‘Time for oneself and time for others’ – the subjective meanings of retirement

All of my participants started their narratives about their involvement in senior centre activities with a depiction of their transition to retirement. Women clients in the interviews spoke of retirement as a positive and welcome change, rooted in their desire to escape from their employment, which no longer brought them as much satisfaction as in the past. As Mrs Hana (67) put it, ‘I was feeling [before she retired] completely wrung out’. Although a number of the interviewed women mentioned the idea of keeping on working, most did not take advantage. The chance to get out of the daily work routine was an anxiously awaited change.

In these interviews retirement was mainly described as the moment of escape from responsibility, and the appearance of new room for interests that had long been in the background as people were too busy with their jobs. These responsibilities were related not only to work itself, but to taking care of the family, as shown in this quote from Mrs Anna (74):

As in the response by Anna, other participants often made comparisons between their current lifestyle and their previous life biography. They described their retirement as an opportunity to enjoy the hobbies they had to neglect in the past. It was above all a vision of the time they would have for themselves and their interests, a situation in direct contrast to their previous life biographies, which in their descriptions were focused on the motifs of work and caring for others. The stories told by these women also spoke of the dual burden of work and caring for the family, which has a fundamentally different impact on women than on men.

The glorification of retirement as a milestone opening up the opportunity for ‘time for oneself’ was a very strong motif in the responses of almost all of the women clients. Meanwhile, it is interesting that similar factors did not appear in the narratives of the men I spoke to at the centre. Mr Paul (73), who took part in activities at the centre with his wife, depicted the transition to retirement as forced by his health and pressure by his employer. He said that he wanted to work longer, because he liked it and it gave him satisfaction. He briefly worked even as a retiree. Mr Vincent (67), whom I met during his first and last visit, was a ‘fresh’ retiree. He also linked his retirement to worsening health, but it was the result of his own decision along with the realisation that ‘if he keeps on working like this he'll soon be dead’. He explained that what brought him to the centre was curiosity, and although he was pleasantly surprised by the lecture he attended, he did not intend to take part further. His decision not to become further involved he associated with his idea of retirement as a milestone that will change his lifestyle routine. He constructed his attitude toward the centre in a similar way as the women clients, in the context of his previous biography, which was very much burdened by work and concentration on his career. Although he and his wife had four children, he mentioned that he did not take much part in their upbringing. Like the women clients, he too described his retirement in terms of escaping from the routine and responsibilities associated with his previous work biography. Instead of the ‘time for myself’ described by the women clients, however, Mr Vincent mainly talked about the chance to do something for other people whom he had neglected in the past, as in the following excerpt from our interview:

For both women clients and Mr Vincent, retirement symbolised the chance to escape from the expectations that were placed on them in the context of their previous roles. Mr Vincent related his intention not to become involved in the centre to his wish to devote time to his wife and grandchildren, whom he had neglected because he was so busy with work. The women clients, however, linked their active lifestyle and involvement in the centre to their past neglect of their own interests.

The differing gendered life experience led to a greater probability of bringing certain actors to the centre, while others did not find the concept of lifestyle in old age offered by centres appealing. At the same time, I suggest that the very principles on which the discourse on active ageing is based share a number of common elements with the mechanisms with which femininity is constructed and embodied, and therefore appeal more to those who were exposed to such gender attitudes during their lifetimes. Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1998) in this context comments that gender is ‘impressed’ on to the bodies of men and women in the form of dispositions influencing the schemata of perception and behaviour. These dispositions are in no way related to the biological body or any other form of essentialist concept of gender, but are the product of ‘a somatized social relationship, a social law converted into an embodied law’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 39). They are embodied through the perpetual training of the body and ‘make a person both inclined and able to enter into the social games’ reserved to certain social groups (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998: 59). The disciplining of one's own body as an integral part of establishing femininity, whether through practices that demand constant care for one's own body and appearance (e.g. Bartky Reference Bartky, Diamond and Quinby1988; Bordo Reference Bordo1993; Young Reference Young2005), or through practices requiring constant negotiation and balancing the needs of work, care and maintenance of a household, shaped themselves into a certain disposition to activity, which was developed through the discourse of active ageing. The discourse on active ageing, with its appeal to keep up activity and constantly be ‘doing something’ (Katz Reference Katz2000) in many ways follows these patterns. Mrs Renata, an employee of the senior centre, expressed a similar interpretation as follows:

