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W O M E N A N D M E N : G R O W I N G UP A N D G R O W I N G O L D

Judith K. Brown, Virginia Kerns and Contributors. 1985. In Her Prime: A New View of Middle-Aged Women. South Hadley, Mass., Bergin and Garvey. 217 pp., $27.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Alice Rossi, ed. 1985. Gender and the Life Course. New York, Aldine. 368 pp., $34.95 cloth, S14.95 paper.

INTRODUCTION The combination of the two books reviewed here should definitely establish gender as a salient variable in life course studies. Rossi and contributors examine the role of gender in fields ranging from economics to psycho-biology, and Brown, Kerns and contributors provide a crosscultural perspective on gender roles in middle age. In conjoining two exciting areas of study, gender and the life course, these volumes argue squarely for an interactive analysis of the forces which structure the different experience of men and women over the course of their lives. Life course studies are rapidly expanding beyond the psychological focus which marked the initiation of this area of research. Historical, economic, political, anthropological, and sociological analyses are now brought to bear on questions concerning the developmental experience of the life course. In line with this more holistic analysis, the object of study is no longer restricted to old age, or infancy or adolescence but now includes attention to young adulthood, middle age, and the young old. Although scholars have long been aware that men and women, and boys and girls experience various stages and statuses in life differently, a systematic analysis of the role of gender throughout the life course has been lacking. The Rossi volume explicitly argues for an integration of biological, sociological, and psychological factors in analyzing the life course. This bio-psycho-social model, which has long been advocated by explanations in medical anthropology, is particularly appropriate for life course studies concerning, as they do, the interaction of the biological organism with the social and cultural environment. Focusing on the role of gender in the life course will expand a promising explanatory tool beyond the safe confines of medical/health related inquiry. This is a challenging undertaking because inevitably such a venture runs the risk of reductionistic biological Journal of Cross-CulturalGerontologyI (1986) 437--446. © 1986 by D. ReidelPublishingCompany.

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determinism. Yet Rossi and colleagues appear well aware of the pitfalls of this approach and seek to present sufficiently complex and detailed data so as to forestall facile theorizing and deterministic explanations. Ironically it is Rossi and colleagues, only two of whom are anthropologists, who promote a holism more commonly claimed by anthropology. This holistic approach is less evident among the anthropologists of the Brown and Kerns volume except for Vatuk and Kaufert. This volume concentrates primarily on the cultural influences on maturation -- again an ironic departure from a discipline frequently preoccupied (Marxism excluded) with analyzing apparently static systems.

These volumes underscore the premise of the new biology and of its hoped for integration between biological and social sciences that there is no such thing as an environment apart from an organism or vice versa. Throughout the life course there is a continuous weaving back and forth between biological predisposition and environmental forces and structure. While the articles in the Rossi volume analyze how these forces and structure are conceptually linked with development, those of the Brown and Kerns volume demonstrate how they operate within individual environmental settings. Like an art critic, I have chosen not to superficially review each separate piece, but instead to highlight those that illustrate this theme. A key argument used to substantiate the significance of gender in life course studies is its connection to biology. In advancing this line of reasoning, Rossi, Ehrhardt, and Lancaster are careful to distinguish between biological predisposition and determinism. To understand gender based differences that persist through time and across cultures, Rossi argues we must dispense with the simplistic division between the biological sphere of life and the social. Lancaster reviews recent findings in primatology in her analysis of the origins of sexual dimorphism in parenting behavior. Lancaster introduces her discussion with a caveat that the demands of sexual and parental investment fall differently on each sex and, importantly, the patterns of this division/differentation are highly species specific. In presenting data attesting to a wide range of species specific activities of the sexes (among chimps females wander at puberty and are sexually promiscuous while males remain at home, attached to kin), Lancaster emphasizes the impossibility of generalizing about male and female primate behavior. For instance, recent findings demonstrate that sexual dimorphism in body size is not related to sexual selection but to environmental factors which determine the need for males to defend their range and therefore deter-

