Fears relating to the growing numbers of older people have given rise to an “apocalyptic demographics” that barely conceals its ageist overtones.1 The popular metaphor of a gray tsunami frames older people as a faceless mass bound to crush the welfare state.2 “Greedy geezer” is another dehumanizing term that pops up in debates around the rising costs of pensions and health care.3 These bits of weaponized language are not just shouts in a void but are matched with real-world consequences. When Twitter users greeted the mass dying of older people during the COVID-19 pandemic with the hashtag #boomerremover, they showcased how age-old stereotypes can breed deadly resentment. The rendering of older people as “useless mouths” is indeed a trope with a long history.4 It makes a flashy return in the intergenerational conflict of the present, designed to deflect from the wreckage left by decades of neoliberal politics.
This special issue is an invitation to visit the shifting landscape of old age today. It taps into the powerful stream of ideas generated by the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In her pioneering treatise The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse), published in 1970, Beauvoir lays bare the matrix of oppression that structured the lived experiences of older people in 1960s France.5 The work is almost encyclopedic in its breadth; it covers a wide range of biological, historical, ethnographic, sociological, and biographical accounts of old age, which it analyzes using the conceptual tools of Marxist dialectics, phenomenology, and existentialism.
This spatial, temporal, and cultural grounding lends special power to Beauvoir’s arguments, but it also makes them appear dated at times. In the last fifty years, welfare provisions for older people in the West have gone through a cycle of evolution and devolution. The precarity and environmental ravage produced by global capitalism have posed questions for age relations that Beauvoir did not consider. Simultaneously, her fierce criticism of the ageist interior of capitalist production has much to offer to a time in which awareness of structural oppression and the intersectional structures of identity has grown exponentially.
Beauvoir’s philosophy of old age is characterized by its emphasis on rupture. Growing old, in her view, is not a continuous process but a series of metamorphoses.6 At one point in The Coming of Age, Beauvoir relates her shock when, at age fifty, she discovered that others considered her an old woman.7 She felt the sting of the label, which “has the ring of an insult” not only because of its pejorative charge but also because it clashed with the youthful image she had of herself.8 As Beauvoir argues, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the obvious clarity of the inward feeling that guarantees our unchanging quality and the objective certainty of our transformation.”9 It is no coincidence that Beauvoir first heard the “news” of this transformation from someone else. In her view, the rupture of aging is simultaneously a rift in one’s life story and a confrontation with the judgment of others. Old age reaches a subject through these exterior judgments, but they do not transform them in a straightforward manner. It is “the Other within us who is old,” Beauvoir notes, suggesting that the subject can never truly realize their old age; it remains a foreign body inside the self, split off from that part within subjectivity that continues to regard itself as ageless.10
The split subject of old age inhabits an intersubjective world that is in turn ruptured by social antagonisms. In a capitalist society, Beauvoir observes, all retirees suffer a loss of status as they exit the labor force. The economic system pitches the working population against its allegedly unproductive counterpart while simultaneously creating a rift among older people themselves. Beauvoir describes how a lifetime of exploitation inscribes itself in workers’ bodies, destroying their health and keeping them away from cultural resources that would render their late lives meaningful.11 A burning question underlies her critique: “What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man? The answer is simple: he would always have been treated as a man.”12
Arguably, a similar imbalance of power characterizes the late lives of other marginalized people. A critique of aging is, therefore, crucial for addressing the embodied temporality of oppression in all forms. The aim of such a critique must lie beyond incremental reforms, as Beauvoir points out.13 While gradual improvements of living conditions are meaningful, they do not tackle the root cause of destitution in old age: the capitalist system and the social antagonisms it breeds. Beauvoir’s response is to call for systemic, revolutionary change. For her, “it is the whole relationship between man and man that must be recast if we wish the old person’s state to be acceptable.”14 The Coming of Age fosters this revolution by countering what Beauvoir calls the “conspiracy of silence” around the plight of older people.15
In designing this special issue, we were inspired by Beauvoir’s activism. Following her example, we believe that theorizing about oppressed identities constitutes an intrinsic part of political action; it is a crucial aspect of the work of hope that aims beyond the boundaries of academic institutions toward collective transformation. The contributions to this special issue touch upon the ruptures and continuities in Beauvoir’s work as they address some pressing questions of today: What is structural and what is personal in experiences of aging? How does time become embodied? How can one resist ageist oppression? In the following sections, we present each of the five articles in this special issue and relate them to five key themes in Beauvoir scholarship and the study of old age: (1) the reception history of Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age, (2) ageism, (3) experiences of time, (4) aging and femininity, and (5) dehumanizing myths.
