With few exceptions, some of which are noted below, retirement studies that include women do so only in relation to their reactions as wives toward the retirement of their husbands (Heyman and Jeffers, 1968).
Career Development
Cumming's (1974) position, too, is that women's basic difference from men lies in having experienced a much "smoother" life cycle:
Disengagement from central life roles is basically different for women than for men, perhaps because women's roles are essentially unchanged from girlhood to death. In the course of their lives, women are asked to give up only pieces of their core socioemotional roles or to change their details. Their transitions are therefore easier...
Others have reported on informative studies concerning work roles of women. Lopata and Steinhart (1971) studied work experiences of metropolitan Chicago widows aged 50 or over and succeeded in demonstrating the marginality of older women vis-a-vis the occupational structure of the society. Most typical of the respondents was an "inflexible work history involving routinized and directed jobs handled passively." The average subject had a very uneven employment history and had dropped out of the labor market several times during her life, withdrawing to the home to perform the roles of wife, mother, and housewife. In general, however, the work histories of these older women reflect frequent engagement in the work world. Most of those respondents who had continuous or almost continuous work histories shared several characteristics: they spent relatively few years in marriage, entering late in life and/or being widowed or separated; they had no children or only one offspring; and they moved around frequently. The jobs they took were the ones available conveniently at the time they were looking, with no program of career-type succession. Part-time work was common after retirement.
Despite the heavy use of the working world during their life cycle, the older women interviewed in Chicago did not place much value on the role of worker in the list of social roles most often performed by women. The role of worker is not assigned major importance by widows, women who never married, and those who never performed the role of mother. The American culture, locating women in the home as wives and mothers, has had so strong an influence on housewives (Lopata, 1971a) and widows (Lopata, 1972) as to prevent the roles of worker, citizen, and even friend from reaching the top three positions in a six-rank scale of importance.
While Williams and Wirths (1965) do not discuss the differential career development of men and women, they do consider differences between their career patterns. Although they give attention to home-making as the primary career role of women, they fail to specify career patterns in terms of an acceptance of work as a primary or secondary mode of validating identity. This distinction seems crucial, because many who work are unable and/or unwilling to work full-time consistently throughout the year.
Role Continuity and Discontinuity
The writer would agree with Lowenthal and Berkman (1967) that "adjustment to the later stages of life may be more gradual for women than for men," and with McEwan and Sheldon (1969) that "women tend to be more satisfied at retirement than men," but would not attribute the positive adjustment to the static nature of women's roles from girlhood to grave. Rather, it appears that the impact of socialization on American women creates impermanence in the form of role loss and repeated adjustment to change in the life situation-and that this socialization process facilitates adjustment of women to old age.
Our society defines "permanence" as having a long-lasting, viable social and economic role. While it appears that this "permanence" is relatively accessible to at least middle-majority males, for women it is tenuous and thwarted. Women of all educational, geographical, and economic positions have been subjected to changes produced by our modern industrial society. Increasing mobility, for example, has changed the complexion of American society in the diminution of the extended family structure in its varied form as well as its demands upon individuals. The striving of women for permanence is dead-ended numerous times during the life cycle, resulting in role discontinuity or change in life situation. This striving for permanence is periodically redirected until old age when societal roles for the aged, both male and female, are further withdrawn.
Failure to attain permanence is exhibited throughout the entire social life cycle of women. Role losses impede attaining permanence before facing the impermanence impact of old age. Symbols of permanence that are thwarted, resulting in role discontinuity and changes in life situation, are numerous.
As stated by Steinmann (1963), the feminine role is "not only ill-defined, but full of contradictions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. Education, for instance, prepared women for membership in the labor force; yet many parents still raise their daughters with a view of marriage rather than furthering their personal development through employment. The women who are processed through the educational system and then marry experience a strong role discontinuity, as described by Decter (1971). For the woman who disbands her work role to give priority to roles of mother and housewife, there is discontinuity when the children leave home or become increasingly independent of home and parents. Another role discontinuity to consider is the disrupted marital status such as widowhood. In 1968, the wife was the surviving spouse in 70 per cent of all marriages broken by the death of one partner (Lopata, 1971b). Although men also suffer the loss of husband role through widowhood, the loss is experienced by fewer numbers of men and is not coupled with financial loss due to widowhood.
Thus, role discontinuity and change in life situation are more likely suffered by women than men. Adjustments to the discontinuities are imposed on women by society through the socialization process.
It is suggested here, then, that precisely because women are subjected to repeated role discontinuities and changes in life situation to which they adjust, the final adjustment to old age is made more easily by them.
Career Flexibility
Recently, important strides are beginning to be made in liberating women to engage in meaningful employment and in liberating society at large to make positions of power available to women. Perhaps the seeming goal to attain the same rigid, life-long role to which most males in our society are now subjected should be reconsidered by women's activist groups. If the theory that impermanence and discontinuity over the adult life cycle exert a direct effect upon positive adjustment to old age is valid, then a new system of career flexibility should be adopted as the new battle cry by men and women alike.
