Tales from the Health Club
Phillipa Kafka
Introduction
After I received my Ph.D. in English Literature in 1964, I taught American literature survey courses without question or examination, using the same syllabus of traditional canonical writers as my colleagues. From 1971 on, I became an impassioned feminist activist in the Second Wave movement, participating in mass marches, demonstrations, and protests; in consciousness raising groups; speaking in churches and synagogues to hostile audiences who threw eggs and tomatoes at us; interviewed on radio; captured on TV to my children’s delight by hostile journalists while liberating sacred male sanctuaries.
By 1976, I began to go private, to take the struggle to my own community; to where I worked; to cultivate “my own garden”—academia. During a year-long sabbatical in my family home in Tucson, Arizona, I researched, created, and developed one of the first multi-ethnic American literature courses in higher education, which I taught from 1977 until my retirement in 1999 at the age of sixty-six. It was the beginning of a long, lonely struggle over the rest of my career to integrate women writers into traditional and multi-ethnic American literature courses; to pioneer in the research and teaching of American ethnic writers; to develop new courses such as “African American Women Writers” and “Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers”; to present papers on my work, on my theory and pedagogical practice at many conferences; to publish my message in the form of essays in journals, and from 1993-2003, to publish six full-length feminist works of literary criticism across the ethnicities, ultimately expanding into transnational feminism in my last work on Indian women writers at home and abroad. In 1985 the English Department began to offer Landmarks of World Literature courses. I had long hoped to be able to teach this course because the title itself permitted an opportunity for a global syllabus. I still retained the traditional canonical syllabus of male writers such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante. However, I expanded the syllabus to a multi-ethnic, transnational feminist perspective by including an equal amount of women writers from historic to the present times and from diverse cultures around the world, extending from the first novelist, Lady Murasaki’s Tales of Genji, to Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife.
That was then. This is now.
What has my past feminist academic expansion and transformation of the traditional canon from within “the walls of the university” got to do with senior women exercising in health clubs? I am now a “bridge” between these two seemingly unrelated communities that spans out from my lengthy experience in expanding and transforming the traditional literature canon in higher education to yet another currently unexamined traditional canon—the embedded cultural “concept” or “idea” about senior women as inherently infirm that is also inscribed in and internalized by senior women ourselves. Here I unpack unexamined belief systems in relation to senior women and exercising as I once unpacked the traditional American higher education canon and its unquestioning followers and exposed this canon’s sexism, racism, class elitism, and exclusion of other ethnicities and cultures. I describe to other senior women who are contemplating exercise in classes the ageism there while simultaneously describing the same prejudices we have internalized about ourselves. This will further enable us not only to function productively beside much younger classmates, but to provide inspiring role models for them when their turn to seniority arrives.
In the past many of my students told me repeatedly how inspiring a role model I was for them. I also aim in this essay to inspire senior women to exercise regularly and as energetically as possible. Through constant repetition of energetic moves rather than cautious, minimal shuffling, we can push ourselves mentally and physically past the stereotypes inscribed in us all our lives that to be aged means that we are automatically medically infirm. Instead, senior women should exercise—not just regularly—but beyond what we accept without examination, blindly following cultural shibboleths and belief systems. Because of a lifetime of cultural internalization about the condition and appearance of seniors, we find the possibility of even going into the health club intimidating to the point where we evade its very existence and culture. We can see no possible relevance to our current stage in life.
Our rejection of exercise, specifically physically challenging classes, is not only due to our unexamined belief that we are senior, therefore infirm. There is also a lack of any information about such classes in health clubs aimed specifically at seniors. A recent survey dealt with a group of seniors aged sixty-five who could not walk up the stairs until they did it regularly and repetitively. In contrast, at seventy-nine, I can run up stairs, many stairs, without getting breathless. How do I, how can we senior women, keep our legs strong? I do it by kicking in class consciously as high as I can; skipping, hopping, and “skiing”; bending to the floor and then rising up to full height as many times as the instructor does. The benefits of walking and of doing stairs are obvious, but these exercises are individual, generally isolated self-determined activities necessitating unusual self-discipline. Online health sites like Real Age and Care 2 enthusiastically recommend yoga, but aside from comparatively rare articles about senior women, thus far no one has dealt with exercise classes in health clubs in relation to senior women’s needs, our perspectives.
It is daunting for us to enter the health club the first few times. Special classes with titles like “Silver Slippers” are offered, but very few seniors attend them or continue to do so. All that we senior women at the health club can observe at first is that far younger club members are preoccupied with participating energetically in the exercise classes in separate glass-enclosed rooms. We also see younger women in the gym area “working out” with weights, lifting and lowering parts of forbiddingly formidable large machines, or running on treadmills. A few senior men and even fewer senior women work out on the machines and a few of them lift weights. If a club has a track it is possible to see senior men running, but I have never seen a senior woman there.
The older we get the more regularly and energetically we should work out, and doing it by ourselves is neither as successful nor as interesting as exercising with a group in a class. Still, few beginners last out to the end of the class and even fewer ever return because they feel that they cannot keep up with the complex, rapidly changing and demanding moves, especially if they have never exercised before, nor done so for some years, and/or are very overweight and/or in bad shape. I joke on occasion that everything aches all the time when I am not exercising, and after exercising everything aches, as well. Nevertheless, I still prefer the after-exercise pain and especially the feeling of increasing “lightness of being” in the process of exercising and immediately afterwards—when the endorphins kick in. Even better than certain prescriptions and medications, endorphins have no side effects unless joie de vivre is considered as such.
From late September until May 1st of each year, my husband Ole and I reside in Boulder City, Nevada, where we attend classes in several health clubs not far from our home. From approximately May 1st on, we leave Nevada to take up residence in our summer cottage in Lake Elsinore, California. The health clubs in both states are affiliated with each other and all offer the same classes. We take these classes three times a week for an hour each. Inevitably, during our annual eight-month absence from Lake Elsinore and four-month absence from Nevada, a few changes in instructors and many changes in class members occur. As a feminist, I am acutely aware of the composition of the classes and therefore observe whether or not the group is uniform or diverse. Class members in California are predominantly Asian and Chicana, as are some instructors. One of them, a Filipina instructor, bonds with students of that ethnicity before and after class, speaking Tagalog with them. Class members in Nevada are a mix of white, African American, and Asian women, but Chicanas are in the majority. The instructors are predominantly white and female. The few male instructors are predominantly Chicano and Asian American.
