[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 158 (Tuesday, September 30, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2179-E2180]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E2179]]
             TRINITY COLLEGE CLASS OF 1958 50TH ANNIVERSARY

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, September 29, 2008

  Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Speaker, the Trinity College class of 1958 
celebrated its 50th anniversary of graduation this past May, in a 
festive gathering of classmates renewing friendships, reliving prized 
memories of their campus years, and sharing experiences of career paths 
followed since Trinity days.
  With my late wife, Jo, I met and came to respect and love the 
extraordinary women of the class of 1958: Bobbi Marhofer, Fran Collins, 
Judy Pauley, Carolyn Moynihan, among others, and those, like Jo, who 
are no longer with us--especially Jo's dearest friend in the class, 
Sara Lucas.
  The 1958 commencement address delivered by Senator John F. Kennedy 
could not have been more compelling or memorable than the reflective, 
thoughtful retrospective reunion address offered by Class of 1958 
alumna Colette Hoppmann Dowling, a gifted, talented, internationally 
renowned writer. Ms. Dowling invites not only her classmates, but all 
of us to consider soberly, profoundly, the risky status of older women 
who live alone--a condition none of the exuberant graduates in 1958 
could ever have anticipated.
  I invite my colleagues to read and reflect seriously on this message 
and its public policy implications.
  Colette Dowling is an internationally renowned writer of eight books 
whose ``The Cinderella Complex'' was translated into 23 languages. She 
is currently completing training in psychoanalysis and has a private 
therapy practice in Manhattan. Ms. Dowling gave the following talk to 
her classmates at the Trinity University Class of 1958's fiftieth 
reunion, on May 31, 2008, in Washington, DC.

            Facing Down the Bag Lady: Older Women in America

                       (By Colette Dowling, LMSW)

