ABSTRACT
Age is usually seen as a natural or biological status, yet historical and cross-cultural research shows that the way in which different societies divide up the life course is highly variable, as is the behaviour associated with different age groups. Feminists have argued that age status is of particular importance to women, who are more often defined in terms of ascribed biological characteristics than social achievements, and whose identity is frequently defined according to their social role as someone’s wife or mother. Feminists have also argued that men and women are ascribed, and experience, the life course differently so that because women are defined largely in terms of reproductive capacity and sexual attractiveness, women are thought to be ‘old’ at a relatively younger age than men (Friedan, 1993). Thus age-status transitions serve to define different kinds of femininity and what it means to be a woman, even though the categories ascribed may not correspond to the lived experience of many women. In this chapter we look at various aspects of the life course including childhood, youth, adulthood (often defined for women largely in terms of marriage and motherhood), middle age and old age, and consider how these are shaped by various aspects of identity, including sexual difference (the difference between men and women – see Chapter 2). There is now a burgeoning sociological literature focusing on each of these aspects of the life course, addressing issues such as age stratification, variations in the meaning and experience of childhood, ageing and particularly the implications of an ageing population in many parts of the world.