1 Riddled Reception
Many have noted the striking parallels between The Coming of Age and The Second Sex.16 As Penelope Deutscher explains, both works deal with the othering of a particular part of humanity: “Where [Beauvoir] had argued in The Second Sex that woman is the Other, in Old Age she would argue that the aged are, and in a similar sense, the marginalized Other.”17 Apart from this thematic overlap, The Coming of Age also resembles The Second Sex in its method and scope.18 In both The Coming of Age and The Second Sex, Beauvoir examines othered identities—old age and womanhood, respectively, which she approaches from two complementary angles: the external point of view, on the one hand, and the perspective of being-in-the-world, on the other.
This parallelism of form and content contrasts with the vastly dissimilar reception histories of The Coming of Age and The Second Sex. While the latter is considered a foundational text of feminism, the former has gone relatively unnoticed.19 Stephen Katz maps the cool responses to The Coming of Age across various fields, concluding that “[o]verall, the critical legacy of The Coming of Age has situated the book as deficient, in one way or the other, in tackling the problems of aging in a modern and meaningful way.”20 Beauvoir traded disciplinary accuracy for a global vision of old age in which “each [of its aspects] reacts upon all others and is at the same time affected by them.”21 Yet, her idiosyncratic mixing of materials and methods did not impress the acolytes of mainstream disciplines. An often-repeated point of objection is Beauvoir’s negative depiction of old age, which went against the grain of gerontological theorizing in the 1970s and 1980s.22 Some reviewers, including Nelson Algren, went so far as disputing her central premise that old people were in fact oppressed; if there was a conspiracy of silence, Algren remarked caustically, it was only in Beauvoir’s head.23
More surprising than the misgivings of mainstream academics and former lovers is the fact that feminists have long neglected The Coming of Age. Reviewing the social scientific literature, Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin note that feminist scholars have largely ignored the subject of old age.24 Silvia Stoller comes to a similar conclusion with regard to feminist philosophy.25 She blames the cool reception of The Coming of Age by feminist philosophers on six main reasons: (1) the general disregard of age in feminist philosophy; (2) the focus of feminists on middle-age and younger women; (3) the fact that The Coming of Age was not considered a feminist work; (4) Beauvoir’s tendency to reduce old age to mortality; (5) the dominance of post-structuralist gender theory; and (6) the entrenched ageism in society at large.26 To this day, reflections on old age are glaringly absent from many works of intersectional feminisms.27 Not all feminist thinkers have ignored the subject of old age, however. Notable exceptions include Kathleen Woodward and Penelope Deutscher, who have written extensively on Beauvoir’s work on old age.28 Roberta Maierhofer has noted that “[r]ecent feminist discussions on women and aging have found two aspects in Beauvoir’s work inspirational: an understanding of the sense of otherness that can be overcome by a recognition of the self in the other, and the necessity of finding a voice for the underprivileged.”29 These would appear to be crucial ingredients of a feminism to come in which age becomes a key category of analysis alongside gender, race, and class.30
In recent years, The Coming of Age has received increased attention from feminist phenomenologists, who explore women’s embodiment and examine the ways in which gender norms impinge on lived experience.31 The emerging movement of critical phenomenology—which brings together an analysis of experience with a critique of power—readily counts Beauvoir among its forebearers.32 Just like other sympathetic readers of Beauvoir, however, critical and feminist phenomenologists tend to focus on The Second Sex. A notable exception is Silvia Stoller’s already mentioned collection Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender, Ethics, and Time.33 The essays in this book center on Beauvoir’s writing on aging and old age, and particularly on The Coming of Age. Sara Heinämaa proposes one of the more systematic phenomenological readings of The Coming of Age, arguing that Beauvoir’s “approach to lived and intentional experiences can best be characterized by classical phenomenological concepts.”34 Bonnie Mann disputes this point, however, holding that “Beauvoir’s phenomenology is feminist precisely insofar as it revisions classical phenomenology.”35 Both seem to agree, however, that phenomenology (in its classic or feminist form) is the definitive framework for the interpretation of The Coming of Age.
In his contribution to this special issue, “L’expérience vécue dans La Vieillesse: phénoménologie ou dialectique?” (Lived experience in The Coming of Age: Phenomenology or dialectics?), Raphaël Ehrsam approaches Beauvoir’s treatise from an altogether different angle. He resists phenomenological readings of The Coming of Age and instead highlights its Marxist outlook. Ehrsam describes how, in the transition from The Second Sex to The Coming of Age, Beauvoir’s theoretical leanings shifted from phenomenology to Marxist dialectics. While The Coming of Age doubtlessly offers profound phenomenological analyses of aging, these analyses do not stand by themselves; rather, “elles sont des moments intégrés à un dispositif théorique plus large, dont les coordonnées sont marxistes” (they are integral moments of a larger theoretical apparatus, the coordinates of which are Marxist).