I observe these classes as a member, as well as from a feminist perspective, and have concluded that the conflicts that erupt in class are not the result of ethnic, race, or class divides, but result from basic territorial instincts and group dynamics. These conflicts are intensified by the huge classes held in heated conditions where there is scarcely enough space for movement. The air conditioners and fans cannot keep up with the heat produced by our bodies. In California, a Zumba class of ninety-five women and one man (Ole) danced almost on top of each other. As a solution, they have begun issuing cards on a first-come, first-served basis to limit the numbers in the class. There are many studies that show overcrowding induces stress. I observe no connection between the stress and the diverse gender, ethnic, racial, make-up of the class. There are cliques that guard and push out others from what they regard as their turf. Some are comprised of ethnic cliques, but others consist of tight-knit groups bonded by their seniority who guard what they consider to be their space against any intruders who happen to wander in.
Turf Warfare
New instructors who have never seen us in class before we come to California for the summer sometimes erroneously assume that Ole and I are inexperienced first-timers. Likewise, those individuals who begin to attend classes after our annual departure in May from Nevada to California and/or our annual departure in September from California to Nevada have never seen us before. They therefore perceive us as intruders in their midst, especially if we arrive earlier to class than they do and have inadvertently taken what they believe is their regular, their own personal “spot.” Some class members move on to their chosen spots as if their names gleamed up at them from the highly polyurethaned floor as if they had earned stars on the Walk of Fame. From their perspective, even when they do come late and find strangers in “their” spots, such regular class members, at least to judge by their frowns and glares in our direction, seem to believe that we are pushy newcomers oblivious of the fact that we are appropriating someone else’s spot. Recently I took a spot in the front of the class, and my Filipina neighbor in a clique turned on me, as its spokesperson: “This is my spot!” she glared. I immediately moved to a neighboring spot, and again she glared at me. “This is my spot!” she repeated. A Filipina friend of mine from her clique came in late and moved to the spot they had saved for her. On her way, she greeted me warmly, and from then on the women in this clique, including their spokesperson, smiled pleasantly whenever they saw me.
Sometimes when I break briefly from my space during class—due to my age, I drink far more water during class and on occasion go to the bathroom—I will find when I return that a neighbor has moved into my space, expressing through her action that she would obliterate my existence if she could. I can only suspect that this exclusionary attempt indicates ageism. It happens frequently; in fact, just the other day I found a young woman in my space when I returned from the bathroom. “I have not left,” I whispered. She returned to her space behind me but glared angrily at me. There have also been many incidents where women used body language to nudge me out of my original position in the class, either by standing too close beside me, or in front of me, or behind me. I ignore it to the extent I can and keep pretending to attend entirely to the instructor’s directions without any awareness of being crowded away from my original spot: a pretense that might work superficially, but stresses me inwardly. I don’t physically or verbally confront anyone in the class who pushes me out of my spot, who comes in late, and then gradually lessens the space between us until she is all but shoving me aside. Sometimes these space hogs smile at me in a friendly manner while nudging me away from my original spot. Sometimes, in an effort to disarm them, I smile back at them when they are doing this. Once a mother and daughter combination forced me off my spot on several occasions while acting very friendly to me. I retreated to the other side of the room where two senior women in their sixties had a little enclave. When I positioned myself behind them, one of them mumbled: “Don’t go close to me.” I never again went near them, either. My purpose in describing these few examples among many is to alert senior women who intend to become members of the health club to group dynamics they might encounter in the classes: to realize that it might take time to be accepted in a space new to them. Some members of the class have formed into a clique to protect a space as their own.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, my confrontation with and rejection of a long-held unexamined certainty in my class in the health club leads to disrupting it, as has happened on occasion in my classroom. An elderly woman recently took the kickboxing class in the front row next to me. She shuffled through the entire class, rarely emulating the instructor’s moves, but doing her own small, childlike shuffles. She approached me after class, bemoaning the fact that we were both “old women,” and that’s why we couldn’t do what these young women were doing. Obviously, older women are generally unable to do what younger women can. Nevertheless, her reality was not necessarily based on the results of aging, but of unexamined beliefs internalized in her that we should not even try to exert ourselves physically because we were old. She accepted and perpetuated the unchallenged stereotype that younger women are strong and healthy but that senior women are automatically medically infirm and therefore should avoid all but the easiest, non-exerting exercise. I asked her age, and she informed me that she was sixty-four, to which I responded that I was fourteen years older; that I kicked and jumped and did all the moves everyone else in the class did throughout the hour. In no way modifying her view and without any change in expression, she continued repeating her original point like a robot, always including me in her paradigm of decrepit age along with herself as examples. It was as if I were having a bad dream where I was attempting to communicate to someone who could never hear me or comprehend me. No matter how I repeated myself, she repeated her mantra as if I had not spoken.
The next time we were kickboxing in the same class, I danced away from the front of the class all the way over to the back of the class where she was shuffling. Here I replicated the instructor’s moves as she made them from in front of the class—such as kicking repeatedly high up in this woman’s face in time with the music. No one appeared to notice. In future classes I spied this woman in the distance, and each time I was fascinated to notice that she was raising her feet a bit higher off the floor. As with my students, I experienced that just prior to their breaking free from cultural shibboleths, they became angry, resentful, and resistant to feminist analyses, she also seemed to have been influenced by our confrontation to lose weight and exert more energy into her moves. Only long afterwards did I become alert to the underlying source of my violent rage against this woman. What did she do or say to provoke me so profoundly? Why did I resent her so much? I realized that I had experienced her communication to me as a unilateral hostile threat, an attack against my metaphorical turf.
Fisticuffs
Once when I first began kickboxing around ten years ago, we donned boxing gloves provided for us at the beginning of class. At some point during the class the instructor exclaimed: “Kill him!” We were supposed to picture an imaginary opponent as we struck our fists in the air. I never returned to that class again, nor has any instructor used such language since. The closest any instructor has come was to critique our lack of aggression, when she shouted out: “This is not a graceful dance class. Put more energy into it!” I cannot speak for others in the class, but I ignored this instructor. I feel that most women prefer moving as gracefully as possible while also simultaneously moving with strength, rather than imagining that we are in a boxing ring with an opponent.
Last week, when I complained to an instructor about the turf warfare, she responded to my surprise with open sympathy—that there had actually “been a fist fight between two women” a few days before over where to position the floor fan. She maintained that under such circumstances the instructor should go to the manager. At any rate, I personally have never been witness to or the object of “fisticuffs,” although the other day a nurse in my doctor’s office pointed to a bruise on my forearm and inquired whether I had gotten it from kickboxing. She appears to have had the misconception, like many others, that kickboxing is done only between battling boxers aggressively confronting one another. The title does appear to imply personal violent interactions as in boxing matches or football. No one ever touches anyone else in class purposely. Sometimes they do touch accidentally in overcrowded classes followed by embarrassed apologies. None of our movements has ever been performed in relation to anyone but the instructor in the front of the room. In reality, the only competition in kickboxing is within the individual members of the class, striving to improve their own performance strength and ability.