The ‘multiple directions’ and ‘running around’ that Mrs Renata talked about symbolised the combination of work and running a household that was present also in the narratives of women clients. In the context of their gendered biography, the women clients relate to the transition into retirement as a chance to pay some attention to themselves instead of others, and devote some time to their own interests. At the same time, their active lifestyle to a certain extent followed the pattern of ‘multiple directions’ and ‘running around’ that was typical for their life before retirement. A number of studies (e.g. Everingham, Warner-Smith and Byles Reference Everingham, Warner-Smith and Byles2007; Russell Reference Russell2007) in this context point out that gender expectations and previous life experience allow women (in comparison to men) to better mobilise new sources of authority and self-satisfaction in retirement and to find alternative forms of self-fulfilment outside the structures of the labour market. Among these we can also include active participation at the centres.

The gendered character of their previous biographies and the self-discipline practices that are part of the discourse on active ageing and which, as I have tried to show above, share some similar features with the way femininity is constructed and embodied, can be seen as significant factors contributing to the fact that the idea of active ageing as mediated by the centres appeals more to women than to men. In the following section I will present the senior centres as gendered organisations. I will try to show that despite the seeming invisibility of gender as a principle that structures the way these centres are run, they are organisations that are gendered and where gender emerges as a basic principle affecting the chances for participation in active ageing as presented by the centres.

The centres as women's space

Although the centres and their activities are intended to address all seniors, a closer look at the structure of activities shows more of a focus on interests traditionally associated with women. The main programmes offered by the centres are language courses. Another major element consists of arts and crafts (pottery, sewing, painting). Exercise programmes include relaxation exercises such as yoga and belly dancing. Likewise even the non-regular activities such as lectures are aimed implicitly or explicitly at women clients. At one centre, for example, during one year besides the standard activities there were only lecture blocks entitled ‘How to be Healthy and Not Gain Weight’ and ‘Thanks to a Healthy Diet We Shed Extra Kilos’.

The gendered nature of the organisation is also reflected in less subtle ways. Through minor practices such as permanent decorations and the year-round exhibits in the corridors, the centres' environment is marked out as a feminine space (for example in one of the years studied the topics of the exhibits were: the ideal housekeeper, old dolls, pottery, teas, summer). The decoration of the centres symbolically establishes the presence of women as automatic and assumed. The symbolic definition of the space as feminine also shapes the expectations of the assumed visitor, which it welcomes a priori. Men, although not explicitly excluded, become a kind of unexpected visitor.

The chess club in the Prague centre represented the only solely ‘men's’ club and the only activity where men were concentrated. The chess club held a special position among the activities of the centres. It had become a symbol of the presence of men. The participants of the chess club did not participate in other social clubs and activities run by the centres and their behaviour was frequently the target of criticism. The chess players were often described by other clients and employees as troublemakers, as explained, for example, by Mrs Gabriel, an employee: ‘the first six months at the centre I was occupied only with complaints about the chess club … It's true that they're really rude sometimes, when they drink they just … you know …’. On the other hand, the chess club was privileged among other clubs. The membership fee was lower and the club met more often than other clubs. The chess club became a symbol of the presence of masculinity in the otherwise feminine environment. This fact problematised its position. The members of the chess club were seen not only as different but also as a disturbing element. At the same time, however, they were able to benefit from their status as tokens of masculinity.

Besides the men's chess club and the men's music group which does not meet on a regular basis, men are found at the centres in other activities and programmes only sporadically. Their presence and involvement at events followed a remarkably similar pattern. In a few cases men regularly attended computer and language courses. Sometimes they showed up at social clubs and thematic programmes. The men often appeared at the club only once, and never returned to the centre. This behaviour was in sharp contrast to the behaviour of women clients, who on the contrary tended to intensify their presence and take on more and more activities. Why did men not come back to the centre and take part in activities that were open to all clients? The answer to this question may be found in analysis of the interactions that took place at the point when men became involved in the centres. As I will try to show in the next section, it was at these moments that establishment of the borders of the centres as a feminine space were the strongest.