Ehrsam identifies four core phenomenological insights of The Coming of Age, then reconstructs Beauvoir’s intellectual shift toward Marxism. He highlights how younger people are in denial about their future old age; how the realization of old age catches the subject by surprise; how old age comes from the other rather than from the self; and how old age is characterized by a gap between persistent desires and diminished capabilities. Ehrsam’s reconstruction of Beauvoir’s intellectual shift draws on her discussion of history and traces the parallel movement found in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.36 From antiquity to modern-day capitalist societies, Beauvoir’s account consistently foregrounds the socioeconomic embeddedness of age relations. This emphasis follows an analytical shift in the works of both Sartre and Beauvoir: from lived experience as meaningful in itself to lived experience as determined by economic, political, and cultural circumstances.
Ehrsam concludes that Beauvoir’s account of aging, while describing various aspects of embodiment, ultimately rests on the Marxist analysis of class. On this point, his interpretation goes against the prevailing phenomenological interpretation of The Coming of Age. While Ehrsam does not espouse the labeling of Beauvoir as a critical phenomenologist avant la lettre, his reading suggests novel ways of engaging with the unique blend of phenomenology, existentialism, and dialectical materialism that informs Beauvoir’s philosophy.
2 Ageism
In The Coming of Age, Beauvoir acknowledges intergenerational rivalry as a source for the oppression of older people. Her reflections on oppression hinge on several themes that would nowadays be called “ageism.” When Beauvoir’s book was published, the notion of ageism had only just been invented by the American gerontologist Robert N. Butler.37 In the wake of Butler’s original work, ageism was continuously redefined. The World Health Organization’s 2021 report on ageism embraces the definition by Thomas Nicolaj Iversen and others:
Ageism is defined as negative or positive stereotypes, prejudice and/or discrimination against (or to the advantage of) elderly people on the basis of their chronological age or on the basis of a perception of them as being “old” or “elderly.” Ageism can be implicit or explicit and can be expressed on a micro-, meso- or macro-level.38
Ageism as described by Iversen and others denotes a complex psychosocial phenomenon, which includes several interrelated components: it engages the thoughts (stereotypes), feelings (prejudices), and behaviors (discrimination) of individuals in relation to themselves (micro-level), their social networks (meso-level), and the broader cultural and institutional context (macro-level). In addition to this definition, the WHO recommends three theoretical frameworks: terror management theory, which suggests that negative attitudes and behaviors toward older people derive from a fear of death; the intergroup threat/contact theory, which links ageism to the hostility of one group (younger people) toward perceived outsiders (older people); and stereotype embodiment theory, which holds that older people tend to internalize cultural stereotypes about themselves.39
Beauvoir’s study of old age prefigures many elements found in these contemporary theories. Without using the term, The Coming of Age may itself count as a treatise on ageism, as Marlène Bichet argues in her article “Appréhender l’âgisme au prisme du sexisme et du classisme grâce à La Vieillesse” (Understanding ageism through the prism of sexism and classism thanks to The Coming of Age). Bichet develops a Beauvoirian perspective on ageism that exposes the intersections of ageist oppression with social class and gender. Doing so, she draws on Beauvoir’s conceptions of the Other, se faire objet (making oneself an object), and existential finitude.40
At the heart of ageism, as Bichet describes it, there are overlapping practices of othering, which shape the cultural perception as well as the self-image of older people. The othering of older people echoes the othering of women, which Beauvoir analyzes in The Second Sex. In both cases, otherness comprises a set of ambiguous, often contradictory characteristics. Old age is particular, however, in that its cultural meaning centers on biological decline. While trying to resist discriminatory practices and labels, older people often end up resigning themselves to the pressure of their socio-cultural environment: “Il n’est pas toujours possible de résister à la situation vécue et aux pratiques discriminatoires qui entrainent une résignation; on finit alors par se faire objet” (it is not always possible to resist the lived situation and the discriminatory practices that lead to resignation, so one ends up making oneself an object). Making oneself an object implies the internalization of harmful stereotypes and prejudices, which rhymes with the stereotype embodiment theory of ageism.
By regarding older people through the lens of decline, society turns them into symbols of existential finitude. Thus symbolically charged, older people come to evoke feelings of disdain and fear. They often find themselves excluded from society, locked away in France’s scandal-ridden nursing facilities, or EHPAD (établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes). This Beauvoirian account of the existential logic behind ageism echoes terror management theory—with one important addition, however. Bichet points to the parallels between ageist fears of finitude and society’s contempt for the physicality of women and workers, reminding us of the interconnections between these different forms of oppression.