In addition to what I have pointed out above about women in kickboxing classes who were reprimanded openly for their moves being graceful rather than strong and forceful, the instructors inadvertently impose their unconscious, internalized belief in essentialist gender dichotomy that grace can only be identified as feminine and therefore inferior to strength, which is masculine. Furthermore seniors might never have even thought of many linguistic inequities that lurk deep within our unexamined accepted discourse. For example, earlier feminist theorists mocked the unexamined cultural homoerotic preoccupation with “balls,” with large and powerful balls. Second Wave feminists such as Germaine Greer and Dale Spender began to unpack terms like “cunt" and “prick.” Nowadays, strong women are defined as “having balls” and other women and men who are not macho as “pussies.” Fetishization of the term “balls” has become a culturally acceptable, commonly used signifier of ultimate, omnipotent masculine power that has proliferated exponentially in media, TV, film, the Internet, and even behind pick-up trucks. Similarly there is the use of the term “mankind” which we have long fought as supposedly generic but that literally and by extension politically somehow by its very use excludes the existence of women routinely. How is it possible to condense discourse by making half of humanity invisible?
Taking Advantage of Instructors’ Stereotyping of Senior Women
Whenever Ole and I came to a class after months in the other state, I had a habit of taking advantage of new instructors who did not know me. The last time I did this and the last time I ever will do this was when I perceived that an instructor was new in my home club (Henderson, Nevada). I waited at the doorway until the whole class had gathered and she was preparing to begin. I then entered and called out: “Is this the senior armchair aerobics class?” The instructor consulted her schedule and informed me that it was a kickboxing class. Those women in the class who knew me giggled. Too distracted by this unexpected difficulty to notice, the instructor looked down once again at her notes, rifling through them nervously to reassure herself that she was preparing correctly, that there was no such class as I had expected to attend at that time and place. She grimaced unhappily as she called out to me: “I’m sorry, but this is a turbo kick box class. It’s not for seniors. It’s too difficult for you.” But I persisted in the face of her certainty. “Well, since I’m here I might as well try it,” I shrugged. She paled, but then decided to start the music, since she did not want to be late for the waiting class. Within only a few seconds after she started, she noticed that I was “kicking ass,” as someone in the class put it to me at the end. I felt guilt-ridden, cruel and hurtful, and that was the last time I ever played a joke based on unexamined cultural assumptions by an exercise instructor. I apologized to the instructor afterwards, but I realized that I had publicly humiliated her.
Ever since that experience, I have understood that an instructor with internalized cultural norms might well be loathe for a senior woman to participate in her class. Indeed, instructors rarely see senior women in kickboxing classes and are fearful and apprehensive that those few who wander in under some kind of delusion could trip or fall and/or that their fragile bodies and hearts could give out. The class routine would be most unpleasantly disrupted, to say the least. In addition, the instructor and/or the club could be sued, of course, for permitting senior women to wander into their kickboxing classes, one of the most difficult of all the classes. From my feminist perspective I view the ghettoization of seniors in special “silver slippers” or “gold” classes designed expressly for their limited abilities as yet another example of the unexamined internalization of a belief system. I still do look around the classes every time and long to see another senior woman there of my advanced age, a Depression Baby.
At sixty-five, Ole is also old compared to most of the members of the class, with the exception of the few senior women, Boomers, somewhere around his age. But they don’t kickbox. They glide gracefully in slow motion, taking small, careful steps. They never kick, jump, hop, skip, or “ski.” I doubt if they “raise a sweat,” and they appear terrified at the thought of working their bodies energetically. Meanwhile, in marked contrast, most of the young women and I rise and fall all around them, all forever running, jumping, hopping, turning and twisting. I also take every opportunity to engage in personal conversations with senior women at the end of class after I have noticed that they stand outside the class looking in to observe our activity, gazing through the glass as from afar and indeed they are, mentally and physically afar. After class I go up to them and request that they try kickboxing. They always respond that they were just waiting for their daughter or granddaughter. They are too old to ever try that stuff. I ask them how old they are, and not one of them has been as old as I, even close. I then ask them how old they think I am, and they respond with estimates somewhat younger than their ages. I then inform them of my greater seniority in age, hoping, anticipating that they would then try the class, but have always failed. There are some senior women in their sixties in the Zumba classes. They prefer Zumba because they can dance by themselves without self-consciousness, although Zumba is not simply dancing, but very vigorous and difficult moves—intense workouts to wonderful music. Admittedly, kickboxing is very hard, even for young people in excellent shape. Thus it remains a lonely experience for me, and this is yet again another reason for my desire for senior women to break free from our cultural baggage to exercise regularly and vigorously.
A few senior women do wander into class on occasion, only to fruitlessly attempt to make the moves, then give up, and walk out after a few minutes. A young classmate unconsciously illustrated her beliefs when describing to me a seminar that was held about exercise that she attended recently. The room, she added, was filled with all ages, even people in “their sixties and seventies with walkers and canes.”
Motives for Regular Exercise
My obese father died of a sudden heart attack at age sixty, in 1960. After failing a stress test at age fifty-two in 1985, I determined to avoid his fate. The first time I entered the aerobics class my complacency increased when I noticed at once that all the other women were much older than I, except for the instructor. However, within five minutes, I had to totter off to the side—faint, exhausted, weak, dizzy, and out of breath. I staggered into a chair and lowered my head down between my legs while everyone else continued jumping and dancing, twisting and turning for the full hour. I left the class feeling humiliated and depressed because, although I was so much younger than those old women, I was to my astonishment much weaker. In the next class I endured for fifteen minutes, and in the next one, thirty minutes, and so on, until I could last the entire class. I had begun exercising, motivated to avoid my father’s fate, but also by the motivation to show off with a smug complacency my superior athletic capacities, based on what I considered my grand youthful accomplishments which I really believed would sail me through any aerobics class. I had not the slightest clue about what aerobics entailed. What were these athletic accomplishments of the distant past that had motivated me to foolishly rely on them? I wonder if other senior women would begin regular group exercise in classes as I did with unrealistic expectations based on past accomplishments, such as I illustrate below, to their disappointment and humiliation also?
