The Women in the Tower by Cynthia Rich.
From Look Me In the Eye: Old Women,
Aging, and Ageism, Expanded Edition, by Barbara Macdonald with Cynthia
Rich, 76-87. Minneapolis: Spinsters Ink, 1983.
In April 1982 a group of Black women demand a
meeting with the Boston Housing Authority. They are women between the ages of
sixty-six and eighty-one. Their lives, in the “housing tower for the elderly”
where they live, are in continual danger. “You’re afraid to get on the elevator
and you’re afraid to get off,” says Mamie Buggs, sixty-six. Odella Keenan,
sixty-nine, is wakened in the nights by men pounding on her apartment door.
Katherine Jefferson, eighty-one, put three locks on her door, but “I’ve come
back to my apartment and found a group of men there eating my food.”
The menace, the violence, is nothing new, they
say. They have reported it before, but lately it has become intolerable. There
are pictures in the Boston Globe of
three women, and their eyes flash with anger. “We pay our rent, and we’re
entitled to some security,” says Mamie Buggs. Two weeks ago, a man attacked and
beat up Ida Burres, seventy-five in the recreation room. Her head wound
required forty stitches.
The headline in the Boston Globe reads, “Elderly in Roxbury building plead with BHA for
24-hour security.” Ida Burres is described in the story as “a feisty,
sparrow-like woman with well-cared-for gray hair, café au lait skin and a
lilting voice.” The byline reads “Viola Osgood.”
I feel that in my lifetime I will not get to the
bottom of this story, of these pictures, of these words.
Feisty,
sparrow-like, well-cared-for gray hair, café au lait skin, lilting voice.
Feisty.
Touchy, excitable, quarrelsome, like a mongrel dog. “Feisty” is the standard
word in newspaper speak for an old person who says what she thinks. As you grow
older, the younger person sees your strongly felt convictions or your protest
against an intolerable life situation as an amusing overreaction, a defect of
personality common to mongrels and old people. To insist that you are a person
deepens the stigma of your Otherness. Your protest is not a specific,
legitimate response to an outside threat. It is a generic and arbitrary
quirkiness, coming from the queer stuff within yourself – sometimes annoying,
sometimes quaint or even endearing, never, never to be responded to seriously.
Sparrow-like.
Imagine for a moment that you have confronted those who have power over you,
demanding that they do something to end the terror of your days and nights. You
and other women have organized a meeting of protest. You have called the press.
Imagine then opening the newspaper and seeing yourself described as “sparrow-like.”
That is no simple indignity, no mere humiliation. The fact that you can be
described as “sparrow-like” is in part why you live in the tower, why nobody
attends. Because you do not look like a natural person – that is, a young or
middle-aged person – you look like a sparrow. The real sparrow is, after all, a
sparrow and is seen merely as homely, but a woman who is sparrow-like is
unnatural and ugly.
A white widow tells of smiling at a group of small
children on the street and one of them saying, “You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.” It is
what society has imprinted on that child’s mind: to be old, and to look old, is
to be ugly, so ugly that you do not deserved to live. Crow’s feet. Liver spots.
The media: “I’m going to wash that gray right out of my hair and wash in my ‘natural’
color.” “Get rid of those unsightly spots.” And if you were raised to believe
that old is ugly, you play strange tricks in your own head. An upper middle
class white woman, a woman with courage and zest for life, writes in 1982: “When
we love we do not see our mates as the young view us – wrinkled, misshapen,
unattractive.” But then she continues: “We still retain, somewhere, the memory of one another as beautiful and lustful,
and we see each other at our once-best.”
Old is ugly and unnatural in a society where
power is male-defined, powerlessness disgraceful. A society where natural death
is dreaded and concealed, while unnatural death is courted and glorified. But
old is ugliest for women. A white woman newscaster in her forties remarks to a
sportscaster who is celebrating his sixtieth birthday: “What women really
resent about men is that you get more
attractive as you get older.” A man is as old as he feels, a woman as old as
she looks. You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.
Aging has a special stigma for women. When our
wombs are no longer ready for procreation, when our vaginas are no longer
tight, when we no longer serve men, we are unnatural and ugly. In medical
school terminology, we are a “crock”; in the language of the street, we are an “old
bag.” The Sanskrit word for widow is “empty.” But there is more than that.
Sparrow-like.
Writing for white men, did Viola Osgood unconsciously wish to say, “Ida Burres
is not a selfish vulture – even though she is doing what old women are not
meant to do, speak for their own interests (not their children’s or
grandchildren’s but their own). She is an innocent sparrow, frail and helpless”?
Or had she herself so incorporated that demeaning image – sparrow-like – that she
saw Ida Burres through those eyes? Or both?
