In reality, though, we weren't nearly as independent as we thought we were. Most of those institutions were staffed by women paid through the Comprehensive Education and Training Act, passed during the presidency of Richard Nixon and continued under Jimmy Carter. When Ronald Reagan and his new brand of Republicans took over in Washington in 1981, those salaries disappeared almost overnight and with them, most of our community's infrastructure.
So, my answer to the problem of aging then was to endorse an ethic of volunteerism rooted in specific communities, like our lesbian one. "Feminists," I wrote, "are rightly uneasy about asking each other to perform any more unpaid work in our lives than we, and centuries of women before us, have already done."
Nevertheless, I argued, "the truth is" no one is going to pay us to take care of each other" and we can't afford to believe the capitalist and patriarchal lie that we are cheating each other when we ask each other even strangers to do that work for free."
In retrospect, it seems clear to me that I was then inching my way toward an ethos that could free the project of caring for each other from the claws of capitalism. But I was na??ve about the amount of time and energy people would be able to spare outside of their day's labor especially as real wages were about to stagnate and then begin to fall. I didn't imagine a time to come when people without much money would need to work two or even three jobs just to get by. I didn't think, as I do now, that it would be better, instead, to focus on raising the status and pay of caring work.
Even back in the 1980s, however, I recognized the limits of volunteerism. I knew that I'd been lucky during my period of temporary disability. I was an outgoing person with quite a sizeable set of acquaintances. With a reasonable levity of spirit and a dependable store of gossip, I knew then that I could make taking care of me relatively pleasant.
But I also knew that no one's survival should depend on having a winning personality. Instead, as I wrote at the time, we needed to "develop simple, dependable structures to serve those among us who require physical care."
How hard could that be, after all? "A file of volunteers and a rotating coordinator could do the job," I wrote then. Here, too, I was more sadly prescient than I even realized. In recent years, the market for aging care has indeed found a way to commercialize volunteer efforts like the ones I imagined in the form of Internet-based options like Lotsa Helping Hands and Mealtrain.
On Our Own?
My point back then was that, as lesbians, we were on our own. No one was going to run the Old Dykes' Home if we didn't do it ourselves. (Perhaps I should have foreseen then that someone might indeed run it, if they could make money doing so!) I figured we had 10 to 15 years to develop "formal networks of support to deal with illness and disability," because eventually each of us would need such structures. We lesbians would have to look out for ourselves because we lived then "on the edges of society." I didn't realize at the time that we shared those edges with so many other people.
Building volunteer structures was, I thought, just the short-term goal. The longer-term project was something much more ambitious: to build "a world in which the work of caring for each other happens not at the fringes of society, but at its heart."
I still believe in that larger goal, and not because it's a lovely fantasy, but because it's a response to a fundamental reality of life. It's a fact that human beings, like all beings, live in a web of interdependence. Every one of us is implicated, folded into that web, simultaneously depending on others, while others depend on us. The self-reliant individual is an illusion, which means that constructing societies based on that chimera is a doomed enterprise, bound in the end (just as we've seen) to fail so many on whom though we may not know it we depend.
Aging really is a roulette game. My partner and I are gambling that good genes, regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and sufficient mental stimulation will keep our limbs, organs, and minds hale enough to, as they say, "age in place." We plan to stay in the house we've occupied for more than 30 years, in the neighborhood where we can walk to the library and the grocery store. We don't plan to get Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or congestive heart failure or (like yet another friend) take a life-changing fall down a flight of stairs. Having somehow forgotten to have children (and never wanting to burden even our hypothetical offspring in any case), we're planning to take care of ourselves.
Talk about hubris!
The truth is that we have much less control than we'd like to believe over how we'll age. Tomorrow, one of us could lose the disability lottery, and like so many of our friends, we could be staring at the reality of growing old in a society that treats preparation for and survival during old age as a matter of individual personal responsibility.
It's time to take a more realistic approach to the fact that all of us lucky enough to live that long will become ever more dependent as we age. It's time to face reality and place caring for one another at the heart of the human endeavor.
Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon
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