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mine the body size required for particular aggressive behavior. Similarly, because of the need for females to lactate, females have a smaller body size to compensate for increased demands of lactation. Thus in seeking antecedents to human behavior we must look to primate species who face similar environmental constraints to those faced by early humans. Lancaster suggests that the sexual dimorphism in body size among humans arose from the extended period in which we feed and care for juveniles. Although the loss of life in infancy varies little from species to species among primates, survival through the juvenile years is highly dependent on environment. Allowing juveniles a prolonged maturational period provides them with more time to learn and hence a superior advantage in exploiting their environment. The sexual division of labor between the parents helped sustain juveniles in this long period. By assuming responsibility for different, though often overlapping, spheres of food production, parents who pooled their food could ensure adequate nutrition for their young in times when food was scarce (no non-human primates pool food). Thus the most significant sexual dimorphism in humans is not the "anatomy of aggressive potential" but the fat storage which allows adult females prolonged lactation. Lancaster suggests that the sexual division of labor which is fundamental to the social cultural constructions of gender may be grounded in species specific sexual dimorphism -- an evolutionary byproduct of adaptation to the culture niche. In the Brown and Kerns volume Lancaster and King propose that the evolutionary logic of care for juveniles might help explain the menopause in women. By ceasing to reproduce early enough, a good proportion of reproducing women can expect to contribute to the nurturance and care of their last child through the juvenile years. They point out that this logic only coheres in societies with a high mortality rate, which was the case over most of human history but is not so today. In her analysis of the psycho-biology of gender, Ehrhardt presents additional data suggesting a biological predisposition to gender behavior. She argues that a static model positing the reaction of gender or hormonal traits to environmental stimuli is too simplistic. Instead she suggests viewing development/behavior as the process by which genetic and hormonal traits are maintained in transactions between organism and environment. This approach -- which she calls a transactional model -does not assume etiological directionality. To illustrate this argument she uses the case of intersexuality -- those people born with nonspecific genitalia. When people who suffer from this problem are assigned a gender at birth and raised in that gender, they form successful gender identities. In response to Puerto Rican data in which "penis at twelve" girls switched their gender identity to male at the onset of puberty, she argues that far from illustrating the strength of

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hormonal predisposition, it more likely shows the positive cultural value attached to men as opposed to women in Puerto Rico. The variation in hormonal levels throughout the life course appears to have an effect on behavior; however, the direction of that effect is not clear, and in fact may vary over the life course according to specific situations. Grove's analysis of age and deviance puts the case for a biological basis of gender behavior more strongly. In an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between age and deviance, he argues that while psychological and social factors help explain why late adolescence and early adulthood are times of self absorption and dissatisfaction and that these states in turn diminish with maturation and increased social integration, these factors cannot explain the rapidity of the decrease in deviant behavior. Grove points out that levels of physical strength, energy, drive, and adrenalin high help explain the rapid decrease of deviant behavior with age. Although extensively documented, this theory needs to be tested on cross-cultural data. Rossi seeks to integrate a biological perspective into her discussion of gender and parenting behavior. She focuses on the problems men encounter in early child care (0--18 months) and the apparent cross-cultural pattern of male absence in early child care. Arguing that socialization alone cannot explain this phenomenon, she examines aspects of parenting styles which appear as gender differences in other contexts and concludes that parenting styles are built on underlying features rooted in basic sexual dimorphism. Rossi cites gender differences in sensory modalities such as females' greater sensitivity to touch, sound, and odor and their finer motor coordination and finger dexterity. These abilities, she suggests, may account for women's greater ease in caring for the fragile, nonverbal infant due to their facility in reading the infant's facial expressions, smoothness of body motions, and greater adeptness at handling and soothing the infant with high pitched soft rhythmic sounds. She emphasizes that these are only tendencies, albeit with strong evidence suggesting a hormonal base, and that socialization can accentuate or suppress them. Drawing on theories of the new dialectical perspective in biology (Lewontin 1983), Rossi calls for an expanded analysis, a "biosocial" analysis, of behavior through the life course -- one that integrates biological predispositions with the effect of socialization and culture. Speaking to the authors in the anthropological volume, Guttman echoes Rossi's call for integrating biological factors into the understanding of maturation and behavior. Guttman describes what he calls the "eruption phase" in female development which coincides with the menopause. This phase, characterized by an increase in aggression and in leadership, is as much the result of expanded social opportunities resulting from the cessation of women's reproductive capacity as of women's proactive stance in creating these opportunities, he argues. While culture determines

