The Forum
The Gerontologist Copyright 2003 by The Gerontological Society of America
Vol. 43, No. 6, 787–796
Self, Society, and the ‘‘New Gerontology’’
Martha B. Holstein, PhD,1
and Meredith Minkler, DrPH2
The ‘‘new gerontology,’’ built on the concept of
successful aging, sets forth the preconditions for and
the end product of the process of aging successfully.
Focused on health and active participation in life, it
vests largely within individuals the power to achieve
this normatively desirable state. While acknowledging
the contributions of the scientific base for Rowe
and Kahn’s successful aging model, we emphasize
the need for a more careful examination of the model
itself. Using critical gerontology as a primary filter,
we critique this normative vision by focusing on its
unarticulated (and perhaps unexplored) values, assumptions,
and consequences. We argue that these
unexamined features may further harm older people,
particularly older women, the poor, and people of
color who are already marginalized. We conclude
by suggesting forms of resistance to this univocal
standard.
Key Words: Critical gerontology, Successful aging,
Feminist philosophy
The primary task of the critic is to analyze the
present and to reveal its fractures and instabilities
and the ways in which it at once limits us and points
to the transgressions of those limits (Bernstein, 1992,
p. 162).
One of gerontology’s great strengths has been its
multidisciplinary perspective. To date, biology and
the social sciences have provided the primary filters
through which gerontologists have studied aging and
old age. These disciplines have deepened our understanding
of the processes of aging, contributed to
policy and program development, and influenced
new generations of gerontologists. In the past several
years, a new paradigm has assumed pride of place.
Although linguistically similar to (but quite different
in content from) earlier work on successful aging
(Baltes & Baltes, 1990), this paradigm, firmly
grounded in the 10-year, $10 million MacArthur
Foundation Study of Successful Aging (Rowe &
Kahn, 1997, 1998), is hailed as the ‘‘new gerontology.’’
It is part of a larger movement in gerontology
and geriatrics—a vigorous emphasis on the potential
for and indeed the likelihood of a healthy and
engaged old age. This view seeks to counteract and
replace the old ‘‘decline and loss’’ paradigm (Unger
& Seeman, 1999) that views aging as a series of
individual decrements or losses to which both elders
and society needed to adapt or adjust (Phillipson,
1998). In contrast, the new gerontology adopts a
prevention model—modify individual behaviors
throughout your life and so avoid these decrements
and losses.
In addition to publishing in academic journals
(Rowe, 1997; Rowe & Kahn, 1997), Rowe and Kahn
presented their model and a wealth of evidencebased
health promotion and disease and disability
prevention advice in the form of a book geared at
a lay audience (Rowe & Kahn, 1998). In the years
since the publication of Successful Aging, this
volume has attracted an articulate, popular, and
professional following. Greeted as a lodestar for
moving the field of aging toward a new understanding
of what permits effective functioning in old age
(Hendricks, 1998) and drawing on the contributions
of many leading scientists in the field of aging,
Successful Aging is perhaps the single most recognized
work in recent gerontology. Intended to
Address correspondence to Martha B. Holstein, 360 W. Wellington,
16A, Chicago, IL 60657. E-mail: marthaholstein@ameritech.net
1
Department of Religious Studies, DePaul University, Chicago,
Illinois.
2
School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley.
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stimulate this wide recognition, the major public
relations effort that followed the book’s publication
and the resulting media attention have deepened its
cultural resonance while also influencing the nation’s
research agenda on aging.
Time and popularity have not, however, erased our
concerns about this paradigm and the associated use
of the implicitly normative phrase ‘‘successful aging.’’
Its very simplicity and apparent clarity mask vital
differences and many critical dimensions of what may
be described as a liminal state—‘‘the condition of
moving from one state to another’’ (Heilbrun, 1999,
p. 35)—under circumstances marked by change and
uncertainty. It is thus timely, we believe, to take
another look at the new gerontology. In particular, we
want to apply to the successful aging paradigm and its
popular manifestations critical and feminist perspectives,
whose standpoints can unsettle familiar and
conventional ways of thinking by revealing their
often-unrecognized underlying values and consequences.
To be critical means to engage in ‘‘historically
and socially situated normative reflection about
research methodologies, assumptions and directions’’
(Holstein, 1998, pp. 2–3). Critical practices reformulate
the questions that research asks, insist on broad
sources of knowledge generation, and urge asking
traditional ‘‘subjects’’ normative questions—what
ought to be—as a way of uncovering hidden
normative possibilities (Holstein, 1998). As interested
in the particular as in the general, in understanding as
well as generalizing, a critical approach enlarges our
perceptions and so calls attention to what more
positivist approaches cannot or do not notice.
