ABSTRACT
A goal of the feminist political economy of aging is to understand how the dominant social institutions render older women vulnerable and dependent throughout their life course (Estes, 1982, 1991 a, 2004; Estes, Biggs, & Phillipson, 2003). An important consideration is how state policies define, individualize, and commodify the problems of aging (e.g., as individual problems and personal private responsibility for the purchase of services sold for profit) (Estes, 1979), and how these processes are ideologically and practically consistent with state roles and activities that advance the interests of capital accumulation and the legitimation of patriarchal and capitalist social relations.