The Coming of Age emphasizes the role of large institutions by directly connecting the oppression of older people to the capitalist mode of production. This sort of macro-level analysis is largely absent from the social psychological literature, but it features prominently in the works of critical gerontologists. Bill Bytheway’s writings exemplify the view that ageism operates as an ideology, in the sense of a coherent set of beliefs that serve the interests of dominant groups and that “justify and sustain not just the inequalities between age groups but also the belief that these age groups exist and are different.”41 On this view, ageism-as-ideology implies a pervasive force that produces the social category of “old age.” Margaret Morganroth Gullette makes a similar argument. She links ageism to “decline ideology,” which naturalizes the countless diminishments associated with aging past youth, hiding their social causes.42
Like Bytheway and Morganroth Gullette, Beauvoir regards ageism as the result of ideology. While fiercely denouncing the classist grounds of ageism, The Coming of Age is relatively silent on other forms of oppression. Bichet’s article is particularly illuminating in this regard, as it suggests timely ways of moving with Beauvoir beyond Beauvoir. It shows “comment l’analyse croisée de Beauvoir nous aide à penser différemment l’âgisme contemporain, notamment en expliquant comment il est exacerbé par le classisme et le sexisme” (how Beauvoir’s cross-disciplinary analysis helps us to think differently about contemporary ageism, in particular by explaining how ageism is exacerbated by classism and sexism).
3 The Experience of Time
The ambiguity of aging not only consists in the process of othering but is also related to the experience of time. For Beauvoir, the metamorphosis of aging relates to time in two different manners. First, aging itself is experienced as a sudden event or series of events, not a gradual progressive decline.43 The notions Beauvoir uses to refer to the event character of the experience of aging are summarized by Heinämaa as follows: “surprise,” “revelation,” “metamorphosis,” “transformation.”44 According to Beauvoir, aging implies a contradiction between the internal self-awareness of not having changed and a social world that tells us a transformation did actually take place.45
The second way aging relates to time concerns the way older people experience time. Growing older confronts us with “a limited future and a frozen past,” Beauvoir contends.46 The structure of past, present, and future undergoes a change when one ages, because the future loses its infinite openness and the past grows in importance. In “The Grip of the Past,” Kathleen Lennon explains why Beauvoir believes the past becomes frozen in aging and challenges this view. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Lennon develops an alternative account of the experience of aging that considers the past as living: it surrounds us like an atmosphere, and we give new meaning to it while reliving it.
For Beauvoir, the shortening of the lifespan in old age means the horizon of the future decreases. Older people therefore tend to engage with projects to a lesser extent, instead returning to their past accomplishments to maintain their self-esteem. Rather than reaching out toward an open future, they look back. This orientation constrains a person and serves as a paralyzing weight.47 Aging in other words has consequences for one’s capacities to transcend one’s situation. Older people tend to continue and repeat their past instead of breaking with it. This problem of “having a limited future and a frozen past,” leads to a pessimistic view on aging.48 Beauvoir challenges the views of philosophers such as Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, for whom life does not end with death, but opens the structural possibility of “trans-generational futurity.”49 In other words, our activities and projects can be taken up by, and influence, the lives of future others. Beauvoir contends, by contrast, that this is not an essential or structural possibility, but one that is historically, culturally, and socially embedded. Only under exceptional circumstances can older people continue to live toward the future—a possibility available only to the lucky few.
Lennon disagrees with Beauvoir’s pessimistic view of transcendence in late life and challenges the pervasively negative notion of a “frozen past.” Being frozen, the past holds an aging person in its grip, weighs heavily, and demands repetition instead of breaks and new beginnings. “In the absence of such possibilities, we do not possess a past. It possesses us and, in so doing, objectifies us, turns us into objects with fixed sets of characteristics, objects to whom certain things have happened,” Lennon explains. Rather than holding older people in its grip, she argues, the past is at every instant taken up in the present.50
Lennon turns to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the living relation to the past to develop an alternative conception of older people’s experience of time. For Merleau-Ponty, the past lives on in the present and is therefore not frozen or “a sum of events over there […] but rather the atmosphere of my present.”51 This view implies two things. First, our past surrounds the present as a horizon of events and experiences that have taken place; it constitutes the “thickness” of the present, as Merleau-Ponty writes.52 Second, in thinking about the past, we do not relate to it as a frozen whole pictured in our minds; instead, we relive specific past events and experiences from our present perspective. Lennon claims that it is this living past that we relate to—the past that gives “affective texture” to the present. This texture implies that each age has its own specific time-conception. In Beauvoir’s The Mandarins and All Said and Done, Lennon finds examples of this past that surrounds the present as a signifying horizon.53
Having a living relation to the past implies, as Lennon explains, that “aging does not place us in an ontologically different relationship to time from that occupied by the young, one in which, for the old, the possibility of agency is inhibited.” Lennon’s claim thus is not merely about the experience of time in aging but is more general and leads to a revaluation of aging as such. The ontological dimension of time becomes apparent when comparing Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s interpretations of “habit” and “sedimentation.” For Beauvoir, habit is mainly about sedimentation and repetition.54 Habit, therefore, locks a person in the same gestures and structures.55 Habitual repetition, in other words, does not transcend toward the future. Merleau-Ponty, however, argues that habit also entails renewal, because in acting we take up a situation and act within its context, even in the case of habitual repetition.56 In all our acting and experiences of time, we thus connect past and present. The past is thus not merely “the practico-inert” Beauvoir holds it to be; it is instead constitutive of the present.57 It is especially in aging that we come to see these constitutive structures of experience.