Well-care-for
gray hair. Is that about race? About class? An attempt to dispel the notion
that a poor Black woman is unkempt? Would Viola Osgood describe a Black welfare
mother in terms of her “well-groomed afro”? Or does she mean to dispel the
notion that this old woman is
unkempt? Only the young can afford to be careless about their hair, their
dress. The care that the old woman takes with her appearance is not merely to
reduce the stigma of ugly; often it is her most essential tactic for survival:
it signals to the person who sees her, I am old, but I am not senile. My hair
is gray but is well-cared-for. Because to be old is to be guilty of craziness
and incapacity unless proven otherwise.
Café au
lait skin. Race? Class? Age? Not dark black like Katherine Jefferson, but
blackness mitigated. White male reader, who has the power to save these women’s
lives, you can’t dismiss her as Black, poor, old. She is almost all right, she
is almost white. She is Black and old, but she has something in common with the
young mulatto woman whose skin you have sometimes found exotic and sensual. And
she is not the power of darkness that you fear in the Terrible Mother.
A lilting
voice. I try to read these words in a lilting voice: “I almost got my eyes
knocked out. A crazy guy just came in here and knocked me down and hit me in
the face. We need security.” These words do not lilt to me. A woman is making a
demand, speaking truth to power, affirming her right to live – Black, Old,
Poor, Woman. Is the “lilting” to say, “Although her words are strong, although
she is bonding with other women, she is not tough and dykey”? Is the “lilting”
to say, “Although she is sparrow-like, although she is gray-haired, something
of the mannerisms you find pleasing in young women remain, so do not ignore her
as you routinely do old women”?
I write this not knowing whether Viola Osgood is
Black or white. I know that she is a woman. And I know that it matters whether
she is Black or white, that this is not a case of one size fits all. But I know
that Black or white, any woman who writes news articles for the Globe, or for any mainstream newspaper,
is mandated to write to white men, in white men’s language. That any messages
to women, Black or white, which challenge white men’s thinking can at best only
be conveyed covertly, subversively. That any messages of appeal to those white
men must be phrased in ways that do not seriously threaten their assumptions,
and that such language itself perpetuates the power men have assumed for
themselves. And I know that Black or white, ageism blows in the wind around us
and certainly through the offices of the Globe.
I write this guessing that Viola Osgood is Black, because she has known that
the story is important, cared enough to make sure the photographer was there. I
write this guessing that the story might never have found its way into the Globe unless through a Black reporter.
Later, I find out that she is Black, thirty-five.
And I think that Viola Osgood has her own story
to tell. I think that I, white Jewish woman of fifty, still sorting through to
find the realities beneath the lies, denials and ignorance of my lifetime of
segregations, cannot write this essay. I think that even when we try to cross
the lines meant to separate us as women – old and young, Black and white, Jew
and non-Jew – the seeds of division cling to our clothes. And I think this must
be true of what I write now. But we cannot stop crossing, we cannot stop
writing.
Elderly in
Roxbury building plead with BHA for 24-hour security. Doubtless, Viola
Osgood did not write the headline. Ten words and it contains two lies – lies that
routinely obscure the struggles of old women. Elderly. This is not a story of elderly people, it is the story of
old women, Black old women. Three-fifths of the “elderly” are women; almost all
of the residents of this tower are women. An old woman has half the income of
an old man. One out of three widows – women without the immediate presence of a
man – lives below the official poverty line, and most women live one third of
their lives as widows. In the United States, as throughout the world, old women
are the poorest of the poor. Seven percent of old white men live in poverty,
forty-seven percent of old Black women. “The Elderly,” “Old People,” “Senior
Citizens,” are inclusive words that blot out these differences. Old women are
twice unseen – unseen because they are old, unseen because they are women.
Black old women are thrice unseen. “Elderly” conveniently clouds the realities
of power and economics. It clouds the convergence of racial hatred and fear,
hatred and fear of the aged, hatred and fear of women. It also clouds the power
of female bonding, of these women in the tower who are acting together as women
for women.
Plead.
Nothing that these women say, nothing in their photographs, suggests pleading.
These women are angry, and if one can demand where there is no leverage – and one
can – they are demanding. They are demanding their lives, to which they know
full well they have a right. Their anger is clear, direct, unwavering. “Pleading”
erases the force of their confrontation. It allows us to continue to think of
old women, if we think of them at all, as meek, cowed, to be pitied,
occasionally as amusingly “feisty,” but not as outraged, outrageous women. Old
women’s anger is denied, tamed, drugged, infantilized, trivialized. And yet
anger in an old woman is a remarkable act of bravery, so dangerous is her
world, and her status in that world so marginal, precarious. Her anger is an
act of insubordination – the refusal to accept her subordinate status even when
everyone, children, men, younger women, and often other older women, assumes
it. “We pay our rent, and we’re entitled to some security.” When will a
headline tell the truth: Old, Black, poor women confront the BHA demanding
24-hour security?