One evening in the summer of 1944, one of us suggested that we have a contest as to who could touch our toes bending down to the ground the most times, and I ultimately won after 521 bends. Today I include touching toes as part of my warm-up routine before every class, and always while doing them I imagine I am back in those moments. Last year, while Ole and I were shopping in the supermarket an old man began to chat with us. He was born in the Philippines of an English father and Spanish mother and was a tennis instructor who could still beat his much younger opponents, one of whom assured him that he could only be beaten if he “had one hand tied behind his back.” When I asked him his age, he responded that he was an old man, much older than we were, but I insisted, until he finally admitted that he was seventy-eight. Thrilled by the rarity of coming across someone my own age, another rare Depression Baby, I revealed to him that I was exactly his age, but he adamantly refused to believe me, until Ole insisted it was true. Suddenly he dropped down onto the cement floor of the aisle and began doing push-ups, proudly doing four with some difficulty, then rising out of breath. I couldn’t resist competing with him. Also dropping down to the floor, I quickly performed ten push-ups and stood up without loss of breath. For good measure I bent from the waist, placed my legs and feet together, and touched my toes several times. Impressed, he crowed that he would tell his wife he had just met “a seventy-eight year-old woman in the supermarket who had touched her toes.” I tried in vain to explain the source for my superior ability to do both push-ups and touching toes; that it was all due to the repetitions that I had performed in classes in the health club many times over many years, but he turned away and left us.
In the all-girls’ junior high school I attended in the Bronx we were taught to play basketball. In 1947, my family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where surviving members, as well as two of my children, still live. In Tucson Senior High School, I earned a minor letter in sports from the Girls’ Athletic League. I enjoyed field hockey until my nose was bashed by a ten-ton teammate in the process of running past me. The summer of my graduation in 1950, I chose to leave home in Tucson to become a student in Washington Square College, NYU, commuting to Manhattan from Brooklyn and from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, Monday to Friday. I never again was able to leave the East Coast, except on visits to my family, until my retirement when I finally returned to the west for good. When I began college, I immediately tried out for and was accepted into the women’s basketball team. In those days, women’s basketball was divided into two groups—forwards who played only offense and guards who played only defense—and I was a guard. By the next year the forwards I was supposed to prevent from scoring began to outgrow me. I failed so many times to stop them from throwing the ball over my head, no matter how hard I jumped up in their faces, that I quit the team, despite the coach’s attempt to get me to reconsider.
When I began to kickbox in 2000, it should be no surprise to readers that whenever we would come to the part in the class where we pretended to jump to dunk the ball into the net, I would do a variation, instead jumping in fantasy to block the forwards for my college team. I jump in class every time I possibly can, far more than the other class members—sometimes even doubling my legs behind me up to the back of my knees as I rear up. It is no use to remind me of my present age. I am in ecstasy, outside myself, when these moments occur. I never tire of recreating how I jumped in college over sixty years ago. I am no longer in this aged body when I jump. I am running after the opponent with the ball, attempting to block her shot, totally focused on that need. I am like an old cat present only to the moment in its consciousness, entirely unaware of its age or any concept of it.
Conclusion
At first when I started kickboxing, I would hear my mother’s stern and commanding voice in my head—strong, loud, and repetitive: “Are you crazy?” she would demand, over and over. “You will be taken away in an ambulance in front of everyone. You must not do this! You’re going to die!” I would immediately have visions of falling on the floor, then being loaded onto a stretcher, leaving ignominiously in an ambulance while everyone in the health club watched me carried out, thus reinforcing the universal belief in senior women’s infirmity as real and true. However, for some time now, once the class begins, once I “get into it,” I become oblivious to anything except the moves. I no longer hear my mother’s voice at all before, during, or after class. I suspect that our mothers’ voices in our heads comprises one of the major elements of our unexamined belief systems that are inscribed in all of us, especially senior women. If it is noticed and then accepted, while differing, I believe that gradually the voice, the constraint will disappear. As a classmate in Zumba who is forty-seven years old and an outstanding athlete put it after reading an early version of this essay: “Your story inspired me so, and I wish I had many more women in my life like you. Your ‘drive’ to live outside the box gives me hope. It allows women to live full and passionate lives without fear. It is so important for me to hear because my mother's voice is still in my head telling me to be afraid and to be perfect. This voice surely permeates my belief systems. I hope you are right that the constraint will disappear, eventually.”
I have another motivation for jumping in addition to my attempt to walk well to my last days, and that is to educate other senior women about this prevailing unexamined belief system of our culture, including our physicians, about senior women, that seniority inherently consists of an automatic medical condition—illness/infirmity/incapacity. Doctors’ offices are filled with seniors who are bombarded with a multitude of prescriptions for every imaginable senior illness, and TV and online ads directed to seniors proliferate endlessly ad nauseam. At the end of a recent visit, my doctor suddenly asked me: “Why do you kick box?” I responded that I had been doing it for ten years. Afterwards I realized that regardless of the amount of time I had devoted to kickboxing, the doctor’s question had exposed his underlying disapproval of such exercise as harmful and unnecessary, self-destructive, and stupid for senior women. I disagree. I predict that in the future, doctors and other societal authority figures will expand and transform their debilitating perspectives on senior women, not only due to the influence of my individual work, but to that of other voices in the future.
What I define as my feminist perspective, a term I have used throughout this essay, is the perspective I use to struggle to unravel, to penetrate deep into the sources of intersecting inequities in race, gender, class, ethnicity, and age that still prevail in most cultures, and to critique what I see. I did this in transforming the traditional canon of higher education in scholarly papers, presentations, and books. In this essay, I have applied this perspective to my experiences in the health club in relation to one of our culture’s current powerful shibboleths, namely that as seniors we are inherently medically infirm. My goal in this essay is to free senior women from constraints by expanding and transforming contemporary senior women’s perspectives by exposing from a feminist perspective the unexamined cultural barriers constraining them because they are seniors a priori.
Introduction
After I received my Ph.D. in English Literature in 1964, I taught American literature survey courses without question or examination, using the same syllabus of traditional canonical writers as my colleagues. From 1971 on, I became an impassioned feminist activist in the Second Wave movement, participating in mass marches, demonstrations, and protests; in consciousness raising groups; speaking in churches and synagogues to hostile audiences who threw eggs and tomatoes at us; interviewed on radio; captured on TV to my children’s delight by hostile journalists while liberating sacred male sanctuaries.
By 1976, I began to go private, to take the struggle to my own community; to where I worked; to cultivate “my own garden”—academia. During a year-long sabbatical in my family home in Tucson, Arizona, I researched, created, and developed one of the first multi-ethnic American literature courses in higher education, which I taught from 1977 until my retirement in 1999 at the age of sixty-six. It was the beginning of a long, lonely struggle over the rest of my career to integrate women writers into traditional and multi-ethnic American literature courses; to pioneer in the research and teaching of American ethnic writers; to develop new courses such as “African American Women Writers” and “Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers”; to present papers on my work, on my theory and pedagogical practice at many conferences; to publish my message in the form of essays in journals, and from 1993-2003, to publish six full-length feminist works of literary criticism across the ethnicities, ultimately expanding into transnational feminism in my last work on Indian women writers at home and abroad. In 1985 the English Department began to offer Landmarks of World Literature courses. I had long hoped to be able to teach this course because the title itself permitted an opportunity for a global syllabus. I still retained the traditional canonical syllabus of male writers such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante. However, I expanded the syllabus to a multi-ethnic, transnational feminist perspective by including an equal amount of women writers from historic to the present times and from diverse cultures around the world, extending from the first novelist, Lady Murasaki’s Tales of Genji, to Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife.
