and British women novelists and
memoirists who, perhaps emboldened by second-wave feminism, which
encouraged women to find their own voices and tell their own stories,
have refused to be silenced and thus have dared to publicly expose this
shameful secret.


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J.B. BOUSON

EMBODIED SHAME AND THE SHAMING OF AGING WOMEN
IN THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF APPEARANCES
“Shame, which is antithetical to the central value of human dignity, the
heart of our ethical vision,” writes Martha Holstein, “is nonetheless a
familiar experience for many aging women” (“On Being” 321). Yet while
the shame experience is deeply familiar to many older women in our culture, only in recent years has shame—the so-called master emotion—
become the subject of intense psychoanalytic and psychological scrutiny,
most notably in the work of affect and shame theorists, such as Silvan
Tomkins, Helen Block Lewis, Donald Nathanson, Andrew Morrison, Paul
Gilbert, Gershen Kaufman, Thomas Scheff, and Léon Wurmser. In a similar way, “the recent turn to the emotions in the humanities has brought
shame out of hiding and made it subject to critical reassessment” within
both literary and cultural studies (McDermott 144).5
An intensely painful experience, shame “follows a moment of exposure,”
an uncovering that “reveals aspects of the self of a peculiarly sensitive,
intimate, and vulnerable nature” (Nathanson, “Timetable” 4). Shame sufferers feel in some profound way inferior to others—they perceive themselves as deeply flawed and defective or as worthless or as failures—and for
aging women this internalized shame script grows out of repeated interactions with contemptuous others. At once an interpersonal and intrapsychic
experience, shame derives from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience
of the other’s scorn,” and, indeed, what is central to the shame experience, writes Helen Block Lewis, is the “self-in-the-eyes-of-the-other”
(Introduction 15). Because the shame experience is “directly about the
self” and registers as the individual’s experience even while it involves
“vivid imagery of the self in the other’s eyes,” shame induces what Lewis
calls a “doubleness of experience” (“Shame” 107). In the classic shame
scenario in which the “eye is the organ of shame par excellence,” the
individual feels exposed and humiliated—looked at with contempt—and
thus wants to hide or disappear (Wurmser, “Shame” 67). Fear of visual
exposure, as Léon Wurmser explains, leads to the wish to disappear as
the person one has shown oneself to be, or to be viewed as different than
one is (Mask 232). While the “inner experience of shame is exposure, the
outer view of shame is captured in its characteristic facial signs: eyes down,
head down, eyes averted, and blushing,” remarks Gershen Kaufman. If the

shame response of lowering the head reduces feelings of painful exposure,
it also produces “the universal symbol of the head hung in shame,” and


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from this classic facial display “comes the historical equation of shame with
‘loss of face.’” Indeed, “Shame is loss of dignity, fallen pride, damaged
self-esteem” (Shame 196).
“To feel shame is to feel seen in a painfully diminished sense” and to be
“revealed as lesser,” writes Kaufman (Shame 195). The “affect of indignity,”
shame is of vital importance to the individual because no other affect “is
closer to the experienced self” or is “more central for the sense of identity”
(Shame xix, xx). Individuals need to feel “valued and respected” in their
daily relations with others, and when this need is not provided for, “shame
will inevitably ensue” (Shame 201). Shame, then, can have profound consequences for individuals in their daily interactions with others. Described
by sociologist and shame theorist Thomas Scheff as “the most social of the
basic emotions,” shame results from “a threat to the social bond.” Since
shame “involves even a slight threat to the bond,” as Scheff explains, “it
is present or anticipated in virtually all social interaction,” making shame
ubiquitous in social life (“Shame” 256). Indeed, “Shame and pride seem
to be an almost continuous part of human existence not only in crises
but also in the slightest of social contacts.” Cross-cultural investigations
of politeness behavior suggest “the universality of shame” in revealing
how cultures “provide elaborate means for protecting face, that is, protecting against embarrassment and humiliation” (Scheff, Bloody Revenge
51). In daily social interactions, states of shame and pride “almost always
depend on the level of deference accorded a person: pride arises from deferential treatment by others (‘respect’), and shame from lack of deference
(‘disrespect’). Gestures that imply respect or disrespect, together with the

emotional response they generate, make up the deference/emotion system,
which exerts a powerful influence on human behavior” (Scheff, Retzinger,
and Ryan 184–85). In a similar way, Gershen Kaufman describes how, in
intergroup relations as each group “enacts it scripted part,” the shame
experienced by devalued groups is “further compounded” by the affect of
contempt, which “partitions the inferior from the superior in any culture
or nation” (Shame 241). Disrespected and treated with contempt, older
and elderly women come to know their allotted inferior place in society
through their daily interactions with others.
Feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky’s observation that shame is
women’s “pervasive affective attunement to the social environment”
(Femininity 85) points to the significance of issues surrounding pride and
shame and the deference–emotion system not only in the social formation
of female identity but, more particularly, in the formation of the socially


