Empowerment and long-living women: return to the rejected body

Abstract

Adhering to a feminist empowerment model, this article began as an attempt to elicit the voices of long-living women on the subject of late life. My intent was to develop understandings that could be used to guide social work interventions. Half way into the project, I discovered that our models of empowerment do not quite “fit” the realities of advanced age. I argue that feminists need to develop a more body-sensitive and thus age-sensitive model of empowerment. Rather than power and powerlessness being understood as polar opposites, they could be seen a coexistent and interpenetrating. Seeing the interplay of power and vulnerability subverts the individualistic ethic of “successful aging” with its implied hostility toward aging bodies. As empowerment theory becomes “embodied,” disability and death lose their stigma and become acceptable and respectable human experiences.