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or "sculpts" the conventional expressions and valued outcomes of the post-menopausal developmental stages, it must work with the results of basic psychological changes associated with the end of child rearing. This interactive view, Guttman asserts, helps account for the fact that postmenopausal women may occupy either a negative or positive status -matriarch or witch, but whatever the role, it is one of power. The interactive bio-psycho-social model sketched out in various ways in these articles is suggested as a means of understanding the basis of gender dichotomies. The next set of articles documents how gender-based differences are shaped by social and cultural forces and how these differences in turn help shape the life course.

II That culture and society use the basic raw material of sexual dimorphism to create and elaborate gender identities is clear, although the extent to which the underlying biological pre-disposition structures the expression of gender is debatable. To understand how social and cultural forces accomplish this structuring we must approach the topic from the perspective of various disciplines and cross-culturally. Socially constructed gender distinctions are readily apparent in the area of economics. Sharp gender based distinctions in wages, working conditions, and opportunities for advancement appear to be inherent aspects of economic systems. However, this may not always have been the case or may not have been so rigidly the case as Louise Tilly demonstrates in a historical analysis of gender roles in the industrialization of France. In her examination of the garment industry, Tilly argues that gender became an easy way to create a division of labor which served to differentiate labor supply needs. Heavy industry required a two tiered occupational division -- a skilled group and a permanently unskilled group. The latter group, which had no chance for advancement, could be absorbed into the workforce when production demands were high and dismissed during slack times. This division also served the interests of heavy industry in helping to maintain a skilled workforce in place. Thus the "housewife" role emerged at this time as women's response to the growing male domination of skilled work. Increased fertility and the need to tend to male workers required women in the home. The household division of labor helped shape the occupational division and was in turn shaped by it. In France the move toward heavy industry rigidified gender distinctions in work experience. Gender differences have become inherent aspects of contemporary business organization, argue Baron and Bielby. Their research on organizations demonstrates that their very structure creates gender inequalities that discrimination, except in cases where women comprise a majority -

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of the employees, is systematic. In particular, they point to the finding that definitions of "relevant experience" in regard to promotions are more fluid for men than for women. They argue that to understand this systematic discrimination one must focus on the relationship between organizational arrangements and career outcomes. Gender based economic discrimination is reflected in and substantiated by ideology. Cancian's analysis of gender politics demonstrates how the feminization of love creates structural barriers to the advancement of women in the professional world and emotional barriers to the fulfillment of men in the domestic sphere. She argues that because love or caring in general have been defined as the feminine domestic sphere, the qualities associated with men, independence, amoralism, competiveness, tend to dominate the public sphere. This distinction permits the objectification of relationships in public life and fosters the absence of emotional and moral issues there. Conversely, in the domestic sphere men's more instrumental ways of expressing love and emotion are not categorized as love, and men are defined as insensitive, uncaring, and sometimes crude. In the resulting separation of spheres both genders suffer. Social, cultural, economic, and biological forces interact to create gender identities. These identities in turn contribute to the structure and experience of people's lives. Because numerous factors besides biology contribute to the structuring of gender identities, cross-cultural data are particularly important in assessing the role of gender both as it is experienced by individuals and as a factor contributing to the understanding of other social and cultural phenomena. For example, economic forces are mediated by cultural patterns in LeVine and LeVine's study comparing age, gender, and demographic transitions in a Gusii village in Kenya with a Mexican village. They show how cultural and social forces mediate the impact of the economic changes entailed in urbanization on gender roles. Because of these various forces, the experience of gender and age roles in two male dominated cultures is strikingly different. Gusii women experience increased autonomy and freedom of movement as a result of socio-demographic change, while rural Mexican women in Queretaro remain secluded. When it comes to caring for the elderly, however, the Mexicans prove better able to adapt to modern changes and still maintain their traditional commitment to care for elders, while the Gusii are markedly less successful and experience the emergence of intergenerational hostility and neglect of the elderly. Although not dealing directly with gender issues, Mead Cain constructs a powerful argument for the importance of cross-cultural considerations in his critique of conventional fertility theory. Cain demonstrates the flaws of Lindent's cost-accounting theory which concludes that children are a net economic cost. He shows that Lindent's dismissal of children as security in old age is an imputation of the absence of those concerns in Anglo-

