"Successful aging" is one of gerontology's most successful ideas. Applied as a model, a concept, an approach, an experience, and an outcome, it has inspired researchers to create affiliated terms such as "healthy," "positive," "active," "productive," and "effective" aging. Although embraced as an optimistic approach to measuring life satisfaction and as a challenge to ageist traditions based on decline, successful aging as defined by John Rowe and Robert Kahn has also invited considerable critical responses. This article takes a critical gerontological perspective to explore such responses to the Rowe-Kahn successful aging paradigm by summarizing its empirical and methodological limitations, theoretical assumptions around ideas of individual choice and lifestyle, and inattention to intersecting issues of social inequality, health disparities, and age relations. The latter point is elaborated with an