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Our medical model of "successful aging" without disability sets up the majority of the population, especially women, for failure.
Models of successful aging based primarily on the avoidance of disease, disability, and functional loss set up the majority of the older adult population for failure-a majority of whom are women, in particular, women of color. This article explores the ableism embedded in successful aging, as enacted through a medical model approach to disability. The authors propose understandings of aging that integrate a social model of disability, to de-pathologize disability, acknowledge the complex experiences of disability and disease, strengthen gerontology's interdisciplinary work, and avoid leveraging ableism to combat ageism. | key words: disability, ableism, successful aging, social model
Several years ago, while working in a senior housing co-op development, one of us (Berge) witnessed a troubling conversation between several residents in a high-end Midwest cooperative. The older adults discussed their desire to keep people who used wheelchairs from playing cards near the sunny lobby windows, where they would be visible to passersby. On another occasion, having heard from residentmembers that they had downsized and moved into the co-op because they wanted to age in place there, Berridge asked the architect why there were no universal design features-or at least grab bars-in any of the newly built bathrooms. The architect explained that the units would sell better this way. Some of the residents and architect apparently shared a concern that outsiders would see the co-op as a place for old and disabled people-an image they wanted to avoid.
Anthropologists Lamb, Robbins-Ruszkowski, and Corwin (2017) shared a similar story from Lamb's research involving a Boston retirement home where residents considered banning wheelchairs in the main dining hall. One resident who supported the ban explained that seeing the wheelchairs disturbed her because, "I don't like the intermingling of the well and the sick."
Such examples of elders distancing themselves from and judging other elders who are disabled or ill are not surprising in the United States, where we often define and uplift the healthy older adult as one who is not disabled and is active, productive, and "not looking her age." Phrases such as "70 is the new 50" reflect a "positive aging" discourse, which suggests that the...