Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later Life

A unique feature of human development is that mothers and fathers are bound to a long period of childrearing, during which the continuity of our species depends on the fulfillment of distinct parental roles and on the suppression of psychological potentials that conflict with those roles. But once the "parental emergency" is over, David Gutmann argues, men and women can assert those parts of themselves curbed by the restrictions of raising children. It is this shift in roles--a product of evolution found throughout our species--that led David Gutmann to propose a new psychology of aging, based not on the prospect of loss but on the promise of important new pleasures and capacities.

"This pioneering book departs from the doom and gloom ageism of most gerontology and opens new vistas of the unique possibilities of the last third of life and of the ultimate growth and self-realization for both women and men." --Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique