It can be done…

In the summer of 2010, I had just started looking for older lesbians to take part in my research. At Brighton Pride that year, I crossed and re-crossed the park, accosting every grey-haired woman I saw - and a few others J -  giving them postcards with details of the research and asking them to pass the word on. It was striking how many of these women responded by asking me whether I was going to investigate ‘where we can live when we are old?’

One of the things that my survey is now showing is the fierce resistance among many older lesbians to the idea of spending their last days in residential care, which they believe to be an oppressively hetero-sexist environment. (Other researchers have found the same attitudes in older gay men.)

So the ‘Lesbian Retirement Home’ has become a fantasy dear to our collective hearts – we often talk about it, we know it already happens in America, and I've come across several people who have made beginnings on actually bringing  it about in the UK.  

While such places don’t yet exist, the important task is to bring about better provision for LGBT old people in ALL services for the elderly.

Meanwhile, here are two inspiring examples to cheer us all up:

The Older Women’s Co-housing Project in London (with its fab acronym, OWCH) is not exclusively lesbian, but is the only instance I know of older ‘sisters doing it for themselves,’ and it’s amazing and wonderful - see

http://www.owch.org.uk/

Then  this morning – thank you, Barbary! – I was alerted to this awesome project in Victoria,  Australia:

http://www.matrixguildvic.org.au/index.htm

Does anyone know of any others?

Getting the word out

The first appearance in print of my older lesbian research will be a chapter I’ve just written for a forthcoming book. It is called LGBT Lives: Ageing and the Life Course, edited by Richard Ward, Ian Rivers and Mike Sutherland, and it’s due to be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers in 2012.

I’m really pleased that there has suddenly been such an upsurge of interest in the existence and needs of older LGBT people. (The Stonewall report, out this week, is a good example.) We do need to think about the needs of EVERY member of our ageing population, and to help practitioners in health and social care, and particularly in service for the elderly, to understand the particular needs of LGBT elders.

BUT

We also need to make sure that older people, LGBT or not, are represented in other ways too – or we are in danger of seeing them only as a helpless burden  on society, and not as the varied, interesting and valuable people they also are….

Have been re-reading those fierce old American radical feminists (Macdonald, Rich, Copper) who wrote about women's ageing back in the late 1980s. Here’s Baba Copper in full cry:

 'One of the primary definitions of patriarchy is the absence of old women of power. Simmering in the psyche of the Father are his ancient fears of the old matriarch and her potential use of power … The accumulated experience of old women has always been a part of what Adrienne Rich called “the enormous potential counterforce (to patriarchy) which is having to be restrained”.’   

One of the ways we restrain that power is to push old women into the stereotypes of powerlessness, ugliness and servant-hood that are ready to hand. Current practice is to describe old women as ‘grannies’.  And when we say ‘granny’ do we mean an interesting older woman with her own life, talents, creativity, friends and lover(s), who just happens also to be a mother and grandmother ? We do not. Grannies are lovable only if they no longer compete for their own place in the world.  Kindly, self-sacrificing, no longer even trying to be attractive, their usefulness to society is to use up their waning physical strength looking after people younger than themselves. Oh, and to knit teabags. ‘Grannies’ are lovable, but always potentially ludicrous. Even those of us who were never mothers or grandmothers - or even heterosexual - can be made into 'grannies.' 

So what to do with the ones who refuse to be stereotyped, invisiblised? (I remember my aunt: a grandmother, yes, among other things – but also radical, dynamic, political, angry. She had friends younger than herself; she espoused animal rights; she challenged speech or behaviour she found unacceptable; she spoke to strangers in the street.) Not a ‘granny’? There are plenty of other stereotypes, handy cages into which these people can be shut so that they don’t do any harm. 'Eccentric' is a useful one. (‘A bit Bohemian’ is the middle-class, arty version of the same thing.) It indicates that someone need not be taken seriously, because they are outside the norm, and therefore slightly ludicrous. With affectionate ridicule we  draw the sting – and the power – of such interesting old women.

Yet more inflammatory stuff of this ilk arrived yesterday, in the form of second-hand books from Amazon - but I was out, so they took them to the post office in the next village. Today I put on my back-pack and walked the three-mile round trip to collect my parcels, watching how passers-by look at me, and wondering what box they put me into as I pass.  

Old Woman of Power?

Mad Old Bat, more likely. J