4 Aging and Femininity
One problem addressed in the feminist reception of The Second Sex is that even though Beauvoir does consider women until their mid-sixties, she especially neglects “very aged women,” as Deutscher argues.58 Those who would have expected Beauvoir to remedy this omission in The Coming of Age will be disappointed, for she is more concerned with the situation of older men.59 Beauvoir’s analysis of the capitalist system that establishes an opposition between those who are productive and those who are not, in other words, seems to obscure the situation of woman as Other. Susan Pickard’s article, “The Red Dressing Gown: Reflections on the Aging of a Dutiful Daughter,” however, argues that Beauvoir’s analysis of aging is very much informed by her situation as a woman, because the alterity of aging and the alterity of the feminine are closely related in a patriarchal context. Pickard writes, “In The Second Sex Beauvoir notes how the threat of finitude, of aging and death, is a key element […] of the construction of the feminine as Other within a patriarchal society and is part of femininity’s essential alterity.” Pickard’s article thus elucidates the experience of aging from a woman’s and a feminist perspective, thereby offering an implicit reply to the feminist critique that The Coming of Age neglects the situation of women.
Pickard discusses the feelings of depression and loss in Beauvoir’s early literary works and in her memoirs, from All Men are Mortal to Force of Circumstance, as well as Beauvoir’s later finding meaning in aging (especially in A Very Easy Death).60 Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s account of “mourning and melancholia” and Julia Kristeva’s notion of “abjection,” she aims not to psychoanalyze Beauvoir as a person but to understand the transitions in the emotional relationship toward aging and death in Beauvoir’s memoirs.61
The allusion to the “dutiful daughter” in Pickard’s title recalls the feminist debates about psychoanalysis in the 1980s, the early years of gender studies: the so-called “dutiful daughters” defended the use of Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories to analyze the psychic dimension of gender, whereas “unfaithful” feminists argued that psychoanalytical theories mainly repeat and reinforce the value placed on masculinity.62 Beauvoir’s engagement with psychoanalysis and femininity long predates these debates. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir praises psychoanalysis for taking into consideration human meaning but points out that Freud models women’s sexuality on the masculine. Instead of considering “the feminine libido in its originality,” he considers it as “deviation from the human libido in general.”63 For Freud, a woman “feels like a mutilated man,” Beauvoir writes, taking a position that resembles Luce Irigaray’s in Speculum of the Other Woman, published almost thirty years later.64
With the allusion to the “dutiful daughter,” Pickard refers to Beauvoir’s changing attitude toward aging, which reflects the changing relationship with her mother. Beauvoir remains a dutiful daughter even though she distanced herself from her mother at an early age and desired an independent life as an intellectual. In the relationship with her mother, Françoise, Beauvoir could not avoid the socially induced emotional attachments of the mother-daughter relationship that Françoise herself also suffered from. In a world in which being a daughter implies a rejection of the mother, Beauvoir’s intellectual and emotional independence demanded retreating from her mother and everything her mother stood for, without having the opportunity to properly mourn this loss.65 Pickard relates this distancing to the aversion to aging and old age in Beauvoir’s novels. Beauvoir starts off as a dutiful daughter, then rejects that position with the aim of attaining selfhood, and finally learns to mourn the mother and acknowledge the bond with her. In a patriarchal society, this is not an individual trajectory but the fate of women in general. While the masculine stands for transcendence, the tokens of finitude, aging, and death are associated with, and thus become part of, the alterity of the feminine. Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of the Lacanian notion of abjection explains this interrelation.66 Entering the patriarchal symbolic implies leaving the mother’s body behind. Matricide is therefore the condition of individuation: in order to become an independent individual, women need to break with their mothers. Pickard finds this process of abjection at play in Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, in which Beauvoir describes how she endeavored to escape from the suffocating atmosphere in her parental home.67 In order to gain autonomy, she needed to depart from her mother.