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American culture. An examination of English poor relief laws on the history of contracts for support in old age shows that the community and extra-familial patterns were used to obtain security and care in old age. This pattern does not explain non-Western practices of childbearing however. There children are seen as the major security asset and will continue to be until adequate public means of old age assistance are in place. Haines also uses cross-cultural data effectively in explaining different patterns of savings over the family cycle between Europe and the United States. Hogan's argument for introducing gender and temporal considerations into the demography of life span transitions unfortunately lacks a crosscultural perspective. Hogan effectively criticizes the use of individual transitions to infer a family demographic cycle and argues that such approaches create an inaccurate impression of homogeneity and obscure temporal and structural influences over a life time. He argues for a life course perspective on individual behavior as a theory coordinating demographic transitions rather than the idea of a family cycle. The family cycle consists of transitions of individual men and women and involves marriage and childbearing. The family cycle or stage does not really exist. This argument, however, does not give due consideration to cultures where the concept of the self as autonomous agent is subsumed in the face of family priorities and where decisions concerning demographic transitions are only posed in a familial idiom. This flaw, however, does not diminish his central contention that one must break down the large vague concepts, i.e., status, stage, cycle, used in demographic analyses, if one is to obtain an accurate understanding which is sensitive to vagaries in temporal conditions and can differentiate the reasons motivating changes in individual status. Although the concept of family may obfuscate the dynamics involved in status change, one should not discount it as a powerful determinative agent in individual decision making, nor seek to understand life cycle transitions solely from the perspective of the individual. Rossi and contributors provide numerous analyses of the factors which shape gender identity and of the ways in which that identity helps structure the life course. From a cross-cultural perspective Brown and Kerns and contributors examine how the process of maturation affects gender identity. A cross-cultural approach is particularly important here because it helps to differentiate those changes which result from social and cultural forces and those which can be attributed to the biological process of aging. Of particular concern in this volume is the role of the menopause in shaping the lives of middle-aged women. With the exception of the Garipena of Belize where loss of reproductive capacity marks a clear shift in power to the postmenopausal women who assume social control of younger women's sexuality, the cases presented here illustrate that bio-

