The Embodiment of Old Women: Silences

Abstract

In 1994, for the first time, I found myself attending closely to the embodiment of two old women, myself and my mother. I was just entering young old age at sixty, and she old old age at eighty. More significantly, our bodies required our attention. Gradually, during the preceding year, Mother became frail, and then her kidneys, lungs, and heart began to fail. Abruptly, I fell, broke my elbow, which was slow to heal, and thus discovered that I had osteoporosis. Both of us had osteoarthritis and unpredictable back pain. I was caring for Mother in hospitals, in her home, and then in a nursing home until she died, a year later. Intensely attuned to her body and frustratingly aware of the limitations of my own, I did what I always do, tried to think about what we were experiencing through the feminist theory that is my lifework. What I have discovered during the past three years as I have pursued my newly personal investigations of feminist literature about the embodiment of old women is a series of significant silences: discussions of women's embodiment in which old women are not mentioned; discussions of that focus on menopause as the crucial bodily event; stories of old women's successful aging that emphasize activity and achievement as if old bodies were not a factor; old women's personal narratives that refer to their/our bodies as if they were unimportant to whatever story is being told. My body and my mother's were terribly important, central factors in everything we might do. The silences discount that significance or hide it. My intention here is to examine the silences as a first step toward developing a feminist analysis of the embodiment of old women. This essay, my notes toward a feminist theory about old age as an embodied phenomenon, moves through analysis of silence toward theoretical speech. Before 1994, in my scholarly work on disability, I had paid considerable attention to the embodiment of women, but I had not realized how little of the