laws are intended to keep select women having babies and to destroy women who are too old to reproduce, too poor or too black or brown to be valued for reproducing, or too queer to pass. This, in
conjunction with the flourishing pornography industry in which
women are sexually consumed and then shit out and left to collect
flies, suggests that women will have to conform slavishly to right-
wing moral codes to survive; and that, too poor or too old, a
woman’s politics or philosophy however traditionally moral will
not make her life a whit more valuable. The use the state wants to
make of a woman’s uterus already largely determines— and will
more effectively determine in the future— whether she is fed or
starved, genuinely sheltered or housed in squalor, taken care of or
left in misery to pass cold, hungry, neglected days.
The association of women with old age and poverty predates the
contemporary Amerikan situation, in which women are the bulk of
both the old and the poor. In 1867, Jean Martin Charcot, known
primarily for his work with the institutionalized insane, did a systematic study of old age. The population he studied was old women in a public hospital in Paris—female, old, poor, urban.
Since that time, many psychological and sociological generalizations about the old have been framed as if the population under discussion were male, even when it was exclusively female as in
Charcot’s study. Many observations about the old were made by
professional men about poor women. As if to signal both the symbolic and actual relationship between old age and women, the first person in the United States to receive a Social Security check after
the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 was a woman, Ida
M. Fuller. Now in the United States, when there is no doubt
whatsoever that the old are primarily female, that the poor are prim arily female, that those on welfare are primarily female, that those in nursing homes are primarily female, that those in mental
institutions are primarily female, there is still no recognition that
the condition of poverty is significantly related to the condition of
women; or that the status of old people, for instance, is what it is
because the bulk of the old are women. “Indeed, ” writes one writer
on old age, “relatively recent trends in the aging of America may
have changed the status of older Americans. It is conceivable, for
instance, that the elderly have become a much larger burden to
society since World War I. After all, women, very old persons,
and those ‘stuck’ in deteriorating locations now constitute a greater
proportion of the aged population than ever before. ” 3 Women,
very old persons, and those “stuck” in deteriorating locations:
women, women, and women. “After all, ” women, women, and
women “now constitute a greater proportion of the aged population
than ever before”—the status of the old has changed, gone down;
they are more of a burden; “after a ll, ” they are women. In 1930,
there were more men over sixty-five than women; by 1940, there
were more women. In 1970, there were 100 women to 72 men over
sixty-five. In 1990, for every 100 women there w ill “only” be 68
men (as the experts put it). The situation is getting worse: because
the more women there are, the fewer men, the worse the situation
gets. Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. T hey live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to
