Female Elders
Ellie Putnam led the Female Elders’ Topic Group at the West Coast North America Contemporary Women’s Issues Workshop.
Fourteen women attended, ranging in age from their early sixties to their early eighties. Isolation is a huge part of every oppression. One of the most delightful things was that we got to be together.
Ellie talked about the oppression of elders in particular as it affects female elders. And we looked at the oppression of females and the oppression of elders in the context of women’s liberation.
The following is a summary of Ellie’s points:
We are one hundred percent female, no less so than when we were young girls. We are smart, powerful, significant, courageous, and loving. We have our minds and voices, and our bodies. And we are now needed in the world more than ever before.
We have lived long lives and accomplished a great deal—as females. Many of us have been leaders in community building and in women’s liberation, both in RC and in the wide world.
The older we become, the harder elder oppression hits us, because it comes on top of decades of being oppressed as females.
Sexism is the systematic one-way oppression of females in our society. It is carried out by men. Men are not the enemy, but they have been conditioned to target females with sexism and male domination. This is because they have been oppressed themselves, by male domination.
Our bodies and minds have been assaulted with physical violence and sexual exploitation. Our very existence as females has been diminished and erased. We are trained to be subservient and accommodating, to please, to be sexually available, to not have our voices or stand up for ourselves, and to settle for smaller lives.
We have internalized the messages of sexism, the trivialization of us as females, and the trivialization of our issues. We have difficulty prioritizing ourselves. Racism and classism serve to drive the effects of sexism in even further.
One of our biggest challenges is to look at our early defeats from sexism. They can be buried and hard to access after all these years. They happened so long ago that it’s often hard to remember to work on them. We can go back and discharge on what happened to us as young females.
Elder oppression is systemic, brutal, and relentless.
Younger people might say invalidating things about us, but they are not the oppressors. They have no power over us. The basis of elder oppression is economic. We no longer create value for the owning class and are therefore seen as expendable.
It is fine to be old. We’ve gotten many negative messages about being elders. Many of us pretend we are younger and deny our age. We pretend we won’t be affected by aging and disability. We need not pretend about or deny these things. We can look at our fears of aging, death, and dying and at the struggles and deaths of our peers. The pandemic has exaggerated all these things.
We can discharge the recordings from elder oppression and at the same time accept the changes to our bodies. Most important, we can figure out how to live our lives well and be pleased with ourselves exactly the way we are. We can follow the RC Elders’ Commitment: “I promise that I will never die, that I will never slow down, and that I will have more fun than ever.”
Oakland, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of women
(Present Time 204, July 2021)