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devalued and stigmatized identity of the older and elderly woman. Living
as we do in an anti-aging society in which “being old is a stigma and
reflects a spoiled self” and old women are considered ugly and are treated
with contempt, it is not surprising that many women attempt to mask the
aging process—that is, hide their shame—by dyeing their hair and using
cosmetics and plastic surgery as they try to minimize or eliminate the
signs of aging on their faces (M. Lewis, Shame 197). Although the body
can be a “source of pleasure”—something to be displayed to approving
others—it can also be “a liability, something that can be a source of rejection, to be covered or hidden,” as shame theorist Paul Gilbert observes
in his important work on body shame (“Body Shame” 29). An “inner

experience of self as an unattractive social agent,” shame is an “involuntary
response to an awareness that one has lost status and is devalued,” and in
body shame, such an experience of social devaluation may be reflected in
negative assessments of the body—“I hate, or am disgusted by, my body”
(“What Is Shame?” 22; “Body Shame” 10).6 Psychologist Sarah Pearlman
reveals how pervasive the experience of body shame is for older women
in her account of a developmental transition that she labels “late mid-life
astonishment,” which typically begins between the ages of fifty and sixty
when many women report on the “emotional shock” (6) they experience
when they look in the mirror and are astonished at the sight of their graying hair and wrinkled skin. “For many late mid-life women, the loss of
socially defined attractiveness is severely disruptive to self-concept and a
traumatizing assault upon … feelings of self-love and self-worth,” explains
Pearlman. “When self-love and self-worth are diminished, the result is the
activation of shame—as if becoming/looking older means that something
is deeply and truly wrong” with the individual (7). That older women
commonly see their gray hair and wrinkles and other signs of aging as a
deviant or pathological “mask or disguise concealing the essentially youthful self beneath” (Featherstone and Hepworth 379) reveals the toxicity of
internalized ageism and the deep rejection of the age-altered body in our
appearance-driven culture.
Despite the fact that old age is the “one difference we are all likely
to live into,” as Kathleen Woodward remarks, there is a telling “invisibility of older women in everyday life” (Introduction x, ix). Offering a
vivid example of the lethal impact of ageism on old women, Woodward
recounts the words of an eighty-seven-year-old widow who lived with her
son and daughter-in-law and was deeply shamed by them because she was
incontinent. “‘I’m only allowed to sit on one chair…. Nobody talks to


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me all day except to yell at me. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. I
just want to die’” (Introduction xi). Through the “pedagogy of mortification,” as Woodward interprets this account, the older woman is taught to
“recede into invisibility.” Indeed, “it is as if the practice of humiliation by
the younger generation produces shame and the corresponding wish to
shrink in size” (Introduction xi–xii). Just as women have “functioned as
mirrors to men that reflect them back twice their size,” so younger people function “as mirrors to older women, reflecting them back half their
size,” writes Woodward as she describes how the shamed individual, who
is looked at with contempt by others, can feel overlooked, insignificant,
inferior. “Surely the practice of the disregard of older women is one of the
reasons why in fact we have so many ‘little old ladies’” (Introduction xii).
In a similar way, the “distasteful metaphor of ‘over the hill’ implies being
out of sight, invisible and hence out of mind” (Introduction xii–xiii). Just
as Woodward hopes to “bring the subject of older women into visibility”
(Introduction xvi), so my aim in Shame and the Aging Woman is to focus
on well-known feminist and contemporary women writers who have been
willing to risk shame by making visible the embodied experiences of the
older (midlife to late midlife) and elderly woman in their works.

CONJURING UP A GROTESQUE IMAGE: AGING FEMINISTS
AND THE AGE MYSTIQUE
“Now that the cohort of women whose pioneering work defined the second wave of the women’s movement has reached the life-stage of the
women they once regarded as invisible or irrelevant,” observes Roberta
Rubenstein, “they have begun to address the challenges of aging from the
perspective of their own experience as older women” (2). Such authors also
reveal their own entanglement in what Mary Carpenter calls “sexageism”
as they express the fear that to grow old is to become shameful “female
grotesques” (142). “I am the older generation now, and I’m not always
sure I like it,” writes Erica Jong in her 1994 book Fear of Fifty, in which
she expresses her own sexageism as she remarks on her anxieties about

belonging to the aging generation of second-wave feminists (2). Growing
up in a world that shamed older women through “hoary jokes about old
bags, cows, yentas, witches, crones,” Jong admits that she herself “dismissed the old bags … hardly knowing I was dismissing my own future”
(xxiii). As women like Jong grow older in a culture “in love with youth,”


