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Ruth H. Jacobs was a professor at Boston University and chair of the Sociology department at Clark University until her retirement in 1987. She continues to teach as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at many universities, has served on the AARP's National Task Force on Aging and Mental Health, and lectures widely to organizations for aging women. She lives in Wellesley, MA.

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In a society that worships youth and relegates its seniors to second-class citizen status, many elderly women end up ignored, mourning their lost youth. It doesn't have to be that way, says Dr. Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Remarkable Aging Smart Person and self-proclaimed troublemaker. Her solution: Be An Outrageous Older Woman. A unique guide to living it up in the senior years, this feisty book addresses the many issues faced by older women in a sassy, humorous and yes, even outrageous way. Drawing from her personal experience and from years of meticulous research, Dr. Jacobs covers such areas as:

• Sexuality: an A-to-Z list of different ways to keep the fires of passion burning

• Reinventing yourself

• Having fun on a tight budget

• Fostering relationships and social groups

• Being outrageous with your descendants

• The benefits and bonuses of aging -- the most freedom since puberty

• Much, much more

  Filled with practical advice and innovative ideas, Be an Outrageous Older Woman gives readers the knowledge and inspiration they need to live as first-class citizens and make their golden years shine.

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Be an Outrageous Older Woman

By Jacobs, Ruth Harriet

Perennial

Copyright © 2004 Ruth H. Jacobs
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060952539

Don't Rage;
Be Outrageous

Rage is in the middle of the word outrageous. Rage occurs when we are frustrated, ignored, hurt, trivialized, denied needed resources, insulted, treated as second-class individuals, and in other ways injured. In our society, women are often discriminated against when they age. This can be as major and open as not being hired or as subtle as being treated as though we are invisible in society and perfunctorily at social gatherings. When we brood about this and take no action, our rage or anger often turns inward, eventually developing into depression or passivity.
However, we can move beyond rage by being outrageous older women, refusing to accept the stereotypes or slights. This book will give you recipes for coming out of rage and into being a magnificent older woman who takes what she can from life to be happy, to be productive, and, above all, to laugh. We need joy in our lives as we age. There are decrements in aging, but we can be creative about increments.
As I grew older, I learned that if you are outrageous enough, good things happen. You stop being invisible and become validated. For example, in 1987, I decided to call myself a R.A.S.P. I had never been a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) because, among other disqualifications, I am the wrong ethnic group and too fat. But I figured I could RASP my way though my older years fighting for my own rights and my own joy and for those of other older women. To me, R.A.S.P. stood for Remarkable Aging Smart Person, and I painted it on a T-shirt and sweatshirt to handle all seasons. I also made a R.A.S.P. button by putting masking tape over the button of a disliked politician and writing R.A.S.P. with a magic marker--bright red, of course.
Other women suggested R.A.S.P. also stood for, as the situation warranted, Ravishing Aging Sexy Person or Radical Aging Strategic Person. Wherever I went, I invited mature women to join R.A.S.P., explaining that it was a great organization because there were no dues, meetings, newsletters, or financial appeals. Other R.A.S.P. buttons began to appear. By 1990, the prestigious American Aging Society sent me an unsolicited letter addressed to Ruth Jacobs, President of R.A.S.P., inviting me and my members to join. If the American Aging Society says R.A.S.P. is real, it must be. It's no longer just my private joke. So now I ask you to join R.A.S.P.
In this book, you will learn how to start Rasping. What I will offer comes from more than my personal experience. It grew from the research, teaching, and advocacy on women and aging that I have done since I earned my Ph.D. in sociology in 1969, at age forty-five (after getting my B.S. at age 40 while my children were in school). I am the older women's Dr. Ruth, come to tell the truth, and I hope by the time I'm done, you'll think I am the better one.
My research and my work on behalf of older women has been supported by such agencies as the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Stone Center for Women's Development and Services at Wellesley College, and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, where I have been affiliated since the seventies. I have learned a great deal from wonderful aging women who have taken my "Older Women Surviving and Thriving" workshops and from women I have interviewed for my research books and articles. Many of them, like me, had to overcome the internalized cultural bias against aging, especially against aging women.
My own crisis of aging came when I was sixty, an age that signaled to me the end of midlife. When I was nearly sixty-one, I wrote in a poem how I had conquered my fears.

Becoming Sixty
There were terror and anger
at coming into sixty.
Would I give birth
only to my old age?
Now near sixty-one
I count the gifts
that sixty gave.
A book flowed from my life
to those who needed it
and love flowed back to me.
In a yard that had seemed full,
space for another garden appeared.
I took my aloneness to Quaker meeting,
and my outstretched palms were filled.
I walked further along the beach,
swam longer in more sacred places,
danced the spiral dance,
reclaimed daisies for women
in my ritual for a precious friend
and received poet's wine
from a new friend who came
in the evening of my need.

In addition to the things listed in the poem, I tried many other new activities the year I turned sixty. By sixty-three, I was really enjoying my older womanhood and asking myself what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Please write down now what you want to do with the rest of your life.
When I did my list, I discovered I no longer wanted to work full-time teaching and chairing the sociology department at Clark University, and I resigned to teach only part-time elsewhere and to do other things. Writing the list made me confront my life and change it. It is easy to stick to a known, safe-but-uncomfortable identity. We have to shake ourselves up once in a while. Writing to ourselves can give us access to our deep wishes as my poem that follows did for me.
Continues...

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