60 on Up: The Truth about Aging in America

Front Cover
Beacon Press, 2007 - Psychology - 184 pages
The Golden Years? You've got to be kidding . . . Part serious, part comic, these words reflect our ambivalence about aging in the twenty-first century. Is it a blessing or a curse? With refreshing candor and characteristic wit, best-selling author Lillian Rubin looks deeply into the issues of our graying nation, the triumph of our new longevity, and the pain, both emotional and physical, that lies right alongside it.
Through thought-provoking interviews, research, and unflinching analysis of her own life experience, Dr. Rubin offers us a much-needed road map for the uncharted territory that lies ahead. In a country where 78 million baby boomers are moving into their sixties and economists worry that they are "the monster at the door" that will break the Social Security bank and trash the economy; where 40 percent of sixty-five-year-olds are in the "sandwich generation," taking care of their parents while often still supporting their children; and where Americans eighty-five and older represent the fastest-growing segment of the population, we cannot afford to pretend that our expanded old age is just a walk on the sunny side of the street, that "sixty is the new forty," "eighty is the new sixty," or that we'll all live happily ever after.
In this wide-ranging book, Dr. Rubin examines how the new longevity ricochets around our social and emotional lives, affecting us all, for good and ill, from adolescence into senescence. How, she asks, do sixty-somethings fill another twenty, thirty, or more years post retirement without a "useful" identity or obvious purpose? What happens to sex as we move through the decades after sixty? What happens to long-cherished friendships as life takes unexpected turns? What happens when, at seventy, instead of living the life of freedom we've dreamed about, we find ourselves having to take care of Mom and Dad? What happens to the inheritances boomers have come to expect when their parents routinely live into their eighties and beyond and the cost of their care soars?
In tackling the subject of aging over a broad swath of the population, cutting across race, class, gender, and physical and cognitive ability, Lillian Rubin gives us a powerful and long-overdue reminder that all of us will be touched by the problems arising from our new longevity. Our best hope is to understand thoroughly the realities we face and to prepare-as individuals and as a society-for a long life from sixty on up.
 

Contents

Through the Looking Glass
1
Out of the Closet
7
Staying Younger While Getting Older
19
Does Age Count Anymore?
29
The Marriage of Self and Society
43
The Golden Years? Theyve Gotta Be Kidding
51
And Now About Sex
71
The Shrinking Ties That Bind
85
Hey Folks Youre Spending My Inheritance
99
Taking Care of Mom and Dad
111
Oh My God Were Old
133
Its Better Than the Alternative Isnt It?
147
One Last Word
165
Acknowledgments
173
Notes
175
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Lillian B. Rubin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 13, 1924. She graduated from high school at the age of 15, was able to obtain a secretarial job, and was married at the age of 19. She had a daughter and worked at various jobs for over 20 years before enrolling in college in 1963. She received a B.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1971 from the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving postgraduate training as a psychotherapist, she began a dual career as a sociological researcher and a private therapist. She became a senior research associate at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at Berkeley, where she worked for many years while writing books. She wrote a series of popular books about the crippling effects of gender and class norms on human potential. Her books include Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family, Women of a Certain Age: The Midlife Search for Self, Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together, Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives, Families on the Fault Line: America's Working Class Speaks about the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity, and The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph over the Past. She died on June 17, 2014 at the age of 90.

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