That was then. This is now.
What has my past feminist academic expansion and transformation of the traditional canon from within “the walls of the university” got to do with senior women exercising in health clubs? I am now a “bridge” between these two seemingly unrelated communities that spans out from my lengthy experience in expanding and transforming the traditional literature canon in higher education to yet another currently unexamined traditional canon—the embedded cultural “concept” or “idea” about senior women as inherently infirm that is also inscribed in and internalized by senior women ourselves. Here I unpack unexamined belief systems in relation to senior women and exercising as I once unpacked the traditional American higher education canon and its unquestioning followers and exposed this canon’s sexism, racism, class elitism, and exclusion of other ethnicities and cultures. I describe to other senior women who are contemplating exercise in classes the ageism there while simultaneously describing the same prejudices we have internalized about ourselves. This will further enable us not only to function productively beside much younger classmates, but to provide inspiring role models for them when their turn to seniority arrives.
In the past many of my students told me repeatedly how inspiring a role model I was for them. I also aim in this essay to inspire senior women to exercise regularly and as energetically as possible. Through constant repetition of energetic moves rather than cautious, minimal shuffling, we can push ourselves mentally and physically past the stereotypes inscribed in us all our lives that to be aged means that we are automatically medically infirm. Instead, senior women should exercise—not just regularly—but beyond what we accept without examination, blindly following cultural shibboleths and belief systems. Because of a lifetime of cultural internalization about the condition and appearance of seniors, we find the possibility of even going into the health club intimidating to the point where we evade its very existence and culture. We can see no possible relevance to our current stage in life.
Our rejection of exercise, specifically physically challenging classes, is not only due to our unexamined belief that we are senior, therefore infirm. There is also a lack of any information about such classes in health clubs aimed specifically at seniors. A recent survey dealt with a group of seniors aged sixty-five who could not walk up the stairs until they did it regularly and repetitively. In contrast, at seventy-nine, I can run up stairs, many stairs, without getting breathless. How do I, how can we senior women, keep our legs strong? I do it by kicking in class consciously as high as I can; skipping, hopping, and “skiing”; bending to the floor and then rising up to full height as many times as the instructor does. The benefits of walking and of doing stairs are obvious, but these exercises are individual, generally isolated self-determined activities necessitating unusual self-discipline. Online health sites like Real Age and Care 2 enthusiastically recommend yoga, but aside from comparatively rare articles about senior women, thus far no one has dealt with exercise classes in health clubs in relation to senior women’s needs, our perspectives.
It is daunting for us to enter the health club the first few times. Special classes with titles like “Silver Slippers” are offered, but very few seniors attend them or continue to do so. All that we senior women at the health club can observe at first is that far younger club members are preoccupied with participating energetically in the exercise classes in separate glass-enclosed rooms. We also see younger women in the gym area “working out” with weights, lifting and lowering parts of forbiddingly formidable large machines, or running on treadmills. A few senior men and even fewer senior women work out on the machines and a few of them lift weights. If a club has a track it is possible to see senior men running, but I have never seen a senior woman there.
The older we get the more regularly and energetically we should work out, and doing it by ourselves is neither as successful nor as interesting as exercising with a group in a class. Still, few beginners last out to the end of the class and even fewer ever return because they feel that they cannot keep up with the complex, rapidly changing and demanding moves, especially if they have never exercised before, nor done so for some years, and/or are very overweight and/or in bad shape. I joke on occasion that everything aches all the time when I am not exercising, and after exercising everything aches, as well. Nevertheless, I still prefer the after-exercise pain and especially the feeling of increasing “lightness of being” in the process of exercising and immediately afterwards—when the endorphins kick in. Even better than certain prescriptions and medications, endorphins have no side effects unless joie de vivre is considered as such.
From late September until May 1st of each year, my husband Ole and I reside in Boulder City, Nevada, where we attend classes in several health clubs not far from our home. From approximately May 1st on, we leave Nevada to take up residence in our summer cottage in Lake Elsinore, California. The health clubs in both states are affiliated with each other and all offer the same classes. We take these classes three times a week for an hour each. Inevitably, during our annual eight-month absence from Lake Elsinore and four-month absence from Nevada, a few changes in instructors and many changes in class members occur. As a feminist, I am acutely aware of the composition of the classes and therefore observe whether or not the group is uniform or diverse. Class members in California are predominantly Asian and Chicana, as are some instructors. One of them, a Filipina instructor, bonds with students of that ethnicity before and after class, speaking Tagalog with them. Class members in Nevada are a mix of white, African American, and Asian women, but Chicanas are in the majority. The instructors are predominantly white and female. The few male instructors are predominantly Chicano and Asian American.
I observe these classes as a member, as well as from a feminist perspective, and have concluded that the conflicts that erupt in class are not the result of ethnic, race, or class divides, but result from basic territorial instincts and group dynamics. These conflicts are intensified by the huge classes held in heated conditions where there is scarcely enough space for movement. The air conditioners and fans cannot keep up with the heat produced by our bodies. In California, a Zumba class of ninety-five women and one man (Ole) danced almost on top of each other. As a solution, they have begun issuing cards on a first-come, first-served basis to limit the numbers in the class. There are many studies that show overcrowding induces stress. I observe no connection between the stress and the diverse gender, ethnic, racial, make-up of the class. There are cliques that guard and push out others from what they regard as their turf. Some are comprised of ethnic cliques, but others consist of tight-knit groups bonded by their seniority who guard what they consider to be their space against any intruders who happen to wander in.
Turf Warfare
New instructors who have never seen us in class before we come to California for the summer sometimes erroneously assume that Ole and I are inexperienced first-timers. Likewise, those individuals who begin to attend classes after our annual departure in May from Nevada to California and/or our annual departure in September from California to Nevada have never seen us before. They therefore perceive us as intruders in their midst, especially if we arrive earlier to class than they do and have inadvertently taken what they believe is their regular, their own personal “spot.” Some class members move on to their chosen spots as if their names gleamed up at them from the highly polyurethaned floor as if they had earned stars on the Walk of Fame. From their perspective, even when they do come late and find strangers in “their” spots, such regular class members, at least to judge by their frowns and glares in our direction, seem to believe that we are pushy newcomers oblivious of the fact that we are appropriating someone else’s spot. Recently I took a spot in the front of the class, and my Filipina neighbor in a clique turned on me, as its spokesperson: “This is my spot!” she glared. I immediately moved to a neighboring spot, and again she glared at me. “This is my spot!” she repeated. A Filipina friend of mine from her clique came in late and moved to the spot they had saved for her. On her way, she greeted me warmly, and from then on the women in this clique, including their spokesperson, smiled pleasantly whenever they saw me.