The
housing tower for the elderly. A tall building filled with women,
courageous women who bond together, but who with every year are less able to
defend themselves against male attack. A tower of women under siege. A ghetto
within a ghetto. The white male solution to the “problem of the elderly” is to
isolate the Terrible Mother.
That tower, however, is not simply
architectural. Nor is the male violence an “inner city problem.” Ten days
later, in nearby Stoughton, a man will have beaten to death an eighty-seven
year-old white woman, leaving her body with “multiple blunt injuries around her
face, head and shoulders.” This woman was not living in a housing tower for the
elderly. She lived in the house where she was born. “She was very, very spry.
She worked in her garden a lot and she drove her own car,” reports a neighbor.
She had the advantages of race, class, a small home of her own, a car of her
own. Nor did she turn away from a world that rejects and demeans old women (“spry,”
like “feisty,” is a segregating and demeaning word). At the time of her murder,
she was involved in planning the anniversary celebration at her parish.
Yet she was dead for a week before anyone found
her body. Why? The reporter finds it perfectly natural. “She outlived her contemporaries and her circle of
immediate relatives.” Of course. How natural. Unless we remember de Beauvoir: “One
of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation
since, after all, one cannot revolt against nature.” How natural that young
people, or even the middle aged, should have nothing in common with an old
woman. Unthinkable that she should have formed friendships with anyone who was
not in her or his seventies or eighties or nineties. It is natural that without
family, who must tolerate the stigma, or other old people who share the stigma,
she would have no close ties. And it is natural that no woman, old or young,
anywhere in the world, should be safe from male violence.
But it is not natural. It is not natural, and it
is dangerous, for younger women to be divided as by a taboo from old women – to
live in our own shaky towers of youth. It is intended, but it is not natural
that we be ashamed of, dissociated from, our future selves, sharing men’s
loathing for the women we are daily becoming. It is intended, but it is not
natural that we be kept ignorant of our deep bonds with old women. And it is
not natural that today, as we reconnect with each other, old women are still an
absence for younger women.
As a child – a golden-haired Jew in the
segregated South while the barbed wire was going up around the Warsaw ghetto –
I was given fairy tales to read. Among them, the story of Rapunzel, the
golden-haired young woman confined to a tower by an old witch until she was
rescued by a young prince. My hair darkened and now it is light again with
gray. I know that I have been made to live unnaturally in a tower for most of
my fifty years. My knowledge of my history – as a woman, as a lesbian, as a
light-skinned woman in a world of dark-skinned women, as the Other in a
Jew-hating world – shut out. My knowledge of my future – as an old woman – shut
out.
Today I reject those mythic opposites:
young/old, light/darkness, life/death, other/self, Rapunzel/Witch, Good
Mother/Terrible Mother. As I listen to the voices of the old women of Warren
Tower, and of my aging self, I know that I have always been aging, always been
dying. Those voices speak of wholeness: To nurture Self = to defy those who
endanger that Self. To declare the I of my unique existence = to assert the We
of my connections with other women. To accept the absolute rightness of my
natural death = to defend the absolute value of my life. To affirm the mystery
of my daily dying and the mystery of my daily living = to challenge men’s
violent cheapening of both.
But I cannot hear these voices clearly if I am
still afraid of the old witch, the Terrible Mother in myself, or if I am
estranged from the real old women of this world. For it is not the wicked witch
who keeps Rapunzel in her tower. It is the prince and our divided selves.
Note: There was no follow-up article on the
women of the tower, but Ida Burres, Mamie Buggs, Mary Gordon, Katherine
Jefferson, Odella Keenan, and the other women of Warren Tower, did win what
they consider to be adequate security – “of course, it is never all that you
could wish,” said Vallie Burton, President of the Warrant Tower Association.
They won because of their own bonding, their demands, and also, no doubt,
because of Viola Osgood.
[1983]
Biography
taken from www.oldwomensproject.org
Cynthia Rich is an activist who has been
exposing ageism against old women for more than 25 years. She co-authored the
trailblazing essay collection Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism
with her partner Barbara Macdonald in 1983; a second, expanded edition was
issued in 1991. Another expansion of that edition was published in 2001 after
Macdonald’s death at age 86, so that the essays span more than twenty years of
analysis and activism, addressing society’s pervasive ageism from a feminist
perspective. Rich lives in San Diego, where she is a co-founder of The Old
Women’s Project. According to the project website, the group “works to make
visible how old women are directly affected by all issues of social justice,
and to combat the ageist attitudes that ignore, trivialize or demean us. We are
a group of old women who use actions of various kinds to achieve this goal. We
welcome women of all ages who wish to join in our actions” (The Old Women’s
Project, 2005).
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