Margret Hovanec - Redefining Retirement: New Realities for Boomer Women

Redefining Retirement

New Realities for Boomer Women

New Realities for Boomer Women

Dr. Margret Hovanec
Elizabeth Shilton

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hovanec, Margret, 1941
Shilton, Elizabeth, 1948
Redefining retirement : new realities for boomer women / by
Margret Hovanec and Elizabeth Shilton.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-897187-21-0

I . WomenRetirementCanada. 2. Baby boom generationCanada.
3. RetirementCanadaPlanning. I. Hovanec, Margret, 1941- II. Title.

HQ IO 63.2.C3S48 2007 646.790820971 C2007-900963-8

Copyright 2007 by Margret Hovanec and Elizabeth Shilton

Edited by Doris Cowan
Designed by Melissa Kaita
Cover photos Guillermo Perales Gonzalez/istockphoto.com

Printed and bound in Canada

Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Published by
Second Story Press
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M5V 2M5
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To my husband, Peter Warrian, and my mother, AnnaM.H.

To David, and to my motherE.S.

You cant open a newspaper these days without confronting apocalyptic headlines about the impending wave of retiring baby boomers. Those of us born between 1946 and 1964 are the demographic time bomb: whatever we do has always been the Next Big Thing. And what were going to do next is retire, en masse. The oldest boomers have just turned sixty, and over the next fifteen years we will transform the way the world works, plays, and does business. The health care system, the housing market, and the public and private pension systems will all have to adapt to us. The graying of the boomers has begun.

Many of these retiring boomers will be women. This fact has been largely unobserved, or at least unnoted, by both academic and popular experts on the issue. Its taken for granted that women work, and will retire as a matter of course. So of course the wave of boomer retirees will include women.

But we are about to experience something unique in our history not just the first wave of boomers retiring, but also the first wave ever of women retiring in significant numbers. Lets not forget that back in the 1960s, before the boomers began to embark on jobs and careers, the Canadian workforce was almost 80 percent male. By 1976, however, it was 37 percent female, and the percentage of women has been climbing steadily since then. In 2003 almost half (47 percent, according to Statistics Canada) of the Canadian workforce was female. Although working women are now very much the rule rather than the exception, the boomer generation is the first to include a significant proportion of women who have spent most of their lives in the paid workforce. Not all of us did, of course, and some early boomers chose lives not so very different from our mothers: marriage, homemaking, and raising children. But over the years most of those women too joined the world of work, some part time, some determined to build careers in their forties, or even their fifties. The majority of the boomer women who are now making retirement plans are the first critical mass of women ever to retire from the workforce in Canada.

The entry of large numbers of women into the paid workforce has been one of the dominant social trends in Canada over the last half century.

Statistics Canada, Women in Canada, 2000

The women who entered the labor force in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s saw themselves as pioneers, the first generation of women to have it all serious, fulfilling careers, good incomes, satisfied spouses, large, tastefully decorated homes, handsome, clever and well-adjusted children. We wanted something better than the lifestyles of our mothers and grandmothers, those domesticated women who stayed home to raise their children us instead of venturing out into the wider world of paid employment. We wanted to blaze a path for women into the real world, the world of serious work.

And we had to work hard to achieve our goals. Having it all, it turned out, wasnt a cakewalk. We read Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Ms. magazine, and we knew that our menfolk were not going to forgo their workplace privileges or take on their share of the housework without a struggle. There were challenges. But as a generation, we took on those challenges, and in our different ways we did surmount them. We found our path, and we changed society. Women are a visible and formidable presence in Canadian workplaces now. Our work is a critical component of the economy.

And now we, the pioneers, are reaching the age at which most Canadian workers are thinking about retirement. We were the first generation of women to enter the workforce in massive numbers, and now we will be the first generation of women to retire in massive numbers. We led the way in breaking down the entry barriers. Now we will have to lead the rush for the exits.

We were short on female role models in the world of work, and well be equally short on female role models for retirement. The generations of retirees before us were men, and weve had plenty of unfortunate experience in our working lives with the pitfalls of trying to squeeze ourselves into male molds. But even if we were tempted to follow that road again in retirement, weve got other obstacles facing us, because its not likely that the old models are going to work for very much longer, even for men. Its just our luck that we, the vanguard, will have to create a female retirement model in a world that is changing dramatically for all older Canadians, male or female.

The concept of retirement has evolved considerably over the years since it first entered cultural consciousness with the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. Initially, with the exception of the very few businessmen who struck it rich and retired to enjoy their wealth, retirement wasnt something working people planned. It simply happened. Industrial labor was hard and debilitating, and there came a time in every workers life when his body simply wore out that is, if he didnt die first from disease or accident. A worn-out worker ceased to be profitable to his employer, and he could no longer find a job. If he was thrifty and lucky, he might have something put by for his old age. Or perhaps he had adult children who would care for him until he died. If he had none of these resources, he and his spouse had to look to the state for their maintenance the dreaded poorhouse or its equivalent.

In this world, retirement was feared rather than welcomed. Public pensions, where they existed, were a form of welfare. Canadas first Old Age Pensions Act, introduced in 1927, allocated benefits only to the most needy. Private pensions too were rooted in the charitable concept of the relief of poverty for those who had lost the capacity for self-support. That stock character of Victorian fiction, the pensioned-off family retainer, came from a tradition of