Is there an alternative to this Lacanian frame of thinking, which holds that the relationship with the mother needs to be rejected? Pickard finds one in object-relations theory. Pleasant, positive, and generous relations between mothers and daughters are possible, according to psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, if the other is recognized as a separate person “who is like us yet distinct.”68 Benjamin explains how intersubjective relations between caregivers and children can come about in processes of identification and rejection, in which the caregiver acts as “good enough mother” and does not give in to the demands and wishes of the child but also does not accept the child’s rejection of her (“I hate you, because you do not give in to my wishes”).69 In this way, the child learns to respect the other’s otherness, and true intersubjectivity can come about. Pickard observes this process of identification without coinciding with the other, of respect for otherness in Beauvoir’s final relationship with her mother Françoise. The different stages in Beauvoir’s account of aging—from depression and regret of the loss of sexuality and femininity to considering aging as part of a meaningful life—thus reflect the situation of women in a society that considers them as Other. Again, in patriarchy, woman’s alterity is identified with finitude and death. Pickard interprets Beauvoir’s situation as a woman in a patriarchal society—in which becoming autonomous implies rejecting the maternal bond—in terms of her initial relationship to aging. Love and intersubjectivity as well as an acceptance of growing older develop in Beauvoir’s relation to her dying mother, in which she recognizes herself as being like her but also different from her. In order to deconstruct the relation between femininity, on the one hand, and finitude and death, on the other, daughters thus need to rework their relationships with their mothers. Instead of renouncing the bond with the mother, women need to be able to engage with her and with each other.
5 Dehumanizing Myths and the COVID Pandemic
In “Responding to the COVID-19 Care Home Crisis: Images, Freedom, and the Unrealizable in The Coming of Age,” Cillian Ó Fathaigh demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Beauvoir’s analysis by using her work to interpret the treatment of older people in the United Kingdom during the COVID pandemic. Reports by Amnesty International and the Joint Human Rights Committee discuss how the mistreatment of older people violated their right to health care and their right to life.70 As these reports show, many older people still find themselves at the margins of society fifty years after the publication of The Coming of Age. In his discussion of these reports, Ó Fathaigh combines two strands of Beauvoir’s analysis: first, her connection of the social and the material and, second, her attention to images—representations that frame older people. Similar to Ehrsam, Ó Fathaigh understands The Coming of Age as combining an analysis of the plurality of lived experiences with a Marxist analysis in which material circumstances determine these experiences.
The COVID crisis saw the promotion of a particular image of older people: the “vulnerable senior.” This image facilitated the management of old age in the context of a pandemic (in the UK, older people were discouraged from going to the hospital in case of an infection), but the image also informs and fixes people’s self-experience. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir famously draws on the notion of myth to address the situation of woman as Other. In The Coming of Age, the same notion describes the situation of older people. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir depicts the myth of woman as Other as a transcendent myth in the Platonic sense, a grounding myth that generates “a multiplicity of incompatible myths.”71 “Woman as Other” is a transcendent idea imposed upon women, pushing out of sight the meanings that their acts and experiences may have in themselves. Myths, in other words, “essentialize” existence. That may happen from the outside, by imposing myths and using them to interpret other people’s lives, but it may also happen from the inside. In the latter case, taking refuge in mythical thinking prevents us from taking up our existential task to be free and actively project ourselves into the world. In other words, living according to myths implies living in bad faith, although it is also very difficult to avoid repeating them.
Still, myths appear to carry some universal truth in them. For this reason, Beauvoir calls them archetypical.72 As Ó Fathaigh notes, the archetypical myth about old age that Beauvoir aims to challenge is “an image of old age as tranquil and serene, one in which older people gradually and deliberately withdraw from the social and material world.” This myth does not reflect older people’s experience but limits their possibilities in life. Ó Fathaigh explains that the material neglect and deprivation, as well as the prejudices, that older people face, can be related to this myth. It generates a specific image of old age that is reflected in the way older people are treated: as superfluous, not productive, and, in circumstances such as the pandemic, legitimate objects of sacrifice.
In essentializing existence, myths deny the contingency of everyday existence by portraying people in terms of static qualities. Beauvoir elucidates in The Second Sex that our desire “to be” may find its home in myths.73 Being captivated by or taking refuge in myths may represent a flight from the demands of our existence as a being-for-itself. On an experiential level, myths, therefore, relate to what Beauvoir calls “the unrealizable”—that is, an image of us held by the other, which remains other but still signifies us.74 Just as myths are transcendent, the image of old age is inflicted upon us from the outside, by others, instead of being an inner experience or something that I can realize in freedom. What Ó Fathaigh calls “images” in reference to Beauvoir are exterior labels that form frames for the interpretation of aging in general and in self-experience.
In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the images of the “vulnerable senior” as well as the material and social circumstances at hand resulted in mistreatment and dehumanization of older people. Ó Fathaigh concludes that the full extent and impact of their oppression during the pandemic can only come to light by considering the actual, dynamic experiences of older people beyond sedimented images. Beauvoir’s method remains inspiring in this regard, as it combines an account of people’s lived experience with an account of the circumstances—economic, social, political—that frame these experiences.
The contributions to this special issue reflect the intricate interplay of personal experience, political economy, social construction, and biology that Beauvoir invites us to imagine.75 They situate Beauvoir’s work on old age in a diverse ecology of theoretical and practical projects, ranging from Marxism and phenomenology to gerontology, psychoanalysis, and the critique of ageist imaginaries. As The Coming of Age reminds us, the factors that make up an older person’s situation must be studied in their interrelatedness, “from the viewpoint of a final synthesis.”76 To do justice to the phenomenon of old age, cross-disciplinarity is key, and it has been an important guiding principle when putting together this special issue. We are happy that its “final synthesis” reflects the diversity of perspectives that is so central to the methodology of Beauvoir’s book.
We hope this special issue will contribute to the revival of a much-neglected part of Beauvoir’s oeuvre. Fifty years after the original publication of The Coming of Age, experiences of aging are more diverse than ever. They unfold at the intersection of various global crises that create new vulnerabilities and potentials for marginalization. Pushing back against the eruptions of ageist ideology requires political interventions alongside theoretical analyses. In this respect, we have much to learn from the revolutionary impetus of The Coming of Age. Emerging philosophical currents, such as critical phenomenology, recall the fierce politics and daring theory that characterize Beauvoir’s work. Together with the development of age studies and critical gerontology, these new currents will hopefully bring us to the point where we can finally break the “conspiracy of silence.”77
Toni Calasanti, “Ageism, Gravity, and Gender: Experiences of Aging Bodies,” Generations, vol. 29, no. 3, 2005, pp. 8–12.
Amanda S. Barusch, “The Aging Tsunami: Time for a New Metaphor?,” Journal of Gerontological Social Work, vol. 56, no. 3, 2013, pp. 181–184.
Scott L. Greer, Julia Lynch, Aaron Reeves, Michelle Falkenbach, Jane Gingrich, Jonathan Cylus, and Clare Bambra, Ageing and Health: The Politics of Better Policies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 39–43.
Simone de Beauvoir mentions the trope at various points in The Coming of Age—for instance, when discussing the perception of older people in non-Western cultures. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York, Norton, 1996 [1970], p. 84. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation CO. She also draws on the notion in her eponymous play The Useless Mouths. Simone de Beauvoir, The Useless Mouths, trans. Liz Stanley and Catherine Naji, in The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 33–87. Play first published and performed in 1945.
CO, p. 171.
See Sara Heinämaa, “Transformations of Old Age: Selfhood, Normativity, and Time,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender Ethics, and Time, ed. Silvia Stoller, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 167–190.
CO, p. 288.
CO, p. 288.
CO, p. 290.
CO, p. 288.
CO, pp. 541–542.
CO, p. 542.
CO, p. 542.
CO, p. 543.
CO, p. 2.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, New York, Vintage Books, 2011 [1949]. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation SS.
Penelope Deutscher, “Bodies, Lost and Found: Simone de Beauvoir from The Second Sex to Old Age,” Radical Philosophy, no. 96, 1999, 6–16, p. 6.
Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke, “Simone de Beauvoir,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, 2023,
This is not to say that The Second Sex became an immediate feminist classic. Early debates in France revolved mostly around Beauvoir’s description of women’s sexuality, and many commentators—both critics and defenders of Beauvoir—eschewed the feminist label. See Sylvie Chaperon, “Outcry over The Second Sex,” trans. Sophia Millman, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 2022 [1999], pp. 19–34.
Stephen Katz, “Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age: The Humanities and Gerontology’s Diagram of Science,” Age, Culture, Humanities, no. 3, 2018, 217–226, p. 219.
CO, p. 9.
See, for example, Peneleope Deutscher, “Beauvoir’s Old Age,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 286–304.
Nelson Algren, “How to Break the Silence Conspiracy over Old Age,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1972.
Toni M. Calasanti and Kathleen F. Slevin, “Introduction: Age Matters,” in Age Matters: Realigning Feminist Thinking, ed. Toni M. Calasanti and Kathleen F. Slevin, New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–17.
Silvia Stoller, “Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Stoller, pp. 1–26.
Ibid., pp. 4–9.
See the critiques of Sonia Kruks and Sue Westwood: Sonia Kruks, “Alterity and Intersectionality: Reflections on Old Age in the Time of COVID-19,” Hypatia, vol. 37, no. 1, 2022, pp. 196–209; Sue Westwood, introduction to Ageing, Diversity and Equality: Social Justice Perspectives, ed. Sue Westwood, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019, pp. 1–21.
Kathleen Woodward, “Simone de Beauvoir: Aging and Its Discontents,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writing, ed. Shari Benstock, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 90–113; “Rereading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age,” Age, Culture, Humanities, no. 3, 2018, pp. 191–206; Deutscher, “Beauvoir’s Old Age,” pp. 286–304; “Afterlives: Beauvoir’s Old Age and the Intersections of The Second Sex,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 438–448.
