“When I Wake Up in the Morning, It All Depends on What I Want to Do”: An Ethnography of Leisure in the Lives of Elderly Women

Abstract

This article is derived from a two-and-a-half year ethnographic inquiry into the nature of literacy development at the end of the life span, inspired by Barbara Myerhoff's 1978 classic Number Our Days, a study of elderly Jewish immigrant women at a senior center in Venice, California. In this research, I examined the relationship between the past and the present literacies of elderly women. The setting, the Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town (PCV/ST) Senior Lounge, is a recreation center in a private apartment complex in downtown Manhattan. PCV/ST (often called simply, StuyTown) was built by the insurance company Metropolitan Life as housing for returning servicemen after World War II and is one of the last enclaves of the white middle and working class in Manhattan—although due to gentrification, that is rapidly changing. The participants are all second generation Irish or Eastern European Jewish women in their 80s, who self-selected to first learn how to use the Internet in individual lessons, and the...