       Six years ago, in the spring of 2002, I was barreling down 
     the Mass Pike towards Woodstock, my ten-year-old Saab stuffed 
     to the tops of its windows with computer and printer, fax and 
     stereo, with towels and sheets and comforter, with jeans and 
     shirts and one good outfit in case I needed it. Last but not 
     least, my writing desk, which fortunately can be dismantled 
     for transport. Some surgeries that fall had slowed me down 
     and I'd had to give up my house in Woodstock and spend the 
     winter at my son's, in Massachusetts. Now I was returning to 
     the town I'd called home for 20 years. I rather liked that 
     I'd reached the point where I could travel light, but I had 
     to ask myself: How light is light? I was down to my last 
     sixty dollars and waiting for my next social security check 
     to arrive. The market value of my JP Morgan portfolio? One-
     tenth of a cent, according to the statement I'd just 
     received. Although my account had long been worthless they 
     were still sending me the things. I guess they were hanging 
     in for the long haul, as I was.
       Basically, when I wasn't imagining what my parents would 
     think if they could see me now, I was telling myself, ``I'll 
     handle this.'' I was reminding myself that I was unencumbered 
     and had an able mind. But I'd sold almost everything I owned, 
     not in order to enter a convent (although the thought had 
     crossed my mind) but because royalties from my books had 
     seriously dwindled. In recent months I'd found myself 
     thinking, ``I've worked hard all my life, sent my children to 
     college and graduate school. How could this have happened?''
       Earlier that year I'd written a proposal for a book on 
     discrimination against women in the workplace. Fifteen 
     publishers read it, and fifteen gracefully declined. ``We 
     agree with her thesis,'' one editor told my agent, ``but the 
     subject is too down.''
       Too down, indeed. In my 35 years as a writer, this was my 
     first rejection of a book proposal and it fueled my 
     apprehension that the winds of change were upon me. To 
     stabilize my later-life income I'd begun living in a rented 
     cottage and substantially cut my expenses. But then came two 
     shockers, first, a mastectomy for an early stage cancer. 
     Then, three weeks later, on the afternoon of September 11, I 
     entered the emergency room needing surgery for an obstructed 
     bowel caused by adhesions from a prior appendectomy. That 
     winter, after recuperating at my son's, in Massachusetts, I 
     forged ahead with research for another book proposal. That, 
     too, came to naught. Suddenly it seemed as if everything in 
     publishing had just dried up. For a while, an interest-free 
     loan from the Authors League Fund was what got me by.
       Two surgeries, two rejected book proposals, three strikes 
     and you're out. I had to come up with something radical and 
     decided to pursue an old dream. I'd long had fantasies of 
     becoming a psychoanalyst. I would need a masters in 
     social work before I could be accepted into an analytic 
     training institute. With two weeks to meet the deadline I 
     applied to Smith College and that summer--the summer of 
     2002--I began classes. It was going to be a long haul. 
     Smith would take two years and the analytic training 
     another four. I knew that by the time I finished I'd be 
     over 70.
       Once I entered school things were a little less rocky, 
     financially, thanks to school loans from the government. But 
     of course, once Smith ended so did the loans. I needed a job, 
     at least for the first couple of years of analytic training, 
     while I was getting my practice up and running. I became a 
     counselor for homeless children in the Brooklyn public 
     schools. The kids were great but the commute was hellish. 
     Each day after working with the kids I traveled an hour by 
     subway to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see patients in 
     the clinic of my analytic institute. For over a year I was 
     clocking fifteen hours a week on the subways, with house 
     music and hip hop leaking from people's headphones. I grew up 
     on Junior Walker and Elvis Presley and yearned for the day 
     when I could buy an Ipod in self defense.
       After a while, catching a little breathing space, I began 
     to do some research on how my finances stacked up against 
     those of other older women. What I learned was shocking. The 
     economic constraints I was experiencing were not only far 
     from unique, the odds had actually been in favor of my 
     becoming an older woman who had found herself, at sixty-five, 
     facing down the bag lady.
       Particularly at risk are older women who live alone. Over a 
     decade ago a U.S. Committee on Aging found that half of older 
     women living alone had incomes below $9,500 a year.
       But whether or not they live alone, the picture for older 
     women is pretty dim. According to the AARP Public Policy 
     Institute, the median income for women over 65 is just about 
     $3,000 above the Census definition of poverty. Older women 
     have slightly over half the money older men have.
       A third of us are getting by on $12,000 annually, often on 
     much less. Poverty by any other name, although the government 
     doesn't consider an individual officially poor if she's got 
     more than $8,000 coming in. The women who live on nothing but 
     Social Security--and that's almost a quarter of us--certainly 
     fit in the officially poor category.
       The only person in this country with less economic 
     protection than the older white woman is the older woman of 
     color. Of those over 65 and living alone, seventy-seven 
     percent of blacks and seventy-nine percent of Hispanics are 
     poor, once they've paid their social security taxes, 
     according to the Census Bureau. Forget that they don't have 
     pensions, many women of color don't even get Social 
     Security--those, for example, who work in domestic labor or 
     agriculture, fields of endeavor in which the pay is so low 
     it's often impossible to meet the minimum for a so-called 
     ``working quarter''. Without enough of these quarters, these 
     women who've worked all their lives picking peas and 
     scrubbing floors in order to support their children, end up 
     with nothing.
       The truth is, women travel the borders of poverty at many 
     points in their--as students, or young single mothers, or as 
     older women living alone. The National Women's Law Center 
     reports that 70% of women in America earn less than $20,000 a 
     year. Forty percent earn less than $10,000. Women are twice 
     as likely as men to be poor, a disparity that increases with 
     age.
       For some time I'd though there must be something wrong with 
     me for having arrived at such a low down place, some 
     elemental bad thing. It's because I never fully understood 
     that the financial pressures I endured at different times of 
     my life were standard for a women--first, as a woman entering 
     the job market, in 1958, later as a widow and a single 
     mother. I'd always held the conviction that the economic 
     price women pay for bearing children was temporary; sooner or 
     later they catch up. Now that I'm seeing things from the 
     other end of the age telescope, I'm beginning to get the 
     picture. They never catch up. According to the National 
     Center for Women and Retirement Research, for every year a 
     woman stays home caring for a child, she has to work an extra 
     five years to recover lost income. I needed only to apply the 
     five-year-per child formula to my own situation to understand 
     why I hadn't retired at 65. Three children equals fifteen 
     extra years. Eighty, here I come!
       The dire straits women face in old age have little to do 
     with age per se, Population Bulletin reports. It's the 
     economic disadvantages they face earlier in life that lead to 
     the insecurity they experience when they're older. For 
     example, two thirds of women who work outside the home have 
     no pensions. When they do, their benefits are half of 
     men's. A study from Brandeis that began in 1967 tracked 
     5,000 women over the course of their lives and found that 
     poverty in old age was the direct result of inequities 
     they'd faced when they were younger.
       This certainly, is not the way the public thinks about 
     older women's poverty, when it thinks about it at all.
       I'd always imagined that my work- and income-history would 
     put me in a place far different than where my mother found 
     herself in her final years. A quarter of a century ago I was 
     fortunate to have a best seller, but fortune can be 
     misleading. Royalties don't last forever. After The 
     Cinderella Complex the money I received on subsequent books 
     was only enough to get me through until the next proposal. 
     Like most writers I lived from book proposal to book 
     proposal. I'm proud of the eight books I've written but the 
     work hasn't provided me with long-term security. So here I am 
     now, in my seventies, with the hounds of heaven at my heels.