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they are “terrified at fifty” because they do not know what they “can
become” when they are “no longer young and cute” (xix).
Like Jong, Letty Cottin Pogrebin in her 1996 book Getting Over
Getting Older admits to the difficulties faced by older women in our
youth-obsessed culture. As Pogrebin, halfway through her fifties, sets out
to offer a “close-to-the-bone story” of her own aging process, she asserts
the importance of maintaining “dignity in the face of the youth cult” (4).
Yet she also describes aging as an “ongoing sideshow of indignity and
deterioration” and views her own age-altered body as a grotesque spectacle: “My skin is sagging, my silhouette is drooping, and, if my new toilet
habits are any indication, everything that has fallen down is now pressing
on my bladder” (5). Admitting that “much of the aging process is disgusting, not the least to young people with young bodies, but to those of us
who are going through it,” Pogrebin is determined to deal with “shame
and fear” and to “normalize aging by talking about the private things” (6).
“I want to tell the truth because I’ve never read it,” Pogrebin asserts, and
she also says that by exposing “the whole gruesome ordeal” in her writing, she will be able to make aging “more manageable and less shameful”
(7–8, 7). As Pogrebin stands in front of a full-length mirror and examines
her fifty-five-year-old body “from the top down,” she admits to the “discrepancy” between her thirty-six-year-old “inner spirit” and the “physical
collapse” of her body (127). But she also insists as she “harshly” monitors
“every crinkle, sag, and scar” of her body that what she has described is
“not a maimed or disfigured human being but a normal female body in its

fifty-fifth year,” and so if her “inventory conjures up a grotesque image,
it’s because most of us are not used to confronting the ordinary aesthetic
of aging” (129). Aware that, since the rise of second-wave feminism, the
“demonization of age” has only intensified, Pogrebin argues that women
past fifty have a choice: they can “consider each new sign of age a cause for
shame, or a badge of life experience” and thus can say that they are either
“degenerating—or transmogrifying” (145, 142). Moreover, in an ageist
culture in which older women are treated as “invisible” and as “corporeal
nonentities,” they can “refuse to voluntarily disappear” (148, 153).
Similar to Jong and Pogrebin, Betty Friedan in her 1993 book The
Fountain of Age confesses to her own “dread of age,” admitting that
when her friends threw a surprise birthday party for her when she turned
sixty, she “could not face being sixty” (10, 13). When she first began to
do research on aging, she “dreaded” doing interviews with old people
because she “didn’t want to be contaminated by them,” and she “didn’t


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want the physical aura of age to rub off” on her (18). In this work,
Friedan offers the idea of an “age mystique,” something that is more
lethal than the “feminine mystique,” which she famously named and
described in the 1960s (42). “If age itself is defined as ‘problem,’ then
those over sixty-five who can no longer ‘pass’ as young are its carriers
and must be quarantined lest they contaminate, in mind or body, the rest
of society,” writes Friedan (50). Just as Pogrebin wishes that the words
“older woman” would conjure up the “image of a strong, wise, selfconfident female, not a hag or a nobody” (308), so Friedan seeks positive images of aging to replace the well-worn and shaming stereotypes
of the older woman in our culture. “I could already see, from the panic

that kept dogging my own search,” recalls Friedan, “that the mystique of
age was much more deadly than the feminine mystique, more terrifying
to confront, harder to break through. Even as age came closer and closer
to me personally, I kept asking myself if denial isn’t better, healthier.
Did I really want to open this sinister Pandora’s box? For there was
truly nothing to look forward to—nothing to identify with, nothing I
wanted to claim as ‘us’—in the image of age as decay and deterioration”
(42). As Friedan listened to experts opine about the “problems” surrounding the care of the aged—the “sick, helpless, senile, incontinent,
childlike, dependent old people, all alone, or draining the finances of
their families, a burden on the Social Security system and the hospitals”
(20–21)—she came to realize that the “dominant view of age as decline”
militates against the view that there is such a thing as productive aging:
a “fountain of age” that keeps some people “growing and developing,”
not deteriorating, as they age (26, 27). For Friedan, the denial of old age
evident in fountain-of-youth fantasies and the attempt of the old to pass
as younger are signs of our culture’s dread of age. Countering the view
that to age is to undergo “a programmed decline from youth,” Friedan
embraces, instead, the idea that later life can be a time of “open-ended
development” and the “‘quiet ripening of … mental and spiritual capacities’” (75, 86).
Like Friedan, Carolyn Heilbrun, in her 1997 book The Last Gift of
Time: Life Beyond Sixty, sees later life as a time of achieving “meaning and purpose” (2), yet she, too, admits that she dreads getting old.
“Having supposed the sixties would be downhill all the way, I had long
held a determination to commit suicide at seventy,” Heilbrun writes,
and when she reached seventy, despite the fact that her life “was good,”
she wondered whether it would be better to “leave at the height of