After offering some historical context and briefly
summarizing Rowe and Kahn’s new gerontology and
the model of successful aging on which it rests, we
highlight key features of critical and feminist
thinking. Using these filters, we critique the new
gerontology and introduce what we believe to be a
needed complexity in thinking about the relationships
among individual biography, social and cultural
norms, and public policy. Although science
seeks parsimony, and individuals or groups seek
guidance for aging well and for reducing uncertainty,
the normative and the unidimensional qualities of
successful aging that seemingly offer these ends are
also its greatest limits. As a decontextualized scientific
discourse, it unconsciously presumes the neutrality
of its privileged standpoint, a presumption
that we will challenge. As friendly critics, we engage
in this interdisciplinary exploration of the new
gerontology and its alternatives in the belief that
critical and positivistic discourses, to borrow Lyotard’s
phrase (1984), are not ‘‘incommensurable
languages.’’ We believe that these discourses can indeed
inform one another. Boundary crossing, getting
out of line, and inviting heterodox perspectives into
one’s horizons of knowledge are risky, inviting, and
revealing (Meyers, 1997; Ray, 1999).
Among the exciting changes in the past decade or
so is the emergence of a multifaceted literature that
does exactly what critique must do. It, for example,
clarifies meanings of familiar terms and expressions
(e.g., Calasanti, 1996), unsettles that which is taken
for granted by exposing how it came to be (e.g.,
Katz, 1996), and introduces conceptual approaches
that move us from studying the ‘‘problem of old age’’
to understanding it as narratively complex and open
to restorying (e.g., Kenyon & Randall, 1999; Ray,
1999). Other scholarship reveals how the power of
unexamined cultural images subtly invades consciousness
even when prejudicial to the person internalizing
them. From the ‘‘mask of ageing’’
(Featherstone & Hepworth, 1991) to the cult of
activity and ‘‘busyness’’ (Cruikshank, 2003; Katz,
2000), many older people try to become what culture
signals as desirable without always recognizing
where the pressures originate and even if those
efforts are ultimately self-defeating.
Time and space considerations, however, have
limited the nature and scope of the critical discourses
we can bring to bear in our interrogation of the new
gerontology. We mention them briefly. Omitted, except
tangentially, from our exploration, for example,
are the cogent analyses offered by scholars such as
Stephen Katz (1996) and Bryan Greene (1993), whose
work reminds us that the discursive practices, which
inform gerontology, create ideas about and assume
authority over old age. Although appealing to Ruth
Ray’s (1999) concept of transgressive stories, our
analysis does not explicitly include other critical
work emerging within narrative gerontology (Kenyon,
Clark, & de Vries, 2001; Kenyon, Ruth, &
Mader, 1999). With scholars who work in narrative
gerontology, we believe that rendering aging visible
from the inside necessarily humbles positivistic ideas
that we can know the ‘‘true story of aging’’ (Kenyon
& Randall, 1999, p. 8). We particularly value the
open epistemology upon which narrative gerontology
rests; accepting many forms of knowing cannot
but challenge a singularly voiced notion labeled
‘‘successful aging,’’ especially one in which the
many-storied lives of older people are not essential
sources of knowledge.
For many years, Jaber Gubrium and James
Holstein, both separately and together (e.g., Gubrium
& Holstein, 1995, 1998; Holstein & Gubrium,
2000), have enlarged our understanding about
identity construction and preservation of agency
through narrative and everyday theorizing. Despite
postmodern challenges to the unity of the self, individuals
can possess agency that allows them to use
cultural materials in their own way (Gubrium &
Holstein, 1995). ‘‘Successful’’ and ‘‘unsuccessful’’
then become rubrics to interpret, organize, and give
meaning to experience. Finally, and while drawing
on some feminist scholarship, particularly feminist
philosophy, we cannot begin to do justice to the
many contributions of diverse streams within feminism
that have enriched our understanding of gender
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and aging (Browne, 1997; Calasanti & Slevin, 2001;
Dressel, Minkler, & Yen, 1999).
In sum, this article cannot, and is not intended to,
offer an exhaustive treatment of the many critiques
that can contribute to reexamining the new successful
aging paradigm. Rather, its objective is to use
selected contributions within the broad field of critical
gerontology and feminist philosophy, along with
our own observations, to contribute to and further
the growing critical dialogue about the new gerontology
and its implications.
Successful Aging and the New Gerontology
Ironically, the new gerontology has much in common
with the century-old Victorian view of successful
aging in which good health signaled a life lived
according to the strict dictates of Victorian convention.
Albeit without today’s scientific foundation and
inclined to view ‘‘vices,’’ such as vigorous sexual
activity, as the cause of an unhealthy old age, it still
distinguished between positive and negative experiences
of aging rooted in individual action over
a lifetime (see Cole, 1992). Even in the 19th century,
America scientists ‘‘sought a ‘normal’ old age that
contained an unstated ideal of health or maximum
functioning—the ‘good’ old age of Victorian morality’’
(Cole, 1992).
