Never Married Women

Six: Aging and Retirement: A Study in Continuity

SIX / Aging and Retiretnent: A Study in Continuity I have never understood all the to-do made over old age. I'm the same person who I have always been, except now my joints speak to me on bad days. And now I have no schedule that anyone else imposes on me. Last month I turned eighty-nine. Youngsters round me "oohed and ahed" and talked to me in that condescending way people have when they have reduced you in their minds to the status of living decrepit wonder. But I am no living wonder. And I'm certainly not decrepit . I'm just somebody who pursues the same things in life that I did at twenty: good companionship, good food, and good works. [August 1983] 144 / Aging and Retirement After retirement, the lives of these 50 never-married women closely resemble their lives before retirement. Indeed, many saw their retirement as a chance to capitalize on the "free time" never before available to them as adults. This meant furthering relationships and activities they had long enjoyed, but in forms more self-determined and idiosyncratic than they had known during full-time employment. Twenty-three of the never-married women voluntarily retired; that is, they said they had ended their full-time jobs when they wanted to retire. More than half of the women (27) retired involuntarily ; that is, they left full-time employment before they wanted to, because of their own illness; or because of care-giving responsibilities for sick, disabled, or dying family members; or because laws or regulations forced them to retire. One of every 5 women I interviewed, 10 in all, retired early and voluntarily, either to end the frustration and exhaustion they had experienced on the job or to pursue more compelling interests. All 4 public schoolteachers retired early by choice, in their late fifties or early sixties, because they were dissatisfied with their working conditions. One of the schoolteachers said: Things went from good to bad to worse in the 1960s. Faculty morale slipped badly when the principals stopped backing up our authority, when young teachers came in who cared more about contract terms than about children, when students grew more and more unruly , and when parents increasingly interfered with classroom matters. A great shift in attitudes took place in my district right about 1966 or 1967. Respect for teaching took a nosedive while litigiousness among Aging and Retirement / 145 students, parents, and teachers soared. Student rights, parent rights, union power, and community control displaced the learning process as central concerns . [December 1982] Others chose to retire early in order to develop second careers or to explore activities, relationships, or places that had appealed to them for years. The comments of one of these women are representative : For thirty-six years I deeply enjoyed my job as a caseworker and psychotherapist in a strict Freudian agency. Early retirement posed the possibility of retraining as a structural family therapist. I could not have done that sort of treatment and kept my senior position at the Simpkin Youth and Children Center. There the doctrinal requirements were quite clear. Just mention Gestalt psychology, Jungian theory, or family therapy in an approving manner, and you are looking for a new job. So I retired at fifty-nine and went to study in an institute that conceptualized relationships and change in a wholly different way than that which I had known before . It has been a grand experiment. I cherish both careers-the one before I retired and the private practice I have developed in family therapy since age fiftynine . Uuly 1984] Part-time work was important during their old age to 22 of the 50 women. Most of the 22 had worked in part-time jobs that were similar to the jobs they had performed earlier on a full-time basis. A few women, like the nurse-turned-horticulturalist (below), started a new career after retiring. The motivation for working 146 / Aging and Retirement part-time during retirement was usually complicated, as in the case of the retired nurse who responded: Why have I kept working in retirement? Money, dear, I need money. Social security is peanuts, and so are my savings. But I also work to stay in touch with people I would not otherwise meet. After forty-odd years as an emergency room nurse, I can't just throwaway all that delicious diversity. How else would I encounter teenagers and people of every race and persuasion...