Intersectionality and the role of the lifecourse in older women’s lives

When reading and writing about place and older women, questions often come to mind, among them: how do we capture the layered experiences of older women’s lives? What are the characteristics that intersect or work together to impact women’s overall health and other outcome measures? And what is the role of social structure or structural societal and historical elements contributing to women’s varied experiences of aging? The articles compiled in this issue were selected because they each address these particular themes in the research about older women. Many of the articles build on Kimberl e Crenshaw’s and Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of intersectionality for older women. As Crenshaw (2017) explains, “intersectionality is the lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times, that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things” (p. 1). I argue that these intersecting structures and identities must also incorporate age as a category (Mitra and Weil, 2016; Weil, forthcoming). As author Natalie Byfield suggests, intersectionality “allows researchers to reveal the underlying categorical boundaries such as race, class, gender, and age that are constructed as interlocking systems of oppression and must be negotiated as people (who are raced, classed, and gendered) navigate those boundaries as they move through the lifecourse” (in Mitra & Weil, 2016, pp. 48–49). The articles curated in this issue also add in another vital lens for research about and with older women, namely adapting Glen Elder’s (1998) lifecourse perspective that looks at linked lives and the way that individual lives are bound within historical, temporal, societal, and cultural contexts. The approach suggests that we examine multiple identities, roles, and statuses of older women simultaneously. A lifecourse perspective integrates both a micro or individual level of analysis with macro or societal and structural-level components. The lifecourse perspective reminds us that we need to look at older women’s lives in both an individual sense and also within the advantages and disadvantages of the time and place in which one lives and their intersectional characteristics. Combining an intersectional and lifecourse approach requires that we use various research designs and theoretical underpinnings as tools in unison as well as placing research in the context of societal structure. Older women’s lives are layered and multi-leveled, and the goal of this issue is to capture and reflect this experience through the articles highlighted within it. Hamiduzzaman et al.’s (2021) article, “When I suffer from fever, I eat mangos”: Determinants of health seeking beliefs and behaviors of rural older women in Sylhet, Bangladesh,” applies socioecological theory to address how power relationships impact health-seeking behaviors for older women in rural Bangladesh which they define as a lower middle-income country (LMIC). They bring to light that these health-seeking behaviors result from both structural forces (such as poverty, lack of access to education, gender discrimination, and cultural and societal norms, etc.) and personal ones (such as mistrust of the medical community or preferred self-care practices) while being embedded in community and even social-justice norms. Interviews with rural older women and health professionals make evident the levels of intersection in the women’s lives. As these researchers suggest, without such acknowledgements the wide range of health determinants and behaviors can mistakenly be reduced to the level of the individual woman. Three articles offer examples of how an intersectional lens can improve the way we conduct research about, and with, older women. The first, by Foster et al. (2022), “But. I survived”: A