Facing and Fulfilling the Later Years

by Elsie Marion Andrews

Overview

My concern with the wise and happy use of the later years has arisen through encounter with certain elderly friends and their families who have recently come to grips with unexpected change. Such change could hardly have been imagined a generation ago. Largely as a result of a spreading social revolution, patterns of living are dissolving and re-forming on every front. This affects all of us, but especially the older among us; for rapid adaptation is not easy to those grown used to an accepted way of life. . . .

The whole structure of society today calls for fresh thinking on the requirements for satisfying living through the added years, years made possible by advance in medical science, but years whose meaning and usefulness is now shadowed by automation and the new proportions of work and leisure.

In the following pages I shall discuss the problems raised by this dilemma, drawing on individual cases which may throw light on possible solutions. Factual matter relating to population trends, urbanization, housing problems, labor, family patterns, and medical and social provision can be obtained in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is to consider more fully the social and spiritual needs of the human being growing toward fruition.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940150882201
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	07/25/2015
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #157
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	114 KB

About the Author

Elsie Andrews lives under the lee of Farnham Castle, near a crossways with the enchanting name of Broomleaf Corner. If there is a certain witchery about this address it is not irrelevant. The witch, so maligned in our Puritan epoch, was the wise woman of an earlier era, and much of this wisdom informs Elsie’s concern for increasing and enriching the lives of people generally, and those of older people in particular.
Trained as an art teacher at Reading University, she taught for some years at Farnham Girls’ Grammar School before exchanging for one year to a Senior High School in Indianapolis. This trans-Atlantic experience was crucial to her development. It convinced her of the value of a social and creative education which includes and serves the many, and eventually took her, as a social worker, into the Youth Service which grew out of war conditions in Britain. Later, after her mother’s last illness, her focus turned from youth to age, and she undertook a specific assignment in the training of those concerned with the welfare of the elderly under the London Council of Social Service, an exploratory and fact-finding project which kept her busy for eight years.
She joined the Society of Friends in 1943, and is at present an Elder of Guildford and Godalming Meeting and a founder member of the Quaker Fellowship of the Arts. “Isn’t life explorable?” she comments as she hurries to her next appointment—and, of course, it is, as she shows us in the present pamphlet.
Thanks go to Dorothy Cooper, Consultant, Committee on Aging Friends, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting; to Mrs. Geneva Mathieson, General Secretary of the National Council on the Aging, New York; and to Dr. Helen Phillips of the Social Science Department of Pennsylvania State University, all of whom gave valuable assistance in the assembling of the following material.