Exploring Ageism as a Structure of Consciousness Across the Female Life Course Through the Work of Simone de Beauvoir

Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper considers ageism as a structure of consciousness, with important convergences with, as well as departures from, those associated with gender. Specifically, it explores the double consciousness through which the self is experienced negatively as old, at 2 points in a woman’s life course, namely midlife and “old age.” The first kind of ageism works through the double standard of aging and the gender hierarchy, whereby women can no longer successfully comply with the objectification of the male gaze. This is a moment of intense age consciousness, tainted by a gendered narrative of decline, working jointly from the outside in and from the inside out. The second form of ageism has its source in the social world, in the reactions of other people to old age, resulting in an uneasy dialectic between one’s own sense of an ageless or youthful self and the alien view of self as old. The paper proceeds as follows. After a brief account of Beauvoir’s general philosophical approach, I compare and contrast the doubled consciousness associated with aging as a woman and with aging in a more general sense as described in The Second Sex and The Coming of Age, respectively. I then flesh out this conceptual framework by drawing on fiction and autofiction written by Beauvoir herself. Together, this approach vividly illuminates the important interconnections and intersections between ageism and sexism, the way they work together, as well as separately, across the female life course.