Kate Davidson

Late life widowhood, selfishness and new partnership choices: a gendered perspective

Little sociological attention has been paid to the repartnering of older people after widowhood, and how age, gender and the meanings of marriage influence choices about new cross-gender relationships. This paper reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 widows and 26 widowers over the age of 65, widowed for at least two years and who had not remarried. Respondents were asked about their current lifestyle and relationships and whether they had ever considered remarriage. The words ‘selfish’ and ‘freedom’ were often used by the widows when describing their present existence, which was associated with not having to look after someone all the time. Few of the widowers mentioned selfishness and this was more likely to be associated with feelings of anger at the loss of their spouse; none of the men associated widowhood with a sense of freedom. The paper argues that the desire for repartnering after widowhood is gender-specific: widows are more likely to choose to remain without a partner for intrinsic factors: the reluctance to relinquish a new-found freedom; while for widowers, extrinsic factors of older age and poor health are more salient issues in new partnership formation choices and constraints.

Gendered Meanings of Care Work Within Late Life Marital Relationships

Most care of older, ailing or disabled people within the home is carried out by a spouse. This paper examines late life marriage and the gendered consequences of caring for older married people in England. Qualitative interview data are analysed to contrast the sense of autonomy of older men and women while caring for a spouse and after widowhood. By encouraging older people to reflect retrospectively on the meaning of their caring roles, we illuminate the process of adjusting to transitions after long-term marriage. The research data indicate that gendered roles and expectations are crucial in understanding the mainly negative experience of older women as carers, in contrast to the more positive experience of older men.

Older Men, Social Integration and Organisational Activities

This article investigates the influence of partnership status on older mens involvement in social organisations, drawing on qualitative research. Men are found to be highly resistant to participation in organisations that cater primarily for the needs of older people. Older divorced and never-married men are more susceptible to social isolation and poor health than married men. This could be ameliorated by membership of such establishments, yet their resistance is the greatest. Policy implications focus on identifying and responding to appropriate provision of organisational and communal activities for ageing men, particularly those who spend their later years without a partner.

Men's organisational affiliations in later life: the influence of social class and marital status on informal group membership

This paper considers a dimension of social life that has been largely neglected in the research literature on ageing, older mens involvement with informal associations. These affiliations represent an under-valued resource which may contribute to the quality of life of older men by facilitating social interaction and providing a context for continued social productivity. Using the British Household Panel Survey for 1999, we explore the engagement of men aged 65 or more years with civic groups (such as political parties or voluntary agencies), religious organisations, and sports and social clubs. Involvement in civic and religious groups and sports clubs is common among middle class older men, while social club membership is common among working class men. Only a small amount of these differences can be explained by variations in health, income and access to private transport. Compared with partnered older men, widowers are more likely to be involved with sports and social clubs, while men who are divorced or never married are less likely to be a member of any informal group.

Gender and Aging

Over the last 30 years, the field of aging has been the site of an exceptional growth of research interest, yet it is only really within more recent social gerontology that the many varied experiences of older people are being acknowledged and explored through the intersection of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and, as many have argued, most importantly, gender. This chapter will show the importance of recognizing the gender dimension within the study of aging by exploring how using a “gendered eye,” or adopting a “gender lens” (Calasanti and Slevin 2001) not only reveals neglected issues for older people, but is also fundamentally important in thinking about the study of old age at a time when the growth in the aging population is unprecedented.

Neighbouring in Later Life: The Influence of Socio-Economic Resources, Gender and Household Composition on Neighbourly Relationships

Positive neighbourly relationships offer sociability and the opportunity to give and receive practical support. This mode of social interaction may be particularly important in later life, when people spend more time around the home andare increasingly likely to live alone. Building on a political economy perspective, this article uses the General Household Survey 2000 to explore three formsof neighbourly contact in later life: frequent conversations, doing favours and receiving favours. We find that socio-economic assets, such as home- and carownership, increase the likelihood both of having done a favour for a neighbour and of having received one. In later life, men are more likely than women to have frequent conversations with their neighbours; however, there is an interaction between gender and household composition in the exchange of favours. Among women, living alone increases the likelihood of providing and receiving favours; whereas among men, living alone decreases engagement in these forms of neighbourly social interaction.This gender difference may contribute to the elevated risk of social isolation among lone older men.

