There’s No Expiration Date on Women’s Health
“More than 30 years ago, I suggested in The Gerontologist that Americans who were old, poor, and female were in ‘triple jeopardy’ of being pushed into the shadows of our society, where the quality of their lives would be at grave risk. That was 1985. Four years later, I suggested in the Women’s Studies Quarterly that poverty among older people in America was becoming a ‘women’s issue.’ At the time, women made up 72.4 percent of the elderly poor, even though they accounted for only 58.7 percent of all elders. Approximately 15 percent of women aged 65 and older lived below the poverty threshold, compared with only 8.5 percent of older men. That poverty rate rose to 19.7 percent for women aged 85 and older. As dramatic as those poverty statistics were, they left out three important factors that, 30 years later, hold relevance as we celebrate National Women’s Health Week.”