Sometimes when I break briefly from my space during class—due to my age, I drink far more water during class and on occasion go to the bathroom—I will find when I return that a neighbor has moved into my space, expressing through her action that she would obliterate my existence if she could. I can only suspect that this exclusionary attempt indicates ageism. It happens frequently; in fact, just the other day I found a young woman in my space when I returned from the bathroom. “I have not left,” I whispered. She returned to her space behind me but glared angrily at me. There have also been many incidents where women used body language to nudge me out of my original position in the class, either by standing too close beside me, or in front of me, or behind me. I ignore it to the extent I can and keep pretending to attend entirely to the instructor’s directions without any awareness of being crowded away from my original spot: a pretense that might work superficially, but stresses me inwardly. I don’t physically or verbally confront anyone in the class who pushes me out of my spot, who comes in late, and then gradually lessens the space between us until she is all but shoving me aside. Sometimes these space hogs smile at me in a friendly manner while nudging me away from my original spot. Sometimes, in an effort to disarm them, I smile back at them when they are doing this. Once a mother and daughter combination forced me off my spot on several occasions while acting very friendly to me. I retreated to the other side of the room where two senior women in their sixties had a little enclave. When I positioned myself behind them, one of them mumbled: “Don’t go close to me.” I never again went near them, either. My purpose in describing these few examples among many is to alert senior women who intend to become members of the health club to group dynamics they might encounter in the classes: to realize that it might take time to be accepted in a space new to them. Some members of the class have formed into a clique to protect a space as their own.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, my confrontation with and rejection of a long-held unexamined certainty in my class in the health club leads to disrupting it, as has happened on occasion in my classroom. An elderly woman recently took the kickboxing class in the front row next to me. She shuffled through the entire class, rarely emulating the instructor’s moves, but doing her own small, childlike shuffles. She approached me after class, bemoaning the fact that we were both “old women,” and that’s why we couldn’t do what these young women were doing. Obviously, older women are generally unable to do what younger women can. Nevertheless, her reality was not necessarily based on the results of aging, but of unexamined beliefs internalized in her that we should not even try to exert ourselves physically because we were old. She accepted and perpetuated the unchallenged stereotype that younger women are strong and healthy but that senior women are automatically medically infirm and therefore should avoid all but the easiest, non-exerting exercise. I asked her age, and she informed me that she was sixty-four, to which I responded that I was fourteen years older; that I kicked and jumped and did all the moves everyone else in the class did throughout the hour. In no way modifying her view and without any change in expression, she continued repeating her original point like a robot, always including me in her paradigm of decrepit age along with herself as examples. It was as if I were having a bad dream where I was attempting to communicate to someone who could never hear me or comprehend me. No matter how I repeated myself, she repeated her mantra as if I had not spoken.
The next time we were kickboxing in the same class, I danced away from the front of the class all the way over to the back of the class where she was shuffling. Here I replicated the instructor’s moves as she made them from in front of the class—such as kicking repeatedly high up in this woman’s face in time with the music. No one appeared to notice. In future classes I spied this woman in the distance, and each time I was fascinated to notice that she was raising her feet a bit higher off the floor. As with my students, I experienced that just prior to their breaking free from cultural shibboleths, they became angry, resentful, and resistant to feminist analyses, she also seemed to have been influenced by our confrontation to lose weight and exert more energy into her moves. Only long afterwards did I become alert to the underlying source of my violent rage against this woman. What did she do or say to provoke me so profoundly? Why did I resent her so much? I realized that I had experienced her communication to me as a unilateral hostile threat, an attack against my metaphorical turf.
Fisticuffs
Once when I first began kickboxing around ten years ago, we donned boxing gloves provided for us at the beginning of class. At some point during the class the instructor exclaimed: “Kill him!” We were supposed to picture an imaginary opponent as we struck our fists in the air. I never returned to that class again, nor has any instructor used such language since. The closest any instructor has come was to critique our lack of aggression, when she shouted out: “This is not a graceful dance class. Put more energy into it!” I cannot speak for others in the class, but I ignored this instructor. I feel that most women prefer moving as gracefully as possible while also simultaneously moving with strength, rather than imagining that we are in a boxing ring with an opponent.
Last week, when I complained to an instructor about the turf warfare, she responded to my surprise with open sympathy—that there had actually “been a fist fight between two women” a few days before over where to position the floor fan. She maintained that under such circumstances the instructor should go to the manager. At any rate, I personally have never been witness to or the object of “fisticuffs,” although the other day a nurse in my doctor’s office pointed to a bruise on my forearm and inquired whether I had gotten it from kickboxing. She appears to have had the misconception, like many others, that kickboxing is done only between battling boxers aggressively confronting one another. The title does appear to imply personal violent interactions as in boxing matches or football. No one ever touches anyone else in class purposely. Sometimes they do touch accidentally in overcrowded classes followed by embarrassed apologies. None of our movements has ever been performed in relation to anyone but the instructor in the front of the room. In reality, the only competition in kickboxing is within the individual members of the class, striving to improve their own performance strength and ability.
In addition to what I have pointed out above about women in kickboxing classes who were reprimanded openly for their moves being graceful rather than strong and forceful, the instructors inadvertently impose their unconscious, internalized belief in essentialist gender dichotomy that grace can only be identified as feminine and therefore inferior to strength, which is masculine. Furthermore seniors might never have even thought of many linguistic inequities that lurk deep within our unexamined accepted discourse. For example, earlier feminist theorists mocked the unexamined cultural homoerotic preoccupation with “balls,” with large and powerful balls. Second Wave feminists such as Germaine Greer and Dale Spender began to unpack terms like “cunt" and “prick.” Nowadays, strong women are defined as “having balls” and other women and men who are not macho as “pussies.” Fetishization of the term “balls” has become a culturally acceptable, commonly used signifier of ultimate, omnipotent masculine power that has proliferated exponentially in media, TV, film, the Internet, and even behind pick-up trucks. Similarly there is the use of the term “mankind” which we have long fought as supposedly generic but that literally and by extension politically somehow by its very use excludes the existence of women routinely. How is it possible to condense discourse by making half of humanity invisible?