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logical aging does not exercise determinative power in the experiential and status changes associated with middle-aged women. Brown proposes a three-fold explanation to account for this change among preindustrial women. They are often freed from the restrictions placed on younger women. They may exert authority over younger kin, and they may be eligible for special status. Most authors report that social and cultural factors account for a change in gender identity with maturation. A possible exception is the !Kung where older/younger distinctions help structure society. When a woman attains elder status, she automatically achieves a certain power and respect. Yet this status of older is derived from dyadic relationships which are relative. The more substantial base for !Kung women's increased power comes from their role in kin networks and as marriage brokers. Among the Bakgalagadi of Botswana, Kaliai of New Guinea, and the Mayotte of the Comoro Islands, women's status and access to freedom in middle age are largely the result of their changing position in family dynamics. Among the Bakgalagadi a woman's position becomes stronger as her children mature, securing her claim over her affines' resources and providing her with the freedom to sell her own produce and immerse herself in livestock exchange. As a woman matures among the Kaliai and assumes more responsibility for her younger kin and her declining parents, her social status and respect rise. Among the Mayotte respect and autonomy are aUoted to women gradually as they accumulate responsibilities and demonstrate social competence. In these cases it is not so much the freedom from childbearing as the presence of adult children which changes women's lives. Even among the women of northern Sudan where cessation of fertility marks the entry into middle age and access to greater privileges and autonomy, the situation is unclear because the end of fertility can be social, i.e., divorce or widowhood, as well as biological. Although in many of the cases under discussion, the social and cultural processes involved in maturation strongly affect gender identity rather than the opposite being the case, in more complex societies, such as China or India, and in Western societies, like Canada, gender identity continues to structure women's experience well past menopause. In her analysis of middle-aged women in India, Vatuk illustrates how ethno-medical themes and cultural views of human nature construct the gender identity of middle-aged women. These women experience a strange paradox. On the one hand they are thought to become "cooler" hence less sexual with the cessation of their monthly flow at menopause. On the other their increase in personal social power and the decrease of male control over their lives gives weight to the cultural view of female nature as powerful and dangerous. Because sexuality is the only modality for

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expressing fears about women's power, ironically these women remain the objects of sexual controls. In an analysis of menopausal women in Manitoba, Kaufert suggests that the internal logic of Western medicine has helped create a feminine gender identity marked by the pathological event of menopause. She argues that when a treatment has been discovered, i.e., hormone therapy, it logically follows that there must be a disease to be treated. In preindustrial societies gender identity diminishes as one matures. It is replaced by the identity of a responsible, empowered adult. Loss of reproductive power, while it releases women from the restrictions on their sexuality, appears to act more as a factor enabling women to enjoy and make use of their increased power and freedom rather than the cause of the change. In more complex societies where gender dichotomies are built into the cultural infrastructure, women retain their gender identities and the restriants, although modified, continue to distinguish and constrain their lives even after the menopause.

CONCLUSION

The focus on gender in the life course is important not only for the perspective it brings to bear on developmental issues, but also for the integral model it explicitly suggests. Studies on aging, especially those on health and aging, have long recognized the importance of an interdisciplinary or holistic approach. In part this is so because the distinctions between normal aging and the progression of chronic illness and the effects these two processes have on one's life tend to blur with increasing age. Gender, mixing as it does cultural, social, and biological aspects, is an entirely appropriate and long overdue focus of study for aging researchers. While introducing new subject matter, it remains consistent with the overall holistic approach of aging studies. Appropriately these authors have not limited their focus to old age. Instead they take the whole life course as their object of study. This will benefit the understanding of age for as many authors implicitly show and Hess explicitly demonstrates a likelihood of gender inequalities can dramatically structure the experience of old age. In extending the biopsycho-social model implicit in the concept of gender to the whole life course, these authors tread on more controversial ground. They do so, however, judiciously drawing on the concepts of the new biology and cross-cultural data to help substantiate their theories. The evidence strongly suggests that gender as it is biologically, socially, and culturally constituted plays a significant role in the individual's experience of the life course. In advocating the saliency of this variable, however, one must

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consider the provocative findings of Ryff who has repeatedly demonstrated that value differences disappear with age. This finding needs to be examined cross-culturally. Perhaps inequities in income and status which have been produced by systematic gender inequality level out when individuals confront the inevitability of their advancing age and ultimate death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, J. and V. Kerns 1985 In Her Prime: A New View of Middle-Age Women. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey. Lewontin, R. 1983 The Corpse in the Elevator. New York Review of Books 29: 34--37. Rossi, A. 1985 Genderand the Life Course. New York. Aldine. School of Social Work University of Michigan

ANDREA P. SANKAR

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