In 2018, we were fortunate to have our professional lives linked through APA Division 20’s mentoring program. What started out as a mentoring relationship metamorphosed into a collaborative writing project to recognize and celebrate the careers and contributions of women in psychology who were in or near retirement. Our volume, Reflections from Pioneering Women in Psychology (Bookwala & Newton, 2022; Cambridge University Press), intentionally focuses on older women. Our own professional careers as women in psychology, and as scholars within life course and life span psychology, propelled us naturally to ask: how can we memorialize the lives and contributions of older women who have had (and continue to have) a transformative impact on shaping their discipline, field, institution, colleagues, and students? Given our own scholarly interests, we were particularly interested in this cohort of women who first arrived in noticeable numbers on the academic landscape coinciding with the second wave of the Women’s Rights Movement. We were also sensitive to the importance of timing – an urgency we sensed for ensuring that history has a record that recognizes and celebrates the life journeys of these influential women psychologists who entered academia in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Admittedly, however, a limitation of our book is that it does not do justice in terms of representation within subdisciplines of psychology (although several women who study aging are included in it, and, arguably, are overrepresented within the volume).
Many of the principles of the life course perspective (Elder, 1985) – development over the lifespan that is marked by both gains and losses, multidimensionality, human agency, timing of decisions, linked lives, and historical time and geographical place – can be clearly identified as shaping the careers of this older cohort of accomplished women psychologists. These women had to develop and demonstrate agency quickly in order to persist and thrive at a time when women were largely absent within the halls of academia. Their trajectories were shaped by contextual forces and historical developments in Western culture that spanned the Women’s Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the non-ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the internationalization of everyday life, as well as the rapid technological developments that dramatically improved transportation, communication, and health care. Their careers also were influenced by the lives of significant others - new spouses and partners, relationships ending, and/or the birth of children - and prevailing gender roles.
We launched our work on the book because of our conviction that it was necessary for the discipline of psychology to record these women’s life journeys and their contributions and accomplishments in the face of numerous and daunting personal, interpersonal, and societal hurdles. However, psychology is not unique in this regard. Rather, every discipline, subdiscipline, and cross-discipline similarly has largely invisible women who have been giants in their influence and impact and are getting ready to leave their careers behind, if they have not already. We write today to invite colleagues in gerontology to corral these giants together in a volume – or two or three – that records the role of women in the history of the field. In their own words.
Gerontology is especially well-positioned to advance this initiative because we have learned the merits of narrative gerontology, or biographical aging. As Kenyon (2016) so aptly articulates, “Human beings not only have life stories; we are stories” (p. 965). According to Kate de Medeiros (2014), who also has written eloquently on narrative gerontology in research and practice, narratives during older age offer a useful approach for understanding cultural, temporal, and relational aspects of how individual lives develop and are remembered. As such, narrative gerontology provides a compelling framework for recording individual life stories so that we can study aging meaningfully and fully. Sharing the narratives of the current generation of retirement-age women academics will begin to build a repository of ways in which women’s academic lives have shaped and been shaped within the field of aging. The overarching goal of this essay is to call our fellow scholars to action, so that our recent contribution to psychology can be extended to gerontology!
Women in gerontology who are currently of retirement age, like their sisters in psychology, entered the world of higher education around the middle of the 21st century, personifying the intersection of all the sociocultural influences of the time, as well as bringing their own personal experiences to their life stories. To capture the richness of such stories, we recommend that they be invited to tell their stories in their own voices, that they be provided a platform to relate their triumphs, tribulations, obstacles, achievements, and insights. In this way, the field of gerontology will celebrate the accomplishments of the current generation of these women and women-identifying scholars, creating a historical record of their influence on the field, their institutions, colleagues, and students, and offering the life stories of scholars who have thrived as inspiration to new and aspiring scholars who identify as women and as members of other minoritized groups.
In closing, we turn to Mulley’s (2012) words concerning the importance of studying our own history: “It can give us wisdom, a broad view, and humility when we realize that our discoveries may have already been made by our forebears” (p. 225). Studying history well requires us to be inclusive and equitable. We hope that the voices and journeys of older women scholars in aging will be memorialized. It is our collective responsibility that we do not leave these life stories untold. Perhaps Division 20’s mentoring program will seed a new collaboration, one that focuses squarely on women pioneers in the field of aging.
References
Bookwala, J., & Newton, N. J. (Eds.). (2022). Reflections of pioneering women in psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
de Medeiros, K. (2014). Narrative gerontology in research and practice. New York, NY: Springer.
Elder, G. H. (1985). Life course dynamics: Trajectories and transitions, 1968-1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kenyon, G. (2016). Narrative gerontology. In S. K. Whitbourne (Ed.), The encyclopedia of adulthood and aging, pp. 965-967. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons.
Mulley, G. (2012). A history of geriatrics and gerontology. European Geriatric Medicine, 3, 225-227. doi.org/10.1016/j.eurger.2012.06.007.