Generations articles from June 1990

Generations archives from June 1990

Gender & aging: making something of our chromosomes. (editorial)
June 22, 1990... Sex is easy; it is a biological characteristic based on one's chromosomes. Two Xs or one: that is the question. Two and the embryo is on its way to being female, anything else and a male embryo is in the making. Wait six weeks, take a look,...

The biology of gender & aging.
June 22, 1990... SOCIAL SCIENTISTS and some psychologists call it gender, while biomedical scientists, birth certificates, driver's licenses, and the like call it sex. For purposes of this article the terms will be used interchangeably to describe the many...

Gender & aging: the demographic parameters.
June 22, 1990... Sociologists have long recognized age and sex as universal bases for the differential distribution of societal resources such as power, prestige, and property. Yet, it is only in the past decade that scholars have asked how the two variables...

Risk factors, gender, & health.
June 22, 1990... As noted earlier, sex is fundamentally a biological factor. However, it is also a social factor, more appropriately called gender. As such, both biological and social factors contribute to sex or gender differentials in health. Another...

Gender, age, and psychiatric disorders.
June 22, 1990... THOUGH MENTAL ILLNESSES are among the most prevalent and costly chronic diseases, many researchers and practitioners who focus on health and well-being during later life seem to ignore psychiatric disorders. Still, despite relative neglect,...

Sexuality in the aging male.
June 22, 1990... The male "climacteric" is a target of countless myths, jokes, speculation, and concern. Commonly held views of aging men emphasize the loss of sexual potency and interest that are presumed to occur in later life. Sexuality for the man over...

Women's reproductive changes: a marker, not a turning point.
June 22, 1990... CONTRARY TO MYTH, menopause is not a major turning point or a traumatic event for most women. It is a marker that we have moved a certain distance on the road of life and that we are no longer able to bear children. Losing our periods is a...

Women & men in the caregiving role. (custodial care of the aged)
June 22, 1990... THE RELATIVELY RECENT emergence of the caregiving role as it exists in the United States today is most often attributed primarily to the unprecedented size of the elderly population. Yet this conclusion precludes looking at another critical...

Gender & family issues in minority groups.
June 22, 1990... The current empirical work on minority families raises more questions than it answers. Explaining these gaps in the literature revolves around the complexity of untangling the influence of culture, social class, patterns of individual and...

Alone & poor: the plight of elderly women.
June 22, 1990... THE ECONOMIC CONDITION of elderly people has improved in both absolute and relative terms over the past two decades. In 1970 the poverty rate for persons age 65 and over was more than 25 percent, twice the rate for all persons (Committee on...

Gender & work at midlife and beyond.
June 22, 1990... Over the course of this century the United States, along with other Western industrialized countries, has shown divergent trends in women's and men's work-force participation (Treiman, 1985; Clark, 1988). Women's labor-force participation has...

Labor market progeria: on the life expectancy of presentability among working women.
June 22, 1990... A Primer of Women's History in 1989 might chronicle the following events: * In July, the Supreme Court upheld the rights of the state to intervene in the reproductive choices of the individual, a decision criticized for undermining a...

Public policies: are they gender-neutral?
June 22, 1990... The development of public policy seldom explicitly considers the impact on gender. And even when public programs are created with the needs of women in mind, their appropriateness may change over time as the roles of men and women in our...

Gender & public policy.
June 22, 1990... The 1972 amendments to the Social Security Act, which raised benefits and tied future increases to the cost-of-living index, enhanced the economic well-being of older people relative to other population groups. They did not, however,...

A perspective on women in politics: political mobilization & older women.
June 22, 1990... The salience of older women in the world of politics has been and continues to be low. The political presence of older women has been confined almost exclusively to a role as policy beneficiaries, a role in stark contrast to their highly...

Growing old: it's different for men and women. (editorial)
June 22, 1990... How much does the accident of our sex determine the nature of our lives? The goal of this issue of Generations was to explore what is unique in old age for men and for women-to identify those things in the later stages of life that are...

The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction.
June 22, 1990... The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction, by R. Weindruch and R. L. Walford. Springfield, il.: C. C. Thomas, 338 pages. This comprehensive work examines in logical sequence the principal effects of dietary restriction...

Caring for the Parkinson Patient.
June 22, 1990... THE PARKINSON PATIENT Caring for the Parkinson Patient, edited by J. Thomas Hutton and Raye Lynne Dippel. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 196 pages. This thoughtfully written book attempts to impress upon readers the absolutely...