For many years, the modern gerontological
enterprise similarly has sought to understand what
can make old age better—healthier, financially more
secure, and a period of fulfillment and even growth.
In the classic edited work, Problems of Aging,
published in 1937, Edmund Cowdry invited a stellar
group of scientists to bring to the multifaceted
problem of aging an ‘‘understanding of how things
worked’’ from the perspective of several scientific
disciplines (quoted in Achenbaum, 1995, p. 67). In
the years since the publication of this first handbook
on aging, we have come a long way toward understanding
what that early volume called the ‘‘problem
of senescence.’’ With improved economic conditions,
positive changes in physical and often social environments,
and improvements in health care and health
care access, many more—though certainly not all—
older people can have a relatively satisfactory old
age. Since the early 1980s, declining poverty and the
mitigation of many diseases of old age have
facilitated interest in health promotion and wellness
and have contributed to richer, more open perceptions
about old age (Bernard, 2000; Schmidt, 1994).
The new gerontology is in this tradition. It
describes, in detail and with carefully documented
scientific support, how individuals can contribute to
their continued good health. In this way it provides
younger people with an important message about
making choices (albeit, as we will discuss, without
sufficient attention to the contexts and constraints
influencing those choices). Commenting on the impressive
scientific grounding of the successful aging
model, Scheidt, Humphreys, and Yorgason (1999)
noted that ‘‘at least a hundred studies have shown
the efficacy of modifications to environmental and
lifestyle factors for increasing the likelihood that
older individuals might achieve success under this
triarchic definition. So what’s not to like?’’ (p. 277).
We will return to that question after briefly reviewing
the premises of successful aging.
Rowe and Kahn (1998) argued that three conditions
or characteristics are necessary preconditions
for successful aging: (a) the avoidance of disease and
disability; (b) the maintenance of high physical and
cognitive functional capacity; and (c) ‘‘active engagement
in life.’’ They further suggested that these
three components are hierarchically ordered:
The absence of disease and disability makes it easier
to maintain mental and physical function. And
maintenance of mental and physical function in turn
enables (but does not guarantee) active engagement
with life. It is the combination [emphasis in the
original] of all three—avoidance of disease and
disability, maintenance of cognitive and physical
function and sustained engagement with life—that
represents the concept of successful aging most
fully [italics added]. (p. 39)
While Rowe and Kahn have refined their model
over the years (1997, 1998; also see Rowe, 1997),
reaffirming more strongly, for example, an emphasis
on the importance of ‘‘active engagement with life,’’
the instrumental or preconditions for successful aging
have become transformed, as the aforementioned
quote suggests, into the concept itself. In a few short
years, this model has become a central theoretical
paradigm within the fields of geriatrics and gerontology.
Despite its many strengths and contributions,
however, the successful aging model and its attendant
publicity are problematic. Following a brief review of
the critical gerontology framework, we will use these
perspectives as lenses through which to more critically
examine successful aging and the new gerontology.
A Critical Conceptual Framework
As an amalgam of different approaches to thinking
about aging and old age (Cole, Achenbaum,
Jakobi, & Kastenbaum, 1993; Katz, 1996; Laws,
1995; Minkler, 1996; Minkler & Estes, 1999;
Phillipson, 1998), critical gerontology asks questions
such as these: Who benefits and who is harmed by
prevailing culturally normative standards? Why does
that particular pattern prevail? From its more philosophical
stream (Moody, 1988; Manheimer, 2000), it
asks: How can we age well? What is a good life? It
questions the seemingly unreflexive ways in which
gerontological knowledge is created (Katz, 1996)
while seeking involved, critical, and overtly political
research strategies (Ray, 1999).
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rience a happier, healthier, and satisfying old age will
always be questions in search of answers. How these
questions are framed, what sources of knowledge
are accepted in seeking answers, and what answers
are considered satisfactory demarcates critical from
positivistic approaches to studying aging and old
age. In the tradition of deconstructionism, a critical
perspective probes the new gerontology for its contradictions
and unstated assumptions that might
otherwise go unnoticed.
It locates within nonscientific forms of knowing,
such as literature, philosophy, and personal narrative
or lived experience, important insights that traditional
research methods are likely to miss (see Cole,
Kastenbaum, & Ray, 2000; Woodward, 1991, 1999).
‘‘How it is for me’’ opens narrative possibilities that
trade the ability to generalize about old age for
increased understanding and reduced risk of a false
universality.