Taking Advantage of Instructors’ Stereotyping of Senior Women
Whenever Ole and I came to a class after months in the other state, I had a habit of taking advantage of new instructors who did not know me. The last time I did this and the last time I ever will do this was when I perceived that an instructor was new in my home club (Henderson, Nevada). I waited at the doorway until the whole class had gathered and she was preparing to begin. I then entered and called out: “Is this the senior armchair aerobics class?” The instructor consulted her schedule and informed me that it was a kickboxing class. Those women in the class who knew me giggled. Too distracted by this unexpected difficulty to notice, the instructor looked down once again at her notes, rifling through them nervously to reassure herself that she was preparing correctly, that there was no such class as I had expected to attend at that time and place. She grimaced unhappily as she called out to me: “I’m sorry, but this is a turbo kick box class. It’s not for seniors. It’s too difficult for you.” But I persisted in the face of her certainty. “Well, since I’m here I might as well try it,” I shrugged. She paled, but then decided to start the music, since she did not want to be late for the waiting class. Within only a few seconds after she started, she noticed that I was “kicking ass,” as someone in the class put it to me at the end. I felt guilt-ridden, cruel and hurtful, and that was the last time I ever played a joke based on unexamined cultural assumptions by an exercise instructor. I apologized to the instructor afterwards, but I realized that I had publicly humiliated her.
Ever since that experience, I have understood that an instructor with internalized cultural norms might well be loathe for a senior woman to participate in her class. Indeed, instructors rarely see senior women in kickboxing classes and are fearful and apprehensive that those few who wander in under some kind of delusion could trip or fall and/or that their fragile bodies and hearts could give out. The class routine would be most unpleasantly disrupted, to say the least. In addition, the instructor and/or the club could be sued, of course, for permitting senior women to wander into their kickboxing classes, one of the most difficult of all the classes. From my feminist perspective I view the ghettoization of seniors in special “silver slippers” or “gold” classes designed expressly for their limited abilities as yet another example of the unexamined internalization of a belief system. I still do look around the classes every time and long to see another senior woman there of my advanced age, a Depression Baby.
At sixty-five, Ole is also old compared to most of the members of the class, with the exception of the few senior women, Boomers, somewhere around his age. But they don’t kickbox. They glide gracefully in slow motion, taking small, careful steps. They never kick, jump, hop, skip, or “ski.” I doubt if they “raise a sweat,” and they appear terrified at the thought of working their bodies energetically. Meanwhile, in marked contrast, most of the young women and I rise and fall all around them, all forever running, jumping, hopping, turning and twisting. I also take every opportunity to engage in personal conversations with senior women at the end of class after I have noticed that they stand outside the class looking in to observe our activity, gazing through the glass as from afar and indeed they are, mentally and physically afar. After class I go up to them and request that they try kickboxing. They always respond that they were just waiting for their daughter or granddaughter. They are too old to ever try that stuff. I ask them how old they are, and not one of them has been as old as I, even close. I then ask them how old they think I am, and they respond with estimates somewhat younger than their ages. I then inform them of my greater seniority in age, hoping, anticipating that they would then try the class, but have always failed. There are some senior women in their sixties in the Zumba classes. They prefer Zumba because they can dance by themselves without self-consciousness, although Zumba is not simply dancing, but very vigorous and difficult moves—intense workouts to wonderful music. Admittedly, kickboxing is very hard, even for young people in excellent shape. Thus it remains a lonely experience for me, and this is yet again another reason for my desire for senior women to break free from our cultural baggage to exercise regularly and vigorously.
A few senior women do wander into class on occasion, only to fruitlessly attempt to make the moves, then give up, and walk out after a few minutes. A young classmate unconsciously illustrated her beliefs when describing to me a seminar that was held about exercise that she attended recently. The room, she added, was filled with all ages, even people in “their sixties and seventies with walkers and canes.”
Motives for Regular Exercise
My obese father died of a sudden heart attack at age sixty, in 1960. After failing a stress test at age fifty-two in 1985, I determined to avoid his fate. The first time I entered the aerobics class my complacency increased when I noticed at once that all the other women were much older than I, except for the instructor. However, within five minutes, I had to totter off to the side—faint, exhausted, weak, dizzy, and out of breath. I staggered into a chair and lowered my head down between my legs while everyone else continued jumping and dancing, twisting and turning for the full hour. I left the class feeling humiliated and depressed because, although I was so much younger than those old women, I was to my astonishment much weaker. In the next class I endured for fifteen minutes, and in the next one, thirty minutes, and so on, until I could last the entire class. I had begun exercising, motivated to avoid my father’s fate, but also by the motivation to show off with a smug complacency my superior athletic capacities, based on what I considered my grand youthful accomplishments which I really believed would sail me through any aerobics class. I had not the slightest clue about what aerobics entailed. What were these athletic accomplishments of the distant past that had motivated me to foolishly rely on them? I wonder if other senior women would begin regular group exercise in classes as I did with unrealistic expectations based on past accomplishments, such as I illustrate below, to their disappointment and humiliation also?
One evening in the summer of 1944, one of us suggested that we have a contest as to who could touch our toes bending down to the ground the most times, and I ultimately won after 521 bends. Today I include touching toes as part of my warm-up routine before every class, and always while doing them I imagine I am back in those moments. Last year, while Ole and I were shopping in the supermarket an old man began to chat with us. He was born in the Philippines of an English father and Spanish mother and was a tennis instructor who could still beat his much younger opponents, one of whom assured him that he could only be beaten if he “had one hand tied behind his back.” When I asked him his age, he responded that he was an old man, much older than we were, but I insisted, until he finally admitted that he was seventy-eight. Thrilled by the rarity of coming across someone my own age, another rare Depression Baby, I revealed to him that I was exactly his age, but he adamantly refused to believe me, until Ole insisted it was true. Suddenly he dropped down onto the cement floor of the aisle and began doing push-ups, proudly doing four with some difficulty, then rising out of breath. I couldn’t resist competing with him. Also dropping down to the floor, I quickly performed ten push-ups and stood up without loss of breath. For good measure I bent from the waist, placed my legs and feet together, and touched my toes several times. Impressed, he crowed that he would tell his wife he had just met “a seventy-eight year-old woman in the supermarket who had touched her toes.” I tried in vain to explain the source for my superior ability to do both push-ups and touching toes; that it was all due to the repetitions that I had performed in classes in the health club many times over many years, but he turned away and left us.
In the all-girls’ junior high school I attended in the Bronx we were taught to play basketball. In 1947, my family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where surviving members, as well as two of my children, still live. In Tucson Senior High School, I earned a minor letter in sports from the Girls’ Athletic League. I enjoyed field hockey until my nose was bashed by a ten-ton teammate in the process of running past me. The summer of my graduation in 1950, I chose to leave home in Tucson to become a student in Washington Square College, NYU, commuting to Manhattan from Brooklyn and from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, Monday to Friday. I never again was able to leave the East Coast, except on visits to my family, until my retirement when I finally returned to the west for good. When I began college, I immediately tried out for and was accepted into the women’s basketball team. In those days, women’s basketball was divided into two groups—forwards who played only offense and guards who played only defense—and I was a guard. By the next year the forwards I was supposed to prevent from scoring began to outgrow me. I failed so many times to stop them from throwing the ball over my head, no matter how hard I jumped up in their faces, that I quit the team, despite the coach’s attempt to get me to reconsider.