[[Page E2180]]

       Smith College, like Trinity, has a long history of 
     supporting women. It was a tremendous opportunity I was given 
     when Smith accepted this older woman into its graduate 
     program and gave me a scholarship. Without that support I 
     would not have had the chance to create a better life for 
     myself during my erstwhile ``retirement years''. But still, 
     it is late. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake and 
     wonder how long can I sustain the tremendous amount of energy 
     it takes to keep going. I have to face the fact that when I'm 
     in my eighties, my financial situation may not be so 
     different than my mother's after all.
       After my father died, my mother, at 82, was barely able to 
     make it on Social Security and my father's small teacher's 
     annuity. She had to spend her late life without enough money 
     to be sure it was going to last longer than she did. I can 
     remember her in the lamplight, with her scarlet robe and 
     short white hair, going over her bills. Toward the end, 
     knowing she'd reached a point where she couldn't stay out of 
     poverty much longer--there were the constant co-pays on 
     doctors' bills, and her savings were gone--she was having 
     dreams of finding herself in a bad part of town and not being 
     able to get back home. She was 86 when she died, in the nick 
     of time, her resources depleted. It saddens me that even with 
     assurances of protection from my brother and me she had to 
     endure such anxiety at the end.
       Studies have shown that concern about ending up a bag lady 
     is women's worst fear, greater than that of getting cancer, 
     greater than that of dying of a heart attack. And why 
     shouldn't they be afraid?
       To try to protect her old age, my mother had even taken on 
     the machinations of investing. I was still young when I 
     learned that she'd been putting her piano teacher savngs--
     ``pin money'', people called such women's earnings, then--
     into Certificates of Deposit. That was in the 70s, when CDs 
     were hot. Eventually her slender earnings grew to $40,000. I 
     was inspired by my mother's cleverness in finding a way to 
     support her old age, but alas, my father needed private 
     nursing for a few months before he died and overnight, my 
     mother's pin money disappeared.
       Women have been conditioned to believe that in the long run 
     it's all going to work out. I'm reminded of the many who've 
     worked part time, forgoing pensions, health insurance and 
     other benefits, because they couldn't afford child care. 
     Women are used to putting others first. As for their later 
     years, they think, How could I end up behind the eight-ball 
     when I've spent my life trying to do what's right? But as 
     they head into their sixties and seventies, behind the eight-
     ball is exactly where women find themselves. Most that I 
     know, writers, therapists, owners of small businesses, expect 
     to be working ``forever'' because otherwise they won't have 
     enough money to get by. Rallying themselves for a long, late-
     life phase of work, they push to stay ahead of the curve. For 
     some, for the fortunate, it's a kind of hip old age. We like 
     to think of ourselves as being ``out there''. But there's an 
     ominous feeling that permeates the thinning air past sixty. 
     Women worry about how they're going to survive as the years 
     roll on--and on. They lack a financial cushion for their 
     really old age and believe that no matter what, they must 
     stay healthy enough to keep on working. It's a desperate and 
     shame-inducing situation they find themselves in, and no 
     one's talking about it. That's why it's important for us--the 
     first generation of women to be affected by the women's 
     movement and the first to have a remarkable and unexpected 
     very long productive life ahead of us--to begin speaking up. 
     We must insist that the voices of older women be heard, 
     because no one is going to pick this up for us until we start 
     shouting. We can take some strength--and reduce shame--from 
     the recognition that our numbers are astounding. I believe 
     that if a presidential candidate were to take this on, the 
     ball game would be over. That's how strong we are, if we 
     choose to be. The more of us who speak up, just as we did in 
     the seventies, the greater the chances that attention will be 
     paid. Let the secret out. We owe it to our daughters and 
     granddaughters. We owe it to ourselves. Maybe it isn't too 
     late, even for us.

                          ____________________