This critical perspective recognizes that, to understand
the problems of old age, we must also
understand the effects of gender, class, and race
analyses (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001; Cruikshank,
2003) to which earlier work in the political economy
of aging called attention (see Cole, 1992; Estes, 1979;
Minkler & Estes, 1999; Moody, 1988; Phillipson,
1998; Townsend, 1981; Walker, 1981). In contrast to
constructions that singularly or primarily emphasized
individual responsibility for health, these alternative
formulations insisted that at least equal
attention be paid to individual ‘‘response-ability,’’
or ‘‘the capacity of individuals for building on their
strengths and meeting the challenges posed by the
environment’’ (Minkler, 1999, p. 124). Individual
response-ability depends heavily on such factors as
having an adequate income, access to affordable and
nutritional food, a healthy and safe neighborhood in
which to live, and affordable, good-quality health
care (Minkler, 1999). In this way it calls attention to
the lifelong inequalities that might, in Rowe and
Kahn’s (1998) imagery, play a key role in placing one
elderly person on cross-country skis and another in
a wheelchair. While the new gerontology acknowledges
that we cannot be solely responsible for how
we age, it then sets aside the many factors that
intimately interact with our individual biographies,
the core subject with which it is concerned. In the
end, because critical gerontology assumes that it is
difficult to imagine ‘‘any way of life which is both
ideal and feasible’’ (Putnam, 1978, p. 87), it is suspicious
of a formula that seems to promise both—
and places it largely within individual control.
As a further limitation on individual control,
feminist philosopher Diana Meyers (1989) reminds
us that choices—including the food we eat and the
exercise we do or do not do—rest on the preconditions
that make such choices both informed and
possible. Making autonomous choices requires a wide
range of experiences and knowledge and the ability to
put these resources to work. These underlying
resources are not equally available. Labeled ‘‘autonomy
competence,’’ this perspective helps to explain
how rampant inequalities, differing life experiences,
and the oppressive social and economic situations
that give some many more choices than others affect
the possibilities for autonomous choice. Philosopher
Martha Nussbaum (1999), in discussing the capabilities
approach to human development, powerfully
argued that societies are morally obligated to move
all citizens above a certain basic threshold of capability.
Without this foundation present, the ability to
age successfully, as defined by Rowe and Kahn, is
dependent on chance and social location.
The particular lens of gender also reminds us that
our bodies are more than the location of illness and
health; they are the interface between public and
private worlds of meaning. Our bodies can liberate
us as well as circumscribe our actions and elicit
judgments that can harm us in that ‘‘between and
betwixt’’ (Heilbrun, 1999) condition of old age.
Because we are known through our bodies, to affirm
that they are ‘‘not us,’’ places a barrier between us
and the world (Gadow, 1983). We may no longer
want to be in the company of others as we expect
that our bodies will lead others to judge us. It is now
common, for example, to describe an older woman
who has wrinkles and some flab as ‘‘letting herself
go’’ without taking into account not only gravitational
forces but the point of privilege from which
we look at that woman. Poverty, widowhood, caregiving,
and other life events that primarily affect
women all take their toll (Cruikshank, 2003). A
gender analysis would thus take issue with blaming
language and the meanings embedded within it; it
would have us critically examine the new gerontology’s
tendency to put further demands on older
women without taking their biography or context
sufficiently into account. Similarly, for men who
have held low-wage and often demeaning jobs, the
pressures to conform to the bodily images and health
standards upheld by the new gerontology are yet
another form of oppression unnoticed by the more
privileged. Hence, a gender analysis would acknowledge
that gender, like race or ethnicity, class, and
sexual orientation, is part of broader ‘‘interlocking
systems of inequality’’ (Dressel et al., 1999; Stoller &
Gibson, 2000). Thus, gender would further be considered
in a more inclusive and intersectional framework
within which the lived experience of, for
example, low-income African American men would
be highlighted.
A final perspective achieving growing popularity
among critical gerontologists that is promising for
our interrogation of concepts such as successful
aging, is that of community-based participatory research
(CBPR). An orientation to research more than
a research method per se, CBPR begins with a topic of
importance to a community or group and equitably
involves all partners in the research process, including
the critical final phase of social action to help bring
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about change (Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998;
Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003). Together with related
participatory research traditions, this approach
‘‘‘turns on its head’ the more traditional research
paradigm in which the outside researcher largely
determines the questions asked, the tools employed,
the interventions developed, and the kinds of results
documented and valued’’ (Minkler & Wallerstein,
2003, p. 4; also see Gaventa, 1993). Such research also
is committed to using study findings to promote social
change as an integral part of the research process.
Although CBPR in gerontology is still in its
infancy, its potential has been demonstrated both
internationally and in the United States (Fadem et al.,
2003; Glanz & Neikrug, 1997. Together with
feminist analysis and other critical gerontology
perspectives, it offers special promise for examining
the successful aging paradigm and its meaning for
elders and society alike. It affirms that statements of
value are too important to be detached from the
voices for and about whom they presume to speak.
These perspectives suggest, in contrast to the
relatively parsimonious goals of modern science, the
likelihood of disharmony, ambiguity, and uncertainty;
these features are not seen as paralyzing but as
challenges that reflect late life’s complexities. And
perhaps, above all, such views hold that although
well-constructed scientific experiments can provide
much needed information about what we must do (if
we are able) to have a relatively healthy old age, it
cannot tell us what makes that life a good one.
