56 pages • 1 hour read
Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Facing Change With Growth, Adaptation, and Resilience
The book weaves the topics of growth, change, adaption, and resilience throughout chapters as key experiences of old age. Each connects to the other, as growth occurs through experiencing change, adapting to that change, and becoming resilient to change.
Pipher advocates for a “developmental perspective” in later life to stimulate growth. A developmental perspective is a psychological concept that emphasizes milestones throughout life stages, such as the development of specific skills in children and building relationships and purpose in adulthood. For Pipher, the developmental perspective in later life entails embracing opportunities for growth from the complex challenges that occur during this period.
One challenge older women face is dealing with changing bodies and ideas of attractiveness and sexuality as they age. Ava’s story illustrates how these changing bodies impact identity: Ava’s sexuality and beauty are key to her identity, and when that self-perception changed after being called a “senior citizen,” she struggled with the loss of this identity, which required her to adapt to a new self-concept.
For older women, loss often involves the loss of loved ones or abilities; however, death, health problems, and loss converge to provide growth opportunities. Pipher explains, “For us to survive loss, we must grow, and it is this growth that will propel us into a life of even greater meaning and gratitude” (83). These issues force women to adapt to new realities, such as the need to care for spouses, as Willow does in dealing with Saul’s Parkinson’s disease. Death creates the need to adapt to living without a spouse, such as with Pat, who learned what was important in life when her husband died.
Older women also face loneliness, which—if reframed as solitude and cherished as alone time—can prompt growth. Because older people have more alone time than younger people, they must adapt to this new situation, change their thinking about it, and grow from the experience to find new activities that help them enjoy that time.
The book’s second section outlines skills older women can use to grow, change, and adapt to their new lives, or become more resilient. These include self-awareness, changing one’s attitude, listening to one’s inner voice, building an enjoyable day, creating a community, reframing past stories, and learning gratitude. Each skill offers different opportunities to grow, such as learning about one’s needs through increased self-awareness, which helps women change their views of themselves and grow.
Once older women have learned these skills, Pipher argues, they can experience the wholeness and beauty of life. Growth leads to bliss, authenticity, self-acceptance, and deeper perspectives on life.
Intention and Gratitude Support Positive Aging
The book focuses on positive aspects of aging, including gratitude and the importance of making intentional choices to create positivity. Although Pipher addresses negative events and emotions like death, loss, loneliness, and health problems, she pushes women to uncover the positive aspects of these experiences and grow from them.
Pipher’s emphasis on positive aging involves adopting an intentionally positive outlook on negative experiences. Even issues like death, loneliness, and health concerns can be viewed with positivity, either by recognizing the growth opportunities within these experiences or by reframing them: “Maneuvering this stretch of river requires flexibility, a tolerance for ambiguity, openness to new vistas, and the ability to conceptualize all experiences in positive ways” (18). Loneliness can be reframed as solitude. Death, health problems, and loss can prompt appreciation and gratitude for what one has. For example, Pipher’s hand problems made her appreciate what she could do, even though she had limitations, and see the experience in a positive light.
Having a positive outlook on aging necessitates intention. Pipher contends that older women can choose to see the world in positive ways and with gratitude to further their happiness: “Happiness is a choice and a set of skills” (105). This reflects positive psychology’s emphasis on happiness and strengths, as exemplified through psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky’s assertion “reframing our situations in positive ways, being thankful, and giving to others” creates happiness (106). The act of reframing necessitates intention to view situations in a positive light.
Pipher also addresses positivity in the context of reframing the stories women tell themselves. Seeing one’s past narratives in positive terms helps older women understand their lives:
We can’t change our pasts, but we can still change our stories. It isn’t just long histories that influence our lives; it’s also the narratives we tell ourselves about that history. Stories allow us to make sense of our lives, resolve our omnipresent contradictions, and understand ourselves and other people. They give us the context for comprehending the flow of life that constantly surrounds us (137).
Stories involving sadness can be reframed to unearth gratitude, such as reminding oneself of resilience, what was learned, or the growth that occurred.
Chapter 13 highlights gratitude, in particular, as a positive aspect of aging and argues that aging also helps people improve their gratitude skills:
Through trial and error learning, we know that if we focus on the good and positive, we see ourselves as lucky. Whereas, when we focus on grievances, past pains, regrets, and disappointments, we can make ourselves feel unlucky and miserable. Also we are likely to have experienced sad events that propelled us toward gratitude as a means of psychic survival (148).
Focusing on the positive aspects of life stimulates gratitude; without this positive attitude, it is harder to find that gratitude.
By reframing one’s thinking about negative events and issues, having positive intention, reframing one’s stories more positively, and having gratitude, older women can create a more positive aging experience.
Refocusing on Self During Aging
The book maintains a focus on the self as an essential aspect of growth during later life. It highlights the role of self-care, self-reflection, and self-awareness in improving and prompting growth as women age.
Self-care may be a new concept for women who have taken care of others throughout their lives and sacrificed their own needs. Emma, who tried to make everyone happy, learned that “good women were happy only when others were happy and to monitor the room and take emotional responsibility for all of the feelings in it. No one ever taught her to take care of herself” (98). Her childhood socialization taught her to neglect her own needs, and she never learned to focus on herself. This shows how self-care is a skill that older women must learn after years of caring for others.
Chapter 8 emphasizes the importance of identifying one’s needs through self-awareness to be able to learn self-care, showing the link between the two concepts. One self-awareness activity Pipher describes is creating position statements that set boundaries about what one will and won’t do. Learning to say “no” is an important way older women can assert their selves and needs. This connects with self-care activities that help older women maintain balance in their lives, such as how Sylvia began swimming and journaling. Pipher explains that “self-awareness allows us to separate our own needs and desires from those of others […and] not take everything personally, and yet to also assume responsibility for ourselves” (204). Self-awareness not only helps women reconsider their lives but focus more on themselves and take responsibility for their own needs.
Self-reflection connects to self-awareness because it requires listening to one’s inner voice and needs. Older women must reflect on what they want in life to address those needs. Self-reflection also occurs when women reframe stories about themselves and learn gratitude. Pipher notes why she uses writing for self-reflection: “I get to tell a second story about whatever happens to me. […] I can shape events in ways that are more beautiful and happiness-producing. Indeed, what is all art, if not an attempt to tell a better story?” (139). Not only does Pipher demonstrate how one can reframe a story through reflection, but she connects it to creativity. Robert Emmons’s research with transplant patients further demonstrates how self-reflection improves feelings of gratitude. Research subjects who kept daily gratitude lists increased their scores on assessments of positive adjustment and well-being, while those who did not keep lists had decreased scores.
Self-awareness, self-care, and self-reflection help women focus on themselves in later life to improve their life experiences and understand what is important. It allows them to feel authenticity, have perspective on their lives, and find bliss, discussed in the final section as the culmination of learning these skills.
Unlock all 56 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
