The frail elderly woman: emergent questions in aging and women's health

Abstract

Aging and elderly women, in particular frail elderly women, have until quite recently been virtually invisible in feminist, sociological, and gerontological literature. This discusses the lack of knowledge about elderly women which currently exists. It shows the need to pay closer attention in research and theory development to clarifying the relationship between macrolevel social arrangements and individual subjective experience, and reviews some work which is beginning to do this. The demographic picture shows a preponderance of women in the elderly population and suggests they have certain needs and suffer from particular disadvantages which differ from those of men and are directly related to the issue of dependency. Many feminist writers have argued forcefully that notions of social class relating to occupational status are very dubious when applied to women, who do not occupy an equivalent status to men either in the labor market or in the domestic sphere.