56 pages • 1 hour read
Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age
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Part 3, Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The People on the Boat”
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “Travel Companions”
Chapter 14 highlights the importance of female friends in old age. It describes a story about Emma, who went camping with friends during a summer solstice. One friend shared her lupus diagnosis and husband’s cancer diagnosis, so the other women created a healing ceremony to help her deal with her emotions.
Pipher claims that women have always worked together and excel at discussing their problems and providing empathy. She notes that society does not teach people about the importance of friends, especially when aging, but that friends provide comfort and care. She offers an anecdote about her friend Betty, who helped Pipher during her mother’s death, as well as an anecdote about Carrie, whose friends helped her get through her husband’s death and learn resilience. Carrie also invited a friend to move in with her, strengthening her social connections.
Pipher describes ways to keep friendships exciting by bringing new people into one’s circle, doing new things, and having new discussions. As an example, Pipher and her friend Marge attend a museum once a month and discuss what they see. Friends can also bring people together and connect each other, such as when Betty hosts parties that bring the neighborhood together.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Co-Captains”
Chapter 15 discusses the role of long-term marriages in older women’s lives. Pipher notes that long-term relationships must change as the people in them change. She also notes that marriages today last longer because people live longer and that people in long marriages learn skills to maintain them. Emma and her husband, for example, have learned to move past small issues and manage conflict in healthy ways.
Research shows that people who remain married are not perfect but are committed to maintaining their marriages. John and Julie Gottman, who are relationship experts, stress the beneficial impact of positive interactions between partners and the importance of not dwelling on negativity, which they contend generates more negativity. Pipher also suggests that people who are married need room to grow individually and make their own decisions. They also need conflict management, listening, and empathy skills and the ability to ask for what they need or desire.
Pipher cites the increasing divorce rate for older people and research by historian Stephanie Coontz, who asserts that staying married is more difficult today than in the past because there are fewer advantages, and bad marriages are bad for one’s health. However, good marriages help enhance women’s health and wealth.
A few anecdotes depict strong marriages: An anecdote about Sylvia illustrates how couples understand each other because they have a shared history; Barbara and Judy have similar interests, respect each other, and have faced challenges that strengthened their marriage; and Pipher and her husband have experienced both challenges and good times together.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: “The Lifeboat of Family”
Chapter 16 addresses the central role of family in older women’s lives, beginning with an anecdote about Kestrel, whose mother wanted her sons to visit during the summer before her death. After the visit, Kestrel, who had not seen her brothers in years, realized that she needed family in her life.
Aging makes people value family more, boosts their interest in family history, and establishes a person’s initial self-concept, Pipher contends. People can choose whom they see as their family, including non-relatives, but there is always someone in one’s family they connect with, she claims. She describes how family provides memories that help heal or explain family history, which can be explored through letters, old photos, interviews with family members, or visiting places of family history.
The chapter ends with an anecdote about Garnet and Donald, who benefit from sustained family support and value their family, which illustrates how family can be a “lifeboat” of support.
Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary: “Grandchildren”
Chapter 17 considers the role of grandchildren, who provide a special and “sacred” relationship, Pipher states. Grandparents can let their grandchildren be themselves and allow them to live in the moment and not focus on scheduled activities or school.
Through Sylvia, Glenda, and Doug, Pipher demonstrates the enjoyment older people feel when spending time with their grandchildren. Pipher also details how she tries to integrate memories of her grandmothers into her relationship with her grandchildren. She includes other personal stories about the joy of her grandchildren.
Grandparents can educate grandchildren about moral behavior, life, and the world through storytelling and discussions. They can also teach them about family history, values, and work. For example, during a tornado warning, Pipher taught her grandson about nature and her family’s enjoyment of storms. Grandparents can also impart information about their own childhood, their parents’ childhood, and world history, disseminating their family history and knowledge to grandchildren. In return, grandchildren can give grandparents joy, such as bringing up childhood memories, providing humor, helping them handle loneliness, and providing them purpose.
At the end of the chapter, Pipher cautions women that they will need to change as grandchildren grow up and change; she also encourages women not to question their children’s decisions about their own children.
Part 3, Chapters 14-17 Analysis
Part 3 emphasizes the benefits of connections as women age, as part of the book’s holistic view of positive aging that encompasses skills, connections, and mindsets. Social connections are important throughout a person’s life, and Pipher shows how connections come in different forms. Instead of focusing on spouses, for instance, she looks at the myriad relationships an older woman can have, from friends to grandchildren, and how each can positively impact their lives.
Part 3 also connects with the theme of Facing Change With Growth, Adaptation, and Resilience, as it shows how spouses can change and how marriages can change with them, becoming more resilient. This section also links to the importance of skills in navigating later life, discussed more fully in Part 2, as older people need to develop skills to maintain their marriages. Pipher again connects sections to each other to support her holistic perspective.
It is notable that Pipher’s argument for the importance of female friends, spouses, family, and grandchildren leaves out the role of male friends in a woman’s life and generalizes about female versus male characteristics in its claim that women excel at discussing problems and having empathy. While men can also exhibit these qualities, Pipher focuses on women and their relationships to reflect the audience of the book.
In the Introduction, Pipher challenges dominant societal ideas about older women, but in this section, the author promotes other gendered stereotypes. While she acknowledges that not all women have the same experiences and can choose the people in their lives whom they consider family, the text presumes that older women have or want a spouse or partner, have friends or can easily make them, have or want grandchildren, have family, and have the ability to retire. It becomes more difficult to make friends as people get older, and some people are confined to their homes and cannot easily connect with people. In addition, some women prefer to be single in later life, and others prefer to remain child-free, therefore having no grandchildren. In excluding these circumstances, Pipher maintains a focus on a generalized older woman and does not include the variety of experiences others might have. Only a few of her interviewees follow alternative life paths, such as Willow, who does not have children, and Kestrel, who only enters a committed relationship at the end of her story.
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