Women`s Studies- Women and Aging

br March 4 , 2007

Women 's Studies : Women and Aging Women and Aging Women over sixty aren t always happy with the size of their bodies (1999 , Tunaley , Walsh , Nicholson ) The authors relays the message that Many of the older women were dissatisfied with their body size highlighting the cross-generational influence of a 'thin ideal of size ' Aging women feel that they need to work harder on their appearance , in to be socially accepted . With so much emphasis being placed on the size of the body , older women are beginning to think

that they have to be in a certain weight category in to be a visible part of society . If they are not attractive , they assume that they will not be accepted and stand in the shadows of a more attractive age group of women

The psychological literature conceptualizes women 's feelings about their body size in terms of the passive internalization of socially defined beauty ideals . It is assumed that women are exposed to these ideals via the media , and that they unreflectively measure themselves against these ideals , and consequently decide that they are too fat and want to lose weight

The lack of body size research on older women forms a part of a wider neglect of older women in social science research , which has occurred despite the fact that there are more women in the over-sixty age group than men (Arbor and Ginn 1991 Bernard and Meade 1993 ) There is a need for more research in this area in to understand the mental stress placed on the woman who is over the age of sixty to better understand how we may assist that age group of women with their feelings on their body type and weight so we may help them feel more socially accepted and less invisible in a weight conscious society

Aging women would merge into society a conscious woman with skin care regimens , trips to the gym , attention paid to the commercials on television and to the ads in the magazines that get harder to compete with , now that she is getting older . Not only are women 's bodies supposed to conform to the sylph-like silhouette of an adolescent or even pre-adolescent , they are also expected to have the soft , hairless and unwrinkled characteristics of youth and sexual immaturity (Chernin 1983 Wolfe 1990 . These ideas mean that women may experience ageing as a 'humiliating process of sexual disqualifications (Sontag 1978 ) Despite the attempts to deny its visible effects through the use of anti-wrinkle creams , hair dye or cosmetic surgery

In research on body size , women become passive of social forces and denied the capacity to challenge or reject discourses surrounding size sexuality and their female identity . a distant agony that we would face so much later in our lives but it is a fact of life that every woman that gets older will experience a transformation that she will have to be happy with or else , she may experience those feelings of...