Beyond Gender Differences: Adaptation to Aging in Life Course Perspective (Society and Aging Series)

Questions surrounding adaptation to aging and how adaptation can best be achieved have been of central concern in gerontology. Over the years, gender differences have been invoked in the answers to these questions. Women and men have been thought to follow different and unequal pathways in adapting to older age. Depending upon the explanation at hand and the specific dimension of adaptation under consideration, either women or men have been portrayed as adapting more effectively or encountering great difficulties in the aging process.

Beyond Gender Differences: Adaptation to Aging in Life Course Perspective shows the need to move beyond a focus on gender differences, toward a life course perspective on adaptation to aging. A life course perspective provides an effective framework to investigate sources of similarity as well as difference between--and among--women and men. The life course approach advanced in this volume emphasizes the interweave of personal biography and social history, the importance of gender, race, social class, and birth cohort across all stages of the life course, and the role of the state in allocating resources to members of different social groups.

Substantive chapters examine adaptation to aging as a broad and cumulative process (Chapter 3) and the two life events that have been thought to pose the greatest challenges to adaptation in older age: The death of a spouse (Chapter 4) and retirement (Chapter 5). Each of these chapters is designed to address the following questions: How have theories of gender difference been used to explain adaptation in this realm of experience? To what degree have gender differences been documented in the relevant empirical literature, and are the reported findings supportive of gender difference theories? How and why does a life course perspective provide a more satisfactory framework for understanding women's and men's adaptation to aging, and their adaptation to later-life events in particular?

The final chapter of the book addresses how the life course perspective can be integrated fruitfully with the theoretical approaches of symbolic interactionism and political economy to achieve a fuller understanding of adaptation to aging. A call is made to modify the study of adaptation to aging to focus more fully on lifelong processes and challenges, rather than on particular life events which are assumed to be stressful.