Labeling the pathways to better health in old age as
successful aging is too great a leap from a critical
perspective.
Applying These Perspectives to the
New Gerontology
The Issue of Normativity
Because critical perspectives are concerned about
hidden value premises, we turn to the new gerontology’s
implicit (and thus unacknowledged) normativity.
Understood as an objective, scientific discourse,
the new gerontology upholds a certain status, defined
primarily in terms of health, and labels those who
exemplify these standards as aging successfully. This
stance affirms normative value commitments, offering
ways to think about—and judge—our choices
(now and in the past), actions, and their results.
Historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and philosophers,
among others (see Cole, 1988; Gubrium
& Wallace, 1990; Harper, 1997; Mackenzie, 2000;
Meyers, 1994), suggest reasons why cultural norms
matter. Cultural images, representations, symbols,
and metaphors are important means to withhold
or to express social recognition; they offer the
cultural imagery from which we construct identities
(Mackenzie, 2000). Central to this understanding are
notions of the self. Mediating between individuals
and their environment, the self is a ‘‘biographically
anchored and reflexive project,’’ realized in conversations
with others and oneself (Dannefer, 2000,
p. 272). Norms matter because we are situated selves,
embedded in society and culture and resonating with
what is valued in the environment. Although resistance
is possible, indeed probable, as situated selves,
we can rarely ignore cultural norms in the construction
of a self. Nor are we able to easily dissent, as
individuals, from culture. The theologian Rosemary
Reuther observed, ‘‘alternate cultures and communities
must be built up to support the dissenting
consciousness’’ (quoted in Heilbrun, 1999, from
Mairs, 1994). To date, alternative perspectives tend
to be ghettoized while the dominant culture accepts
as the desired norm the tanned, vigorous couple who
are bicycle riding on gently rolling hills and dining in
the warm glow of candles.
Even if we put aside the publicity the new
gerontology has received, and the strong scientific
base of the MacArthur Foundation Study, it is not
surprising that the new paradigm has gained popular
approbation. Success, a valued attribute in American
society, is generally visible and measurable, perhaps
countable in dollars, degrees, gold medals, and so
on. Evidence of success is commendable, to the
individual’s credit, and therefore praiseworthy. The
new gerontology offers another measurable variable
to define success, another source of praiseworthy
behavior that has currency in a competitive society.
However, normative terms such as successful
aging are not neutral; they are laden with comparative,
either-or, hierarchically ordered dimensions.
Unfortunately, too many people—most often the
already marginalized—come up on the wrong side of
the hierarchy and the either–or divide. Its reductionist
qualities are revealed by a different sort of
comparison: How would it seem to describe a
particular kind of childhood or midlife—as such—
as successful because the person rarely became ill
and participated in many social events? Why then is
it is desirable to describe this kind of aging (or more
accurately, old age) as successful?
Even if we bracket for a moment our reluctance to
apply the term ‘‘successful’’ to aging, the specific
norms the new gerontology identifies as measures of
success are also problematic. As we discuss in more
detail in the paragraphs that follow, if how we live
determines how we age, and if how we live is shaped
by many factors beyond individual choice, then
success is far harder to come by for some than for
others.
Hence, because normative concepts are important,
dominant cultural images can easily make individual
efforts to transform themselves as their lives and
bodieschange moredifficult (Mackenzie, 2000). These
concepts tell us what is worthwhile (on different levels
of our lives) and give us criteria by which to evaluate
our lives. Thus, the power to identify such normative
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concepts is pivotal. For this reason, in particular, the
authority to create cultural views and images about
aging can only rest in an interactive research process,
and in a critical awareness of how context and particularities
influence how we grow old and what we
value once we get there. Exchanges between older
people and academic researchers, for example, are
unlikely to accept uncritically that a disease-resistant
80-year-old man playing golf at Augusta or skiing at
Aspen is aging more successfully than a woman in
a wheelchair who tutors inner city children or writes
poetry or feels a passionate energy that she is too
fragile to enact (Maxwell, 1968).
Health, as a normative standard, calls for certain
virtues—diligence, caution, and perhaps a touch of
solipsism. We must be ever wary of how we govern
our lives. This view omits the natural lottery
imposed by genetics, the general contingencies of
human life, and the more specific damages (and often
strengths) that marginalization and oppression
bequeath to many individuals.
