Life Course Studies – serie

Among the many studies of aging and the aged, there is comparatively little material in which the aged speak for themselves. In this compelling study, Sharon Kaufman encourages just such expression, recording and presenting the voices of a number of old Americans. Her informants tell their life stories and relate their most personal feelings about becoming old. Each story is unique, and yet, presented together, they inevitable weave a clear pattern, one that clashes sharply with much current gerontological thought. With this book, Sharon Kaufman allows us to understand the experience of the aging by listening to the aged themselves.Kaufman, while maintaining objectivity, is able to draw an intimate portrait of her subjects. We come to know these people as individuals and we become involved with their lives. Through their words, we find that the aging process is not merely a period of sensory, functional, economic, and social decline. Old people continue to participate in society, and—more important—continue to interpret their participation in the social world. Through themes constructed from these stories, we can see how the old not only cope with losses, but how they create new meaning as they reformulate and build viable selves. Creating identity, Kaufman stresses, is a lifelong process.Sharon Kaufman's book will be of interest and value not only to students of gerontology and life span development, and to professionals in the field of aging, but to everyone who is concerned with the aging process itself. As Sharon Kaufman says, "If we can find the sources of meaning held by the elderly and see how individuals put it all together, we will go a long way toward appreciating the complexity of human aging and the ultimate reality of coming to terms with one's whole life.

There are many important questions raised in this book. The fragmentation of medical values, whether a good doctor requires as much knowledge of the person as of the disease, the claims created by a scientific medicine dependent upon the largesse of government grants, the conversion of medicine from ""cottage industry"" to entrepreneurial endeavour, all had their beginnings in medicine's Golden Age. Their heirs, today's practitioners, may have mistaken technology for their task, science for their religion, and business for their creed, but if the spirit of the physicians in this book wins out, medicine's Golden Age is yet in the future.

In ""Dolor y Alegria"" (Sorrow and Joy), 15 mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers in the Mexican City of Cuernavaca speak about the dramatic effects that urbanisation and rapid social change have had on their lives. Sarah LeVine combines these autobiographical vignettes with ethnographic material, survey findings and her own observations. The result is a vivid picture of contrast and continuity. While many earlier publications have focused on the poor of Latin America who live at the margins of urban life, ""Dolor y Alegria"" explores the experiences of ordinary working and lower-middle class women, most of them transplanted from villages and small towns to a densely populated city neighbourhood. In their early years, many experienced family disruption, emotional deprivation and economic hardship; but steadily increasing educational opportunities, improved health care and easily available contraception, have significantly altered how the younger women relate to their families and the larger society. Today's Mexican schoolgirl, LeVine shows, is encouraged to apply herself to her studies for her own benefit, and the longer she remains in school, the greater the self-confidence she will carry with her into the world of work, and later, into marriage and motherhood. Hard economic times have forced many married women into the workplace where their sense of personal efficacy is enhanced; at the same time, in the domestic sphere, their earnings allow them greater negotiating power with husbands and male relatives. Changes are not confined to the younger generation. Older women are enjoying better health and living longer; but with adult children either less able or willing to accept responsibility for aged parents than they were in the past, anxiety runs high and family relations are often strained. ""Dolor y Alegria"" takes a close look at the efforts of three generations of Mexican women to redefine themselves in both family and workplace; it shows that today's young woman has expectations of herself and others very different from those that her grandmother or even her mother had.