Joan Ditzion on Ageism

Feminist pioneer Joan Ditzion may be best known as one of the authors of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” After all, the seminal book has been a staple on the shelves of women around the world, ever since publication of the first commercial edition in 1973.

However, that was only the beginning of Ditzion’s journey into tackling the dual issues of feminism and aging. Now 78, the former art educator-turned-clinical geriatric social worker who lives with her husband Bruce in Cambridge, Mass., spoke with Next Avenue about the latter half of life, the women’s movement, ageism and staying relevant.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Next Avenue: What did you learn from the early women’s movement that has carried forward to your current fight against ageism?

Joan Ditzion: I define myself as an aging activist, and having a sense of agency fuels my purpose in life in many ways. One of the things that profoundly affected my attitude was that my values and visions were my feminist values, having been part of the successful social liberation movement in the “Our Bodies Ourselves” project.

A core lesson I learned fifty years ago, in the early days of the women’s movement, is that sexism is a social construction. I had grown up as everyone did in those days, with my sense of myself as a woman in a patriarchal view of society; that women are inferior to men. I was very well loved in my family, but nonetheless, these were the cultural attitudes I was raised on.

I was the other sex, a sex object to please men. A male-centered view of reality was the reality of the world. When I began to realize that there was nothing biologically pre-determined about this, but it’s really just a social construction based on a patriarchal view of the world and sexist attitudes, I began to change my sense of myself, and embraced my identity as a woman and a woman-centric view of the world.

This was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. Now, more than fifty years later, I fully embrace my identity as a woman in the second half of life.

And over the last ten or twenty years, I have been dealing with changes in my body and my place in the generational hierarchy, this new stage of life and having less time.

I also have had to deal with ageist responses to me as an aging woman. I was immersed in the aging field for many years and I understood it well, but began to really integrate it personally as I aged myself.

What specifically strikes you about people’s attitudes towards older adults?

More problematic than the normal aspects of aging, were the ageist, demeaning attitudes that I was bumping up against. I kept bumping into ageism and my anxiety rose and I feared ‘I was over the hill, I’m less than, I’m in decline, I’m more marginal, I’m a sexually invisible’ and all of that.

But, in my late fifties and sixtiess, this light went off. I was struggling with internalized — and in turn, institutionalized — ageist attitudes, just as I did decades before when I was struggling with sexism. In the early days, I kept thinking, sexism is a social construction. So, I just kept repeating, ageism is a social construction, and it’s our cultural attitudes towards aging, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Many of us, aging women and men, are asking: How do we balance the affirming positive attitudes of aging with recognizing the realities and problems of aging?

How do you think older women in particular need to navigate this tightrope?

We know that each stage of this life is much more complicated and much more complex than many of our cultural stereotypes or myths or stories. And if we all age consciously and feel, not ‘less than’ because we are aging, we can individually and collectively transform attitudes in ourselves, in society.

It’s a huge, social, cultural problem. It requires collective action, so we should find ways to shift from an age-segregated to an age-integrated society.

Basic research even shows that there’s much lower rates for any kind of mental health, or psychiatric conditions, for people who resist ageist attitudes.

How can older people, and older women in particular, take action, or push back against ageism?

This is such a timely and important topic for everyone. We can all be aging activists.

Pre-COVID, I used to look for opportunities. I would try to find things I could do to change attitudes.

For example, when I turned seventy-five, I decided to stop dyeing my hair. So, I went to the local pharmacy looking for some gray tint and was told there’s no such thing, that no woman ever wants to go gray. So I started pushing back — insisting it’s part of my natural aging process.

There are moments like this in everyday life, where we can really change attitudes. And my fantasy is if everyone looks for moments like these, we can really begin to address this kind of thing, and listen to ways people demean or put themselves down or diminish themselves or feel ‘less than’ because we’re aging.