In raising these concerns about normativity, we
are not suggesting that Rowe and Kahn intended to
launch what can appear to be a coercive standard
that affects individuals and groups in different and,
in some cases, potentially damaging ways (see the
paragraphs that follow). In an interesting irony, had
Rowe and Kahn not labeled their landmark work as
‘‘successful aging,’’ it may well have remained what
it in essence is—a careful, empirically grounded
account of how to help individuals stay as healthy as
possible for as long as possible. On this foundation,
they would be free, within inevitable limits, to
construct the kind of life they choose. The use of the
term ‘‘successful,’’ however, shifts that intention to
help people stay as well as possible to something
much larger. What was initially affirmed as the
preconditions for effective functioning in old age—
the foundation on which many varieties of life
choices may flourish—in an almost imperceptible
move became the concept of successful aging. The
foundation became the entirety. The concept does
not say, These are guidelines to preserve your health
and well-being in old age, all things being equal.
Although such a statement gives health a high status,
it does not equate good health with success. Eating
properly, exercising regularly, and not smoking are
connected directly to a goal of good health, a goal
that, we suspect, most would treasure. However, we
suggest throughout this essay, despite its wide
appeal, attaining a healthy old age on the individual
level should not be universally equated with the
attainment of a good or successful old age.
The ‘‘Problems’’ of Feasibility and Disability
Although our discussion raises broad questions
about why both the phrase ‘‘successful aging,’’ and
the model bearing that name are problematic from a
normative standpoint, there are other, more specific
concerns that challenge its acceptability as an ideal.
A major contribution of Rowe and Kahn’s paradigm
lay in its message that many of the losses associated
with ‘‘usual aging’’ are not ‘‘normal’’ aspects of
aging at all but are caused primarily by extrinsic
factors, such as poor diet and lack of exercise, and
therefore are subject to alteration. However, the
value of this message from a health promotion
perspective is tempered by another, as the authors go
on to suggest that ‘‘successful aging is dependent
upon individual choices and behaviors. It can be
attained through individual choice and effort
[italics added]’’ (Rowe & Kahn, 1998, p. 37). The
single endpoint is effective physical and mental
functioning. In Rowe and Kahn’s (1998) words:
‘‘We were trying to pinpoint the many factors that
conspire to put one octogenarian on cross-country
skis and another in a wheelchair’’ (p. xii).
Such a statement is problematic on several counts;
key among them is its implication that had the elder
who is disabled but tried harder and made different
(health-promoting) choices, he or she might also be
enjoying a physically vigorous and able-bodied old
age. This individualistic analysis doesn’t ask if the 80year-old
skier had county club privileges and a winter
home in Colorado, or the 80-year-old in the wheelchair
had cleaned houses for a living while holding
down a second job as a nurses’ aide on the graveyard
shift in a nursing home. Nor does this analysis inquire
about the inner or family life of our 80-year-old in the
wheelchair. These contextual features, at a minimum,
shape the conditions of possibility for individuals and
determine how they choose what to value. If the ideal
is not practically feasible for all, or even most,
people—even with the best intentions—then it serves
to further privilege the already privileged, a danger
that a feminist perspective identifies.
The ‘‘problem’’ of disability also looms. Within the
successful aging paradigm, and with a few notable
exceptions, disability, even visible ‘‘oldness,’’ signifies
failure or, at best, ‘‘usual’’ aging. ‘‘With midlife
the universal ideal, older people meet the stringent
criteria of successful aging only insofar as they are
not ‘old.’ If the young body is . . . projected into old
age as the norm’’ (Harper, 1997, p. 167), all will
ultimately fail. This end is particularly troubling.
When norms consider frailty and disability as reflections
of failure, they reinforce ‘‘cultural fears of
bodily suffering (and thus of people who are ‘old’)
and [promote] inadequate policy responses’’ at the
same time that they blame people whose bodies are
proverbially ‘‘out of control’’ (Kennedy & Minkler,
1999; Morell, 2003; Wendell, 1996). As was the case
with its Victorian era predecessors (Cole, 1988),
illness, especially because it prevents ‘‘active engagement
with life,’’ becomes a transgression of cultural
rules (Herskovits & Mitteness, 1994).
This exaggerated emphasis on the degree to which
we can control the body contributes to and denies
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older people with functional limitations, most of
whom are women, the dignity of their struggle to
accept what they cannot change. On a broader level,
it contributes as well to the cultural denial of disability,
dependency, and ultimately death. That
struggle, social ethicist Frida Furman (1997) says,
‘‘is a struggle of the soul to affirm what is yet
possible, to let go of what is not’’ (p. 102).
Similarly, the ‘‘new ageism’’ inadvertently promoted
though the skis versus wheelchair analogy
simply replaces an earlier generalized dread of aging
with a more specific fear of aging with a disability
(Cohen, 1988). Frequently internalized by older
people themselves, this new variant of ageism ironically
can mitigate against the very proactive health
promotion and healthy maintenance activities
advocated by proponents of successful aging by
‘‘substantially lowering the bar of dreams and
expectations for and by elders with disabilities’’
(Minkler & Fadem, 2002, p. 231). Looking old
and suffering from disabling conditions become
personal failures, thereby compounding the ‘‘problem’’
of aging and contributing to often self-defeating
strategies to preserve ‘‘youthfulness’’ and so
appear ‘‘not old’’ (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001).