Roberta Maierhofer, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Graying of American Feminism,” Journal of Aging and Identity, vol. 5, no. 2, 2000, 67–77, p. 76.
For examples of this approach, see Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 114–123; Toni Calasanti and Neal King, “Intersectionality and Age,” in Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, ed. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015, pp. 193–200.
A classic of feminist phenomenology is Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Human Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 1980, pp. 137–156.
See Lisa Guenther, “Critical Phenomenology,” in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2019, 11–16, p. 14.
Stoller, ed., Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age.
Heinämaa, “Transformations of Old Age,” p. 168.
Bonnie Mann, “Revisioning Classical Phenomenology: Comment on Sara Heinämaa,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Stoller, 191–194, p. 193.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree, London, Verso, 2004 [1960].
Robert N. Butler, “Age-Ism: Another Form of Bigotry,” Gerontologist, vol. 9, no. 4, 1969, pp. 243–246.
Thomas Nicolaj Iversen, Lars Larsen, and Per Erik Solem, “A Conceptual Analysis of Ageism,” Nordic Psychology, vol. 61, no. 3, 2009, 4–22, p. 15; World Health Organization (WHO), Global Report on Ageism, Geneva, 2021,
WHO, “Global Report on Ageism,” pp. 69–70.
On the relation of se faire objet and aging, see Susan Pickard, “Exploring Ageism as a Structure of Consciousness Across the Female Life Course Through the Work of Simone de Beauvoir,” Gerontologist, vol. 63, no. 5, 2023, 812–819, p. 812.
Bill Bytheway, Ageism, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1995, p. 116.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 4–5. Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard challenge this ideological model of ageism, which they perceive as sweeping social constructivism. See Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard, “The Ideology of Ageism versus the Social Imaginary of the Fourth Age: Two Differing Approaches to the Negative Contexts of Old Age,” Ageing and Society, vol. 40, no. 8, 2020, 1617–1630, p. 1622.
See Heinämaa, “Transformations of Old Age,” p. 170.
Ibid., pp. 292, 290, 283, 290.
CO, p. 290.
CO, p. 378.
CO, p. 373.
CO, p. 378.
Heinämaa, “Transformations of Old Age,” p. 182.
Christina Schües makes a similar argument, situating Beauvoir’s account of aging in relation to two major conceptions of time found in Western philosophy: the Augustinian concept of inner time and the physicalist idea of objective time. See Christina Schües, “Age and Future: Phenomenological Paths of Optimism,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Stoller, 215–230, pp. 223–224.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012 [1945], p. 467.
Ibid., p. 457.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. Leonard M. Friedman, London, Collins, 1957 [1954]; All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London, Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974 [1972].
CO, pp. 466–469.
See Helen A. Fielding, “The Poetry of Habit: Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Aging Embodiment,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Stoller, pp. 69–82. Fielding argues that Beauvoir also understands habit as poetry, and not merely as repetition.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 143–148.
CO, pp. 372–373.
Penelope Deutscher, “The Sex of Age and the Age of Sex: The Compressions of Life,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Stoller, 29–42, p. 30.
On this point, see Oliver Davis, Old Age and Going Gently: Stories of the Senescent Subject in Twentieth-Century French Writing, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2006, p. 49.
Simone de Beauvoir, All Men Are Mortal, trans. Euan Cameron, London, Virago, 2003 [1946]; Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965 [1963]; A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York, Pantheon Books, 1985 [1964].
Sigmund Freud “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, London, Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 243–258, essay originally published in 1917; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980].
Juliet Mitchell’s counterargument is that psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis, London, Allan Lane, 1974.
SS, pp. 50, 51.
SS, p. 53. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1985 [1974].
The rejection of the mother in a patriarchal society and language is analyzed by Irigaray succinctly in the lecture “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” in Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993 [1987], pp. 7–21. Lecture originally presented in 1980.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963 [1958].
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, London, Virago, 1990 [1988], p. 23. See also Benjamin’s Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1995; and Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, and Jessica Benjamin, “Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview,” Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1979, pp. 330–345.
Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 23–42; Like Subjects, Love Objects, pp. 27–48.
Amnesty International, As If Expendable: The UK Government’s Failure to Protect Older People in Care Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic, London, Amnesty International, 2020; Joint Committee on Human Rights, The Government’s Response to COVID-19: Human Rights Implications, United Kingdom House of Commons and House of Lords, HC 265/HL 125, September 21, 2020.
SS, p. 276.
SS, p. 276.
SS, p. 280.
CO, p. 291.
See Thomas R. Cole, “Rereading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age from a Distance of Some Forty Years,” Age Culture Humanities, no. 3, 2018, 207–216, p. 209.
CO, p. 279, italics omitted.
CO, p. 2.