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well-being rather than contemplate the inevitable decline and the burden one becomes upon others” (7). When she decided not to commit
suicide at the age of seventy, Heilbrun found it “powerfully reassuring”
to think that she was living her life on “borrowed time,” since she was
free to choose, each day, whether to live or to die (10). “I can remember
graduating from college and assuring myself that never, never would
I look like those old fragile beings staggering along in the academic
procession,” Heilbrun comments at one point, thinking that if she has
come to look like “some of those ancient beings,” she, nevertheless,
“can still partake of all the spontaneous joy of youth—to which is added
the exquisite unlikelihood of its recurrence”; indeed, because those who
grow old “can taste the biting edge of passion’s anticipated annulment,”
they can “savor it as the young cannot” (163–64). “The shorter my hold
on life, the deeper and fuller do I seek to render it,” writes Heilbrun
even as she insists on her right to choose a voluntary death to avoid
becoming old and infirm (208). That Heilbrun eventually committed
suicide at age seventy-seven, as Margaret Morganroth Gullette remarks,
points to the perniciousness of ageism and decline ideology, for despite
Heilbrun’s “well-known history of feminist anti-ageism,” she chose a
voluntary death to avoid the decline of old age and she called such acts
of suicide “rational” (Agewise 42–43; see also 42–61).7 Often viewed as a
willed choice, Heilbrun’s decision to commit suicide rather than face the
“inevitable decline” of old age reveals the shaming—and lethal—force of
internalized ageism in our culture.

THE WITCH IN THE MIRROR: OLDER WOMEN FACING
THE MIRROR
“I see my work as an occasion for ordinary older women, who are typically absent from public discourse, to speak out and be listened to,” asserts
feminist and social ethicist Frida Furman as she describes the feminist
imperative behind her well-known 1997 book, Facing the Mirror: Older

Women and Beauty Shop Culture (“Old Venuses” 20). Because women are
“embodied selves,” writes Furman, “we cannot understand who women
are as socio-moral beings apart from the reality of their embodiment,” and
yet there has been little research on older women’s experiences of their
embodied identities (Facing 5). In her ethnographic study of a group of
twenty women who populate a beauty shop and who range in age from the
mid-fifties to the mid-eighties, Furman sets out to remedy this situation by


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focusing on the real-life experiences of older and elderly women in order
to discover how they feel about the aging process.
In contemporary culture where “the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ nature
of a woman’s experience prepares her to be ever at the ready for being
observed, looked at, appraised on the basis of her appearance,” the physical appearance of the older female body—a body that “slows down, sags,
grays, becomes limiting and sometimes painful, acquires wrinkles and
added weight”—can be deeply shaming, as it is for many of the women in
Furman’s study (54, 5). “Why should my daughter be ashamed of the way
I look? Why shouldn’t she be proud of the way her mother looks?” comments an eighty-five-year-old woman, who says she goes to the beauty shop
so she can look “nice” and who calls women who neglect their appearance
“frumps” (54). The “frump,” as Furman explains, is “a feminine failure,”
an object of shame whose “unwillingness” to assume responsibility for
her appearance “discredits her, and by extension, dishonors her family”
(55). When the beauty shop women look at photographs of themselves
taken by Furman, they routinely identify features that they find “embarrassing, shameful, or otherwise unacceptable”—a dowager’s hump, or
a large nose, or the folds of skin around the neck (57). “I’d rather die
than not get my hair done,” one woman in her seventies admits, to which

another woman, also in her seventies, replies, “I look at myself in the mirror and I see a witch.” In calling herself a “witch” this woman reveals her
own internalized ageism, for as Furman notes, shaming epithets such as
“witch” or “frump” or “dog” or “bag lady” are routinely used to identify
and humiliate older women who do not invest in their appearance and
thus to communicate the “revulsion inspired by the unimproved female
body” (60). Furman is especially struck by the open horror expressed by
a seventy-seven-year-old woman with Bell’s palsy when she examines her
photograph. “I look like a birth defect,” remarks the woman, whose Bell’s
palsy affects her eye and lip on the right side of her face. “How could I
look so…. I can’t stand to look at myself. I look so ugly!…How could that
be me?” (95).
Having internalized the cultural dictate that “looking old is bad” while
“looking young is good,” aging women in our culture do not want to
look old, and thus many older women who “feel good about their appearance do so on the basis of looking younger,” and they feel “bad” if they
do not, explains Furman (104, 105). Some women want to avoid or even
deny the physical changes associated with aging. When an eighty-fiveyear-old woman in Furman’s study gazes at her photograph, she admits