Once an individual strategy—staying fit and
vigorous—becomes a societal vision, then ‘‘whole
social groups and areas of life become marginalized’’
(Blaikie, 1999, p. 109). As already noted, such marginalization
can elicit damaging and invidious comparisons,
particularly if one is disabled, or simply old and
‘‘not well preserved.’’As Blaikie(1999) has argued,the
‘‘constant quest for youth, in stigmatizing [sic] the old
and sick, casts off these people as human failures’’ (p.
109).
Devaluing of Women’s Roles and
Acts of Resistance
The cultural scripts that the new gerontology extols
particularly affect older women. The greater burden
of chronic illness and functional limitations they
experience and their far higher poverty rates couple
with differential societal norms that continue to assign
a higher value to physical appearance and ‘‘youthful
physical attractiveness’’ among women. However,
many women have lived by the norms of their own
more intimate society, being responsible for others
and attending to the everyday business of life, whether
that meant scrubbing floors or caring for a dying
parent or a grandchild. These features that mark many
a woman’s moral life neither gain approbation from
the wider society nor give her the leisure to tend to the
specifics of health maintenance that contribute to
successful aging by the criterion that Rowe and Kahn
set forth. Hence, as life course and political economy
perspectives remind us, the burden on older women—
especially women who live on limited incomes and
have experienced exclusions based on color, ethnicity,
or class—is often particularly heavy.
The new gerontology can render invisible important
adaptive and other actions that allow people to
cope with change (see Baltes & Carstensen, 1996).
Many people, for example, particularly older
women, with their less than perfect bodies and with
one or more chronic illnesses, confront cultural narratives
of decline on their own terms (Furman, 1997;
Gullette, 1997). Rarely noted and seldom valued
even if noticed, their acts of resistance—‘‘going gray,’’
choosing to live a simpler, less busy life (Katz, 2000),
taking the time to give concentrated care to a parent,
a spouse, or a grandchild, accepting ‘‘old’’ as a way to
describe oneself (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001)—are less
a bulwark against the loss of self-esteem than they
might be if different cultural norms prevailed.
Successful aging, for example, only tangentially—
through its attention to active engagement with life—
attends to aspects of the moral life such as nurturing,
caring, friendship, love, and social activism that have
been primary in the lives of many women. Such
aspects of life that are publicly underestimated and
undervalued become vulnerable as sources of selfworth
if they lack sustenance and recognition
(Flanagan, 1991). Instead of creating conditions that
lessen important aspects of women’s lives, does
society not have a responsibility to ‘‘examine,
evaluate, condemn, and change . . . expectations . . .
that harm some, and militate against the well-being of
all, women?’’ (Furman, 1997, p. 95).
Potential Problems for Policy
In the policy arena, the notion that health and wellbeing
in old age are largely in the hands of individuals
can do further damage. Ironically, we are successfully
old when we conform to society’s needs; placing
responsibility on the individual mitigates demands on
social resources across our lives. Exceptionalism—‘‘I
made it, why can’t you’’—is, in our minds, a failing
strategy. It does nothing to eliminate larger patterns
of oppression, in which certain individuals and
groups lack the advantages privileged groups possess
by virtue of their social location (Calasanti, 1996).
When the tasks essential to aging successfully are
vested in the individual aging person, the young and
the middle-aged hear about these splendid people
who have aged so well and wonder why all the fuss
about old age in America. Policies promoting increased
Medicare coverage for home modifications
and assistive devices, as well as increased Supplemental
Social Security Income payments that would
bring elderly and disabled recipients above the
poverty line, may well suffer at the hands of
a populace and a legislature that has bought the
stereotypes of a new breed of successfully aging
seniors who no longer need much in the way of
government support. Particularly in the current
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political climate of major government cutbacks in the
face of economic downturns and military buildups,
overly optimistic images of ‘‘successful agers’’ may
make even more vulnerable the position of many
older women for whom more, rather than less,
government assistance is vital.
The new gerontology can hinder the development
of a thoughtful and morally rich account of dependency
and interdependency (see Kittay, 1999, and
Robertson, 1999, for two important attempts to do
so). The often implicit singling out of disabled
elderly persons as unsuccessful agers also allows us
to evade the inevitable confrontation with sickness
and death. In this way, it may further diminish policy
attention to the need for greater engagement with
these issues in a rapidly aging society.
Boundary Crossing
A critical perspective does not end with study. It is
committed to remedying the underlying conditions
that place certain people at the margins. By clarifying
the moral and political legitimacy of the changes
necessary to remedy these conditions, it contributes
to the possibilities for change. From the ‘‘ground’’ it
would urge radical revisioning of what is important
in old age—for individuals, for the relationships in
which they are a part, and for the larger social
structures. Such activism would challenge the hegemonic
voice of the new gerontology, whose narrow
focus on what individuals can do for themselves fails
to address the broader social context that inevitably
influences how older people experience old age.