When I began to kickbox in 2000, it should be no surprise to readers that whenever we would come to the part in the class where we pretended to jump to dunk the ball into the net, I would do a variation, instead jumping in fantasy to block the forwards for my college team. I jump in class every time I possibly can, far more than the other class members—sometimes even doubling my legs behind me up to the back of my knees as I rear up. It is no use to remind me of my present age. I am in ecstasy, outside myself, when these moments occur. I never tire of recreating how I jumped in college over sixty years ago. I am no longer in this aged body when I jump. I am running after the opponent with the ball, attempting to block her shot, totally focused on that need. I am like an old cat present only to the moment in its consciousness, entirely unaware of its age or any concept of it.
Conclusion
At first when I started kickboxing, I would hear my mother’s stern and commanding voice in my head—strong, loud, and repetitive: “Are you crazy?” she would demand, over and over. “You will be taken away in an ambulance in front of everyone. You must not do this! You’re going to die!” I would immediately have visions of falling on the floor, then being loaded onto a stretcher, leaving ignominiously in an ambulance while everyone in the health club watched me carried out, thus reinforcing the universal belief in senior women’s infirmity as real and true. However, for some time now, once the class begins, once I “get into it,” I become oblivious to anything except the moves. I no longer hear my mother’s voice at all before, during, or after class. I suspect that our mothers’ voices in our heads comprises one of the major elements of our unexamined belief systems that are inscribed in all of us, especially senior women. If it is noticed and then accepted, while differing, I believe that gradually the voice, the constraint will disappear. As a classmate in Zumba who is forty-seven years old and an outstanding athlete put it after reading an early version of this essay: “Your story inspired me so, and I wish I had many more women in my life like you. Your ‘drive’ to live outside the box gives me hope. It allows women to live full and passionate lives without fear. It is so important for me to hear because my mother's voice is still in my head telling me to be afraid and to be perfect. This voice surely permeates my belief systems. I hope you are right that the constraint will disappear, eventually.”
I have another motivation for jumping in addition to my attempt to walk well to my last days, and that is to educate other senior women about this prevailing unexamined belief system of our culture, including our physicians, about senior women, that seniority inherently consists of an automatic medical condition—illness/infirmity/incapacity. Doctors’ offices are filled with seniors who are bombarded with a multitude of prescriptions for every imaginable senior illness, and TV and online ads directed to seniors proliferate endlessly ad nauseam. At the end of a recent visit, my doctor suddenly asked me: “Why do you kick box?” I responded that I had been doing it for ten years. Afterwards I realized that regardless of the amount of time I had devoted to kickboxing, the doctor’s question had exposed his underlying disapproval of such exercise as harmful and unnecessary, self-destructive, and stupid for senior women. I disagree. I predict that in the future, doctors and other societal authority figures will expand and transform their debilitating perspectives on senior women, not only due to the influence of my individual work, but to that of other voices in the future.
What I define as my feminist perspective, a term I have used throughout this essay, is the perspective I use to struggle to unravel, to penetrate deep into the sources of intersecting inequities in race, gender, class, ethnicity, and age that still prevail in most cultures, and to critique what I see. I did this in transforming the traditional canon of higher education in scholarly papers, presentations, and books. In this essay, I have applied this perspective to my experiences in the health club in relation to one of our culture’s current powerful shibboleths, namely that as seniors we are inherently medically infirm. My goal in this essay is to free senior women from constraints by expanding and transforming contemporary senior women’s perspectives by exposing from a feminist perspective the unexamined cultural barriers constraining them because they are seniors a priori.
Working notes
From 1998 to the present I have contributed to the Women’s Studies list on questions related to activists and writers prior to, in, and after the Second Wave movement who influenced me. Before I taught and wrote from a feminist perspective, my early influences included Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Emma Lazarus, Anne Frank, and Bernard Malamud. In creating and developing my ground-breaking syllabi, I was influenced by Dexter Fisher’s anthology, The Third Woman, the incomparable feminist journal Signs, and by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Dale Spender, Kate Millett, Cherrie Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa. In my courses, I taught Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobson (Linda Brent), Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Ferré, Nicolasa Mohr, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, among others. My greatest influences are Alice Walker and Carolyn Heilbrun, aka Amanda Cross, who in her popular mysteries satirized the sadistic treatment which she suffered—as I did—within her English department because she was a feminist. I currently read feminist women activists, writers, and critics from a variety of diverse cultures such as Mahasweta Devi and her editor, the transnational feminist philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Charlotte Bunche, and Marjane Satrapi. I also participate in a number of charitable and politically progressive organizations and support politicians that focus on women.
About the author
Phillipa Kafka was a professor for thirty years in the English Department of Kean University, Union, New Jersey, where she also directed the Women’s Studies program. When she retired in 1999, she was rewarded for life with the title of Professor Emeritus (in her case, Emerita). In 1976 a conglomerate monopoly, the “Old Boy WASP Network,” controlled English departments where the term “English” exposed a narrow ethnocentric preference as to what constitutes “great literature” and still does. Writers and critics assigned in course syllabi consisted almost entirely—99 percent—of white males, dead or alive. From that point until her retirement, she expanded this traditional literature canon by creating African American Women Writers and Caribbean Women Writers courses and a pioneering Multi-Ethnic American Literature course which included women writers. She also inserted women writers into pre-existing courses such as World Literature and African American Literature. She described and analyzed the results in journals such as MELUS; in collections on Filipina writers, on Jewish women writers (which she also edited), and later published an essay in a collection on “confronting retirement.” She presented papers at conferences such as the African American Writers in Paris Conference at the Sorbonne, in 1992, where as an invited member of the African American women writers’ panel she read her paper on Nella Larsen to a standing-room-only crowd. From 1993-2003 she published five full-length books on women writers who suffered gender, ethnic, race, and class prejudice: The Great White Way: African-AmericanWomen Writers and American Success Mythologies; (Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women's Writings; (Out)Classed Women: Contemporary Chicana Writers on Inequitable Gendered Power Relations; "Saddling La Gringa": Gatekeeping in Contemporary Latina Writers; On the Outside Looking In(dian): Indian WomenWriters at Home and Abroad. From 2000-2010 she served on the editorial board of “Femspec,” a feminist journal, where she worked as line editor, judged submissions, and reviewed books. Nowadays she cultivates her own rose garden, exercises regularly in the health club, and occasionally plays the piano (badly); basks in the beauty of her home overlooking Lake Mead; delights in the wonderful lives of her three children, now-middle aged, who all serve society in their chosen careers, and in Olavi Koskinen, Jr., her companion for thirty-one years.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.