K IRS TEN SA X TON
A Future for Old Women FOUR YEARS AGO, at the age of 75, Ruth
Saxton says she wrote The Book of
O. Saxton, MA ’72, retired from teaching
Old Ladies because she “wanted to com-
English full-time at Mills College, a job
plicate people’s notions of old women.
she had held since 1974. Honored with
We’re capable of a lot more growth and
the title of professor emerita, Saxton had
change than you would guess from por-
earned the right to look back with sat-
trayals in books.” But it’s not only the
isfaction at her career as a preeminent
content of the book that dismantles
Virginia Woolf scholar, an exemplary edu-
stereotypes. Over the past two decades,
cator and beloved mentor, the College’s
Saxton’s own journey as an author and
first dean of letters, and the co-founder
a teacher demonstrates how women of
of the Women’s Studies Program—among
a certain age continue to use their cre-
other accomplishments. For many fac-
ative and intellectual prowess to sur-
ulty, achieving emeritus status means
mount loss, to grow, and to innovate.
it’s time to disengage from the constant demands of students and colleagues, the challenges of learning new pedagogical methods and technologies, and the pressure of publishing.
Professor Emerita Ruth Saxton offers alternate visions for “coming to age” in The Book of Old Ladies By Dawn Cunningham ‘85
Not for Saxton. Instead, “retirement”
short stories from the 20th and 21st cen-
opened one of her career’s most produc-
turies—that illustrate key themes in plots
tive chapters, a highlight of which is the
featuring “Old Lady” protagonists. In the
recent publication of a landmark work of
book’s introduction, Saxton explains:
literary criticism, The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction. The book provided the foundation for Saxton’s final class at Mills: Coming to Age, a unique communitybased course she taught this past spring in collaboration with the Downtown Oakland Senior Center. To bring both the course and the book to fruition, she mobilized a network of students, alumnae, colleagues, and family.
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M I L L S Q U A R T E R LY
For The Book of Old Ladies, Saxton selected 31 works of fiction—novels and
I have always read fiction to find models for how to live, how to be . . . . Stories offer us ways to make sense of our pasts and to forge a way of being in our presents and futures . . . I wanted to gather examples of good aging, of wise or surprising women over sixty and into their nineties, like beads on a string, a secular rosary to help fend off the fear of becoming elderly in a society whose mainstream vision of aging women is marked by fear, loathing, refusal, or reduction. I wanted to read the novels in which fictional older women prepare for the journey of aging, inhabit the territory, and become increasingly their truest selves.