Men as the active, disappearing and ‘weaker sex’

Although there were only a few male clients present in the centres, when they did attend the activities they almost always became the most active participants, as illustrated by the following excerpt from field notes from one of the lectures organised by the centre.

Mr Vincent (67) was making his first visit to the centre; the four women participants were regular visitors. Mr Vincent, even though he told me in the subsequent informal interview that he liked the event, also expressed doubts whether he would ever come back to the centre. I myself never saw him again. His activity strongly contrasted with the behaviour of the women clients, who were much more active in terms of involvement at the centre. Men usually visited the centre once and never came back. This was true especially for the Meeting Club, which was conceived as a place for seniors to meet one another. An employee of the centre, Mrs Renata, summed up similar situations like this:

As Mrs Renata says, if they visit the centre men take part in the programme, and are welcomed with rejoicing; they like the programme, but then they never show up again. This is a paradoxical situation in which men are often the most active participants, but usually never visit the centre again, and are in the permanent minority on the courses. It is possible that the centres draw a certain type of men who are much more active than their female colleagues. Even so I believe that this type of explanation, although we cannot ignore it, provides us only a vague understanding of the interactions that take place at the centre.

The position of Mr Vincent was defined by two boundaries: the boundary of a newcomer who must introduce himself, and the boundary of a man whose presence produces an uncertain impression. His active behaviour, accompanied by a constant effort to present himself, can also be interpreted as a reaction to the need to establish one's own position between these two boundaries. Men clients taking part in the social clubs often never overcame the first boundary of being the new person, because their first visit was their last. The second boundary remains in place even if the men end up attending the centre regularly.

Even though men were always explicitly welcomed, and employees in view of the low numbers of men always tried to involve them as much as possible (often at the expense of women clients), the very presence of men and their behaviour did not always produce a positive reaction. The activity of men in some cases was perceived as a form of disruption. Their presence as a ‘risk factor’ was further increased by the gender boundaries of an otherwise homogeneous group of women. While women clients symbolically entered the centres with the self-confident feeling of expected participants, even if it was their first time, men entered as symbolic personifications of the male gender. As with other tokens, it was not expected that they share the same unwritten assumptions, attitudes or problems as the other members of this otherwise homogeneous collective (Kanter Reference Kanter1993). The presence of men, however explicitly welcomed, at the same time became a clear threat to the very functioning of the centres.

In the presence of men the interaction between participants always took place in a particular manner; the usual approaches did not work. It took major efforts on the part of employees to deal with these situations. These concerns were expressed also by Mrs Margaret, an employee of the centre, who said in an informal conversation:

In Margaret's description the presence of men is questionable not only because of their increased activity at the expense of the others, but mainly because of their influence on the interaction among the others. Men and women were constructed as polarised groups between which there are differences that prevent the mutual understanding and communication that form the main content of these activities. Through interpretations of clients' behaviour in terms of sexualised relations, these differences were constantly confirmed and reconstructed.

The man in Mrs Renata's description comes to the club for completely different reasons than his female colleagues, and his presence changes the previous purpose of the meeting. Even though these episodes were described by the employees with a certain degree of amusement, they played a fundamental role in interpreting the mutual interaction between men and women at the centre, and simultaneously served to (re)construct the distinctions between them as gendered beings.

The presence of men was seen by the employees as problematic for two reasons. First, men emerged as actors whose behaviour overshadows the others. Second, their presence was perceived as disruptive with respect to their impact on the behaviour of the women clients. Suddenly everything seemed to revolve around the men clients. The topics and behaviour of the women were suddenly determined by new rules. Both of these processes led to a situation in which the presence of men became a major problem – the activities as they were conceived by the centres' employees and their philosophy began to dissolve. Although the participants took an active part, it was not in pursuit of the original goals. The disruption of the character of the services offered by the centre also disrupts the position of the centre as a mediator or key to this beneficial activity. Despite the fact that men were explicitly welcomed at the centre, implicitly they become unwelcome interlopers, whose presence has the potential to destroy the development of ‘proper’ activities.

