Barbara MacDonald (1913-2000)
MacDonald was, and continues to be a pivotal (and powerful) figure in the study of aging. For decades, she urged for older women to be taken seriously in the emerging field of Women & Gender Studies, speaking at major conferences and publishing works that challenged normative conceptions of gender.
In a dynamic speech at the 1989 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference, MacDonald pressed the audience to reconsider their own assumptions. Pitting women against the patriarchal family structure, she argued that older women were being forced to live with others’ expectations of selflessness, motherliness – something that came through within personal relationships, and was in stark contrast to the treatment of older men.
“The source of your ageism, the reason you see older women as there to serve you, comes from family. It was in patriarchal family that you learned that mother is there to serve you, her child, that serving you is her purpose in life. This is not woman’s definition of motherhood” (9, MacDonald, 1989).
With her partner, Cynthia Rich, MacDonald co-edited the volume “Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism” (1983). This served to put issues of older women squarely on the proverbial table, and MacDonald wrote passionately about their prior exclusion:
“ From the beginning of this wave of the women’s movement, from the beginning of women’s studies, the message has gone out to those of us over sixty that your “Sisterhood” does not include us, that those of you who are younger see us as men see us – that is, as women who used to be women but aren’t any more.” (6, Macdonald, 1989).
What’s interesting is MacDonald’s ability to build off of the most radical threads of feminist theory, suggesting (above) that aging has placed women outside of “womanhood” – that they are in many ways, genderless, sexless, and perhaps individualized as separate from the “Sisterhood” at large. “Look Me In They Eye” is therefore a provocative book, asking questions that are still largely unanswered within the field – Who do we think of, when we think of “woman”? How do our own expectations lead to inter-generational conflict between young and older, and how can this be re-framed to be more inclusive?
And from an excerpt, printed in the 15th Anniversary Retrospective of lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom (1991):
“I think a lot about being drawn into the earth. I have the knowledge that one day I will fall and the earth will take back what is hers. I have no choice, yet I choose it…But uncertainty will not always be there, for this is like no other experience I have ever had – I can count on it. My life has been filled with uncertainties, some were not of my making and many were…
But this time I can rely on myself, for life will keep her promise to me. I can trust her. She isn’t going to confuse me with a multitude of other choices and beckon me down other roads with vague promises. She will give me finally only one choice, one road, one sense of possibility. And in exchange for the multitude of choices she no longer offers, she gives me, at last, certainty. Nor do I have to worry this time that I will fail myself, fail to pull it off. This time, for sure I am going to make that single-handed crossing.”
(89, Sinister Wisdom 43: 44. Summer 1991)
References
Macdonald, B. (1989). Outside the sisterhood: Ageism in women’s studies. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 17(1/2), 6-11.
Macdonald, B., & Rich, C. (2001). Look me in the eye: Old women, aging and ageism. Spinsters Ink.
