When I was young, my mom was one of the few mothers I knew who worked or went to college. In the year I started elementary school, she started her BA; as I was graduating from high school, she was graduating with her MA in Speech Pathology. After that, she ran the Speech and Hearing Clinic at the University of Tulsa for many years.
She was one of those women who, like the Energizer Bunny, kept “going . . . and going . . . and going.” She loved her work. Supervising graduate students kept her young, she said. But in her late fifties, she started having to take care of her mother, driving the two hours from Tulsa up to Joplin every weekend. Eventually even the Energizer Bunny’s battery ran down. So she retired. She and my dad moved to Joplin, where they’d been a young married couple and the cost of living was lower. My mom looked after my grandmother and played golf with my dad, she gardened and cooked, and she picked back up one of her early loves: painting. Within a year or two, she was volunteering for all sorts of organizations. In other words, she was a model of an active, engaged retirement.
My dad did okay, too, but it was a more of a battle for him. Like many of the WWII vets he’d fought with, he went through life with what I came to recognize as chronic, low-grade depression. (It probably didn’t help his pessimism about human nature that he helped liberate Dachau, although we didn’t know that until we saw pictures after he died.) He worked his way up through a good career in the railroad industry, he enjoyed the camaraderie and exercise of playing golf, and he liked a good laugh at the bar. And though he timed the minister’s sermons and pointed ostentatiously to his watch if they lasted too long, he had a real and deep spirituality. But when my mom went away on conferences or to take care of my grandmother, he collapsed in on himself: he tended to sit in his chair and sip whiskey in the near-dark, barely speaking a word.
I suspect his retirement was a day-to-day struggle against a similar kind of collapse. Laid off in his late fifties, when his company was bought by a larger railroad, he continued to play a lot of golf. He also worked hard for the church vestry. But I don’t think either of those things interested him very much. Or if they did, they didn’t compensate for not bringing in money anymore.
So different genders was only one of the factors that differentiated the retirements of my two parents. Personality counted for at least as much.
Does that mean that it’s silly to have books on retirement that are aimed especially at women? Not at all.
Of course women face many of the same challenges as do men when they retire. But those challenges are inflected differently. Like the men of our generation, we women who are retiring have been working for much of our adult lives. Some of us (myself included) had careers that satisfied us – careers that we were proud of and identified with. Some of us even got paid more or less the same as our male cohort. But often women’s work was underpaid, undervalued, or both; we often left jobs or downshifted when the kids were born. So our Social Security and pension payments tend to be lower than men’s. And it’s not just our finance situations that are different; we often relate to money differently than most men do, too – just as many of us relate differently to our friends, our partners, and even our bodies. From a marketing angle, there’s also the fact that women read more.
So here are some books that I ran across on the specificities of women over 60.
The Single Woman’s Guide to Retirement, by Jan Cullinane, for AARP (2012). Cullinane wrote an earlier book for AARP on retirement and realized that it largely assumed readers were in couples. This book is oriented towards a different (and often neglected) subset of retirees: single women – the divorced, the widowed, and the never-married. She includes chapters on when to retire, where to retire, how much money one needs to retire, things to do when one retires—all focused on the particular needs of women retiring on their own.
My Take: I ordered this for a friend and skimmed it before I gave it to her. I liked Cullinane’s down-to-earth voice and her lively mix of statistics with stories about particular women. She provides excellent details and lists—things like travel companies that cater to single women, towns that are especially good for lesbian women, organizations that provide good volunteer opportunities for singles, good dating sites for seniors, and so forth. She also includes checklists and website addresses. My single friend reported that the best advice she got was that quiet or introverted women should, soon after they retire, check out moving into a senior community; the clubs, groups, and activities can provide ways to meet new friends and avoid social isolation.
Tips and Tricks for Boomer Chicks: A Survival Book for Retirement Years, by Gail Mewes (2014). The book emerged from Mewes losing two friends to cancer and then heading off down the Mississippi River to raise money for cancer research. The chapters are short, personal, and upbeat, organized around the issues of preparing oneself mentally, physically, & financially; thinking about relationships and appearance; a list of ten “commandments” she and her friends evolved; and dealing with inevitable irritations of retirement, from hot flashes to annoying relatives.
My Take: The book has a sassy Southern quality that some women will like and that I found pretty alien. I admired that Mewes wrote the book in memory of her friends and spoke about issues that many women don’t talk about in public, like menopause and (heterosexual) sex. For me, the most intriguing piece of advice was to take a yearly “sabbatical” by yourself for a few days; it reminds you of what it’s like to manage on your own, spend time by yourself, and try something new.
Smart Women Don’t Retire – They Break Free, by The Transition Network and Gail Rentsch (2008). This book arose from conversations with women in TTN (The Transition Network, co-founded in 2000 by Christine Millen and Charlotte Frank), and the book continues the work of TTN: to promote conversations among women over fifty about how we want to handle the next phase of life. It takes a good, hard look at how women in the current generation are planning for (and living out) their lives once they’ve passed fifty. It covers the usual topics (from finances to friendships) firmly from the perspective of women who have come to adulthood in an era in which they could work and succeed at traditionally male-dominated jobs. There are lots of stories and comments from actual women.
My Take: This is a thorough, useful overview of the issues women face in retirement, written with a feminist edge that I enjoyed. For example, in the chapter on finances, Rentsch addresses the very real reluctance many women (partnered or unpartnered) experience when they need to think seriously about managing money. She’s sympathetic but firm: we need to be involved in decision-making, and we need to know where the money is stashed, what the passwords are, and how it’s invested – especially since lots of us will get divorced or widowed. She also discusses the particular problems of female friendships (the myths and realities) and dealing with partners (mostly male). She even includes worksheets that suggest ways to think through the changes coming one’s direction. An additional note: there are Transition Network groups in lots of cities, for those who want to find a community of thoughtful women in later life.
So, those are the books I’ve run across so far. Some of the memoirs of retiring overseas are written by women, too, but that information is available in another post.
Anyone else find anything useful? I’ll be happy to learn about them!