‘There are too few men and we must pamper them’ – construing the anomaly of men's presence

The interloper status of men and the automatically assumed presence of women were constantly being reconstructed during the minor everyday interactions in the centres. As I have tried to show in the previous section, the presence of men at the activities was perceived as potentially threatening to the ‘proper’ course of activities, and men found themselves in the position of implicitly unwelcome visitors. This does not mean, however, that employees excluded the men from the activities directly. The presence of men was always welcomed, and often caused excitement, as documented by the extract from field notes of the first and only visit by Mr Vincent at the centre:

Similar reactions of praise and appreciation for men's activity were evident in the statements by other centre employees. Men were praised not only as active participants, but also as men. Implicit in this praise of them as men was the fact that their presence there was not a matter of course. These interactions, the goal of which was to encourage the men to repeat the visit, thus paradoxically assisted in their exclusion. The extraordinary status of the men visitors was re-affirmed, and their presence highlighted as a deviation.

The re-construction of the centre as a feminine space also took place in situations where men had become regular clients of the centre. Their status as a ‘special case’ deviating from the gender norm was confirmed again and again as part of the interaction, as illustrated by the following incident from the English language course.

The reaction of Mrs Wendy after entering the class marks the boundary between the ordinary and the out-of-the-ordinary. Although part of the disruption was her interest in his continuing to take part (‘we have to pamper him’), her remark also indicated the barrier between him and the other, women clients. At this point Mr Blue becomes something special – the ‘other’. He stands out from the crowd of students as something strange, almost amusing. In both cases – with men who came for the first time to the centre and whose willingness to appear was praised by the centre's well-intentioned employees, as well as with regular clients whose presence was still seen as temporary and peculiar – the environment of the centre was reconstructed as space belonging to women. The presence of tokens underlines rather than undermines the majority culture (Kanter Reference Kanter1993). Within the context of individual interactions, the norm of women as the assumed clients was constantly re-established.

I have tried to show that there are mechanisms at work at the centres which contribute to the systematic exclusion of men. Nonetheless, those mechanisms can be interpreted as a reaction to the small number of men attending. The organisation is simply adjusting the services to meet the needs of women who constitute the majority of the clients. However, in the next part an attempt will be made to show that gender symbolism is deeply grounded in the very conceptualisation of the activities and image of the ‘active senior’ as construed by both employees and clients of the centre. For this reason I believe that the process of exclusion of men described above cannot be simply the result of their fewer numbers, but is implicit in the structural mechanisms of the organisation itself and the manner in which masculinity and femininity at the centre are construed in relation to its activities. This ‘gender ideology’ is grounded in the organisational logic of the centres, and at the same time produces and legitimises the above-described mechanisms leading to the exclusion of men.

Active women and passive men – a gendered description of active seniors

The absence of men at the centre was evident on first glance; both employees and women clients were quite conscious of that fact. However, neither of these groups perceived it as a problem. Whenever I mentioned this fact during the interviews, both employees and women clients responded with similar interpretations, starting with a reference to the statistically lower numbers of senior men in society. Men as a group do indeed differ from women in life expectancy. In 2010 in the Czech Republic men aged 65 could hope to live another 15·2 years, women 18·7 years (ČSÚ 2011). Especially among the lower age groups, the presence of seniors at the centre is affected by early retirement. There are more than twice as many men than women still employed in the age group 60 plus (ČSÚ 2012). Despite these statistically significant differences in the biographies of men and women, we cannot assume that they are the cause of such a major gender disproportion in the composition of visitors to the senior centres, where women frequently make up as much as 90 per cent of the clients.

The insufficiency of this type of explanation was evident even to the centre's employees: although they primarily referred to the statistical explanation, at the same time they did not give it fundamental importance. When explaining the reasons for the absence of men, they refer mainly to the natural differences between masculinity and femininity. They share this conception with women clients, who related in the same way to their own lifestyles and the representation of masculinity:

Likewise, senior centre employee Lucy referred to the natural difference in the nature and life attitudes of men and women.

