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Growing old gracefully Buffeted by change, 'women just buck up and do' December 14, 1998 The art of growing older is one honed mostly by women. It’s Wednesday at a senior citizens center in Turtle Creek and of the 175 people sampling the day’s activities, from card playing to "creative thinking," 115 of them are women. It’s 4 o’clock Mass on Saturday at Holy Family Church in Lawrenceville, the best-attended service of the week for one of the city’s most elderly congregations, and of the 400 people worshipping, about 300 are women. It’s a week’s worth of trips for an Access driver in Mt. Lebanon, and of the 95 passengers being ferried to doctor’s appointments, stores, social activities, church and the beauty parlor, 84 of them are women. It’s nighttime in any nursing home anywhere, and the lights shine low on a community that also is mostly women, random housemates united in sickness and need. Females have long outnumbered males in the senior population – and in the institutions that serve it. But that well-established predominance can obscure a bigger and more textured trend: how well most older women cope with their graying world. "Women age more successfully than men," Pennsylvania Secretary of Aging Richard Browdie says succinctly. "They’re simply better at patching together a social network that helps them through the process of growing older." That process can include a number of sharp demographic turns, some of which are likely to test the adaptive skills Browdie applauds women for having. They include: Safety in numbers. Life expectancy for both women and men is increasing, meaning married couples, for better or worse, will probably celebrate a few more anniversaries together than their parents or grandparents did. However, women continue to outlive men in increasing ratios the older each group gets. In 1997, there were 20.1 million women age 65 and older and 14 million older men in the United States, a ratio of 143 women for every 100 men. The ratio increased with age, reaching a high of 248 women to 100 men for those 85 and over. In Allegheny County, the second-oldest metropolitan county in the United States, women in 1995 made up 61.7 percent of the over-65 population. Going it alone: The relative scarcity of older men means women are much more likely to be widowed and live alone than men. Almost half of all older women in 1997 were widowed, compared with about 14 percent of older men. Of the 9.9 million older people who lived alone in 1997, nearly 8 million were women. Money matters: The median income for elderly people more than doubled between 1957 and 1992, according to one study, and income of older married couple households rose 16 percent between 1980 and 1992. However, older women continue to be considerably poorer than older men. Their median income in 1996 was $10,062, compared with $17,768 for older males. Older women had a higher poverty rate (13.1 percent) than older men (7 percent) and older black women who lived alone had a higher rate still: Nearly 40 percent were below the poverty line in 1997.
Social network: Women are more apt than men to plug into activities — social, religious, community and family — that keep them busier and for the most part happier late into their lives. That’s another reason they dominate recreation and education programs like those served up at the county’s 74 senior centers, use the Access transportation system as much for social as practical trips and participate in volunteer and outreach efforts at churches and synagogues as religiously as they attend services there. But the current generation of older women is also the last of a fading breed, women whose attitudes and ambitions were shaped by a male-dominated era. Alone, elderly and often deferential in their decision-making, they may be vulnerable to the whims and motives of others. Head of the house Interviews with dozens of older women in Pittsburgh and experts in aging here and across the country show how senior women are buffeted by these trends. Jean Gamer, 84, of Natrona Heights, had time to learn how to do things that her husband traditionally had handled around their house. He taught her during his long, slow struggle with the angina and heart disease that finally claimed his life three years ago. With his coaching, she mastered cleaning the furnace and fixing the faucet. She mows the lawn outside her small brick bungalow regularly and precisely, although she says she never quite did it to her husband’s satisfaction when he was alive. She feels shaky handling her finances. She lives on $800 a month in Social Security, which she thanks God for every day. She worries about making ends meet and frets even more about seeking outside help for jobs beyond her physical reach. "When you’re a widow, the hardest thing to do, I think, is to hire somebody to help you out. To trust somebody. I’m scared to death of being taken advantage of." Still, she considers herself comfortably settled into her quiet routine. She’s a homebody, who’d rather putter around in her vegetable garden than play bingo at her nearby church. She spends more time reading than watching TV. A lapsed seamstress, she recently broke out her sewing machine and some cloth purchased long ago and made herself a burial outfit — not that she plans to wear it anytime soon. "My family was a little surprised, but I enjoyed making it. I lost myself in it really. It was uplifting. Why not? I didn’t want the fabric to go to waste and I like the color [a grayish blue floral pattern]. It will save everyone some trouble, even the undertaker because I made it easy for him. There’s a zipper down the front so he won’t have to bother much with me."
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