Meaning of aging in women's lives

As limited resources led me to combine teaching and research responsibilities, my students have been participating in an assignment that involves listening to aging women in order to discover how women explain the aging process. We have conducted 329 comprehensive interviews of women who were living in the decade of their sixties, seventies, eighties, or nineties. In this sample of predominantly southern women in the United States, meaning of age is explained in a process involving both looking back (reminiscence) and looking ahead (preminiscence) at one's life course with specific references to changes in one's body, family, home, and "keeping the faith.".