Both employees and clients constructed femininity through references to activity, sociability and determination. Their representation of men in their old age, on the other hand, was connected with passivity and unwillingness to try new things. This difference came out in reference to gender as a part of the male or female nature.

Not even the sporadic presence of men at the centre could break down the dichotomy between active women and passive men. Men present in the centres were not seen as someone seeking activity (i.e. something associated with femininity). Employees most often associated men's presence with the activity of their wives instead. As Mrs Iva mentioned: ‘women find this place, men have to be led to it’. For women, involvement in the activities of the centre was interpreted as a fundamental aspect of their natural activity. But the same activity by men was interpreted as being the initiative of their wives. Their presence at the centre did not diverge from the perceived relationship between activity and femininity, and masculinity and passivity. On the contrary, it was interpreted in accordance with that logic.

Male passivity, meanwhile, has always had a negative connotation. Employees of the centre often associated it with the barriers women faced in becoming fully involved in the centre, as in the case of the response by employee Mrs Iva:

The depiction given by Mrs Iva concerned women who seek new friends and self-fulfilment in old age. At the same time it embodied the idea of the ‘naturally active spirit’ dormant in women, which is often blanketed by the passivity of their partners and responsibilities connected with taking care of the family. Based on my observation I can confirm that a relatively large number of women clients were widows. The ones I had a chance to talk with, however, mostly said that the turning point of their involvement in the centre was more their own retirement than the loss of their partner. Only in the case of women who came to the centres only for the social clubs (or started out with them) did the motif of widowhood play a more prominent role. The social clubs were conceived as meeting places for seniors who are threatened by loneliness. The loss of a partner often figured as the mechanism triggering the need for such services. About one-quarter of the women I interviewed were married, but their husbands took part in such activities either sporadically or not at all. Although the women always referred to their previous biography in their narratives about how they became involved in the centres, much more important than their partners was the chance to control their own time which gained with retirement, and their declining investment in taking care of the household.

The dichotomy of activity and passivity represents an important element of gender symbolism at the senior centres, which structures men and women into two different groups. The behaviour and motives of the representatives of these groups were interpreted in light of the assumed relationship between masculinity and passivity, and femininity and activity, while these interpretations then served to confirm these gender stereotypes. The symbolic difference between femininity/activity and masculinity/passivity was encoded into the workings of the centre, and at the same time served as a mechanism for legitimising the absence of men. In the previous section I pointed out the existence of a number of mechanisms of exclusion which may have played a part in the absence of men. These mechanisms to a significant degree grew out of the gender symbolism that served as the framework for workings of the centre in the sense of structuring its activities and spaces, as well as for interpreting the reasons why men attend the centre. The absence of men was not seen as a problem. Internalisation of the relation between masculinity and passivity made their absence a natural thing, and at the same time masked any role the centre might have had in their possible exclusion. Linking femininity with activity was considered natural by both employees and women clients. The very concept of the active senior carries with it a clearly female connotation, which implicitly excluded men from being represented. Thus the centres, with its programme of activities, its spaces and through its employees, embodied the assumed relationship between activity and femininity.

The notions of activity and passivity represent one of the basic dichotomies structuring gender relationships in general. The manner in which various actors in the centres conceptualised this dichotomy, however, reveals gender as social construct whose content varies in different contexts. As a number of authors point out (e.g. Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998; Martin Reference Martin1991), in the dichotomies establishing gender relations, activity was traditionally associated with masculinity. Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1998) even sees the division between active masculinity and passive femininity as a fundamental principle of social relations and the dominance of the male principle. In the context of the senior centre, however, this dichotomy was turned on its head. Men appeared as naturally more passive, less pushy and more dependent on their female partners. The significance of gender symbolism for conceptualising the active senior thus points to the fundamental importance of gender for structuralising the status positions of seniors in relation to the ideal model of ageing, and the variability of content that is associated with femininity and masculinity.