ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that gerontology scholars and activists need to move beyond the feminization of poverty argument to acknowledge how complexly the factors of race and gender are interlocked with the variable of social class in the United States. Increasing popular and scholarly attention is devoted to the feminization of poverty argument, which is focused both on women in general and on older women in particular. The writings of selected black political economists have detailed the central way in which racial oppression informs the development of the US political economy. Racial-ethnic women have been overlooked in most writing on the feminization of poverty in later life. The tendency has been, however, to take the “add-and-stir” approach, which leads to race-blind theoretical formulations. The important fact that racial-ethnic men are systematically rendered economically marginal is also ignored in the literature on the feminization of poverty in later life.