Ruth Ray (1999) suggested transgressive storytelling
that encourages women to move beyond the
circumscribed narrative conventions that tell them
what their stories ought to be about. Women,
through these stories, can redefine problems, elevate
new problems, or include previously excluded forms
of knowing. Such narratives can give license to
heterodox perceptions—the ‘‘aha’’ phenomenon of
seeing a problem differently—that contribute to redefining
familiar situations and hence opening the
possibilities for action. Domestic violence, for example,
was long ignored in the name of privacy until
women (and others) deconstructed the public–private
dichotomy and redefined acceptable behaviors between
men and women (Rosen, 2000). To recall
Rosemary Reuther’s words quoted earlier: ‘‘Alternate
cultures and communities must be built up to support
the dissenting consciousness’’ (quoted in Heilbrun,
1999 from Mairs, 1994).
Valuing the processes through which such redefinitions
may emerge would require greater
attention to qualitative research methods that give
voice to older women’s views of a good old age, and
to the implications of concepts such as successful
aging. Such valuing would further support participatory
research in which older people themselves
determine the issues to be investigated and serve as
valued partners throughout the research process—
including, importantly, the action phase so often
omitted from more traditional research approaches.
As Glanz and Neikrug (1997, p. 826), suggested,
‘‘When seniors themselves begin to ‘tinker’ with
social gerontology’s theories and ideas as a result of
conducting their own research, we may discover that
‘the graying of social gerontology’ is just what we
needed to help find new paradigms for understanding
aging in the 21st century.’’
Conclusion
Growing old in a society that not only valorizes
youth but informs people whoever they are that
successful aging—defined almost exclusively in terms
of health status—‘‘can be attained through individual
choice and effort’’ (Rowe & Kahn, 1998, p. 37) is
potentially damaging personally and politically. Such
a perspectivetends to trivialize therole of gender, race,
socioeconomic status, and genetics in influencing both
health and broader life chances both throughout life
and in old age. At the same time, and precisely through
its failure to take into account the unacknowledged
role of broader sociostructural and environmental
forces, this viewpoint transforms the particular into
the universal and absolves social and political institutions
of their responsibilities for the health and wellbeing
of residents. By suggesting that the great
majority of those elders in wheelchairs could indeed
have been on cross-country skis had they but made the
right choices and practiced the right behaviors can
burden rather than liberate older people. Hence, we
emphasize that concepts such as successful aging are
marked by important and unacknowledged class,
race, and gender concerns that result in further
marginalizing the already marginalized. The perpetuation
of privilege is not a desirable end.
However, even setting aside these concerns, the
new gerontology offers an impoverished view of
what a ‘‘good’’ old age can be. As suggested earlier,
the MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Aging
led by Rowe and Kahn made a critical contribution in
helping to provide a strong empirical base for the
utility of a variety of health-promoting practices and
behaviors throughout life and in old age. Nevertheless,
the equation of good health with successful
aging (and by extension, disability and poor health
with failure) together with the simplistic popularization
of these proscriptive views in the mass and
popular culture fail to honor the many ways in which
individuals face the physiological, emotional, or
contextual changes that accompany aging.
We end with some ideas about how to alter the
problematic aspects of the successful aging model’s
foundational assumptions. Acts of resistance, already
touched on, are beginning points. The tyranny
of youth-preserving technologies and lifestyles that
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demand more and more time and money hinders
a respectful attitude toward old age. How can we
respect age if we do everything in our power to deny
it? What most assume as a matter of course in youth
and middle age—that is, health and activity—cannot
be the critical measure of success in old age. At
a minimum, it reduces old age to the most basic
norms, less than we would accept at other times of
our lives. It offers continuity, but old age is also
importantly about transformation as we learn to
accept what we cannot change, rage when we must,
and adopt new ways of life as needed. Writing in her
60s, the late May Sarton (1997), poet, essayist, and
novelist, reflecting on the imminence of death, noted
that ‘‘preparing to die we shed our leaves, without
regret, so that the essential person may be alive and
well at the end’’ (p. 230). Biomedicine, as important
as it is, does not see the luminous moments that offer
promise despite uncertainty and the proximity of
death. Its tools cannot diagnose the mischief the very
term ‘‘successful’’ can do, particularly in a competitive,
youth-driven society.
We might return to the ancient question: What is
the good life—for the whole of life—and what does
it take to live a good old age? What virtues do we
strive for and how do we honor difference? Germain
Greer (1999) said it well: ‘‘Liberation struggles are
not about assimilation but about asserting difference,
endowing that difference with dignity and
prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of selfdefinition
and self-determination’’ (p. 3).
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Received January 9, 2003
Accepted April 21, 2003
Decision Editor: Linda S. Noelker, PhD
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