Gender and food in later life: shifting roles and relationships

Whilst most academic literature on food is written from a nutritional perspective, over the last three decades there has been increasing sociological interest in the meaning of food from a social interactionist approach. This interest was stimulated by the burgeoning feminist examination of the gendered domestic division of labour within households (for example Arber, 1993; Oakley, 1975). Cooking and its allied tasks: menu choice, shopping, preparation and clearing up afterwards, continues to be carried out mainly by women (DeVault, 1991; Sullivan, 1997). Since the 1980s, there have been changes in the gender dynamics of responsibility for meal preparation associated with age, class, educational level and presence of children within relationship units (Kemmer, 2000; Warde and Hetherington, 1994). The negotiation of food habits and behaviours of heterosexual couples entering into a relationship, whether cohabitation or marriage, has been investigated by Kemmer et al (1998) and Lake (2006), but less attention has been paid how food is linked to older people’s negotiations and adjustments to life events such as widowhood and new partnership formation. This chapter sheds light on the enduring importance of food as ‘social glue’ in old age, and how gendered food practices play a pivotal role in the maintenance of roles and identities in later life. Food practices expose social relations as they reflect, and are used to perform, social roles and identities. Life events such as widowhood in later life impact on the social roles of older people which in turn are reflected in food related behaviour such as the responsibility for food and food preparation. Continuities and discontinuities are experienced differently by older men and women, and the strategies employed to deal with them reflect perceptions of traditional cultural and gender roles. The chapter firstly examines sociological literature around food and the gendered division of labour in the kitchen, and discusses the sparse literature on ageing, social networks and food behaviours. Secondly, it discusses the methodology of our qualitative research project. Thirdly, it analyses our data to examine traditional notions of age related feminine and masculine identities and their impact on food related behaviours despite, and as a result of late life-course transitions.

Virpi Timonen, Ageing Societies: A Comparative Introduction , Open University Press, Maidenhead, UK, 2008, 224 pp., pbk £21.99, ISBN 13: 978 0 335 22269 8.

‘changing minds’, as the authors note, although the ‘ thinning’ of the life plot may not be experienced by all. This leads to personal introspection about identity in later life ; or rather its continuance or re-emergence. My reading of texts around later life suggests that there is much in common with other parts of the lifecourse in searches for identity : the teenage complaint of ‘who am I?’, the new mother’s observations of her ‘changed’ identity. Death features in this text, as it must, although not all books about later life step into this area. The authors’ concluding comments that the ‘ story ’ of a life is ironic need to be set in the context of their meaning that this involves untidiness, uncertainty and ‘positive befuddlement ’. This text has the potential to inform our reading of our own lives, and adds to the ‘ toolkit ’ of gerontologists by asking us to think more critically about reading, while reading.

Joint Review Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community Cambridge: Polity, 2005, £16.99 pbk (ISBN: 0–745–62950–4), x +206 pp.; Pat Chambers Older Widows and the Life Course: Multiple Narratives of Hidden Lives Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2005, £50 hbk (ISBN: 0–7546–4001–9), x +287 pp.

There are two major ways in which these books can be reviewed jointly: they both deal with transitions of ageing through a life-course lens, and they both seriously challenge the way we think about old age and its consequences for individuals and contemporary society. However, they are quite different in their style, approach and intellectual rigour. This is not to say one has greater value than the other as they also differ in their target audience and both fill a gap in the current literature. The Gilleard and Higgs volume Ageing in Context is timely as it makes a serious attempt to revise ‘critical gerontological’ theory, currently dominated, they argue, by the political economy approach. This perspective emphasizes the structural pressures and constraints associated with class, gender and ethnicity, which affect the lives of older people. Rather, Gilleard and Higgs interrogate the experience of people growing older in a global world of increasing diversity, erosion of traditional values, powerful influences of consumption and changing attitudes to lifestyle choices. In so doing, they draw on a variety of disciplines and meta-theories in order to present a fresh conceptualization of ageing in the context of the 21st century. Chambers examines the lives of a highly visible population but largely neglected field of study in the UK in Older Widows and the Life Course. In adopting a feminist life-course perspective, she challenges the stereotype of the lonely, miserable, problem-ridden women who have lost their husbands, usually after a long marriage, by asking a group of older widows about their lives from their own perspectives. She has a congenial, virtually jargon-free style which eases the read. This cannot always be said of the Gilleard and Higgs volume, which in places is hard to grasp. For example ‘... the stable identities that were created by industrial capitalism have been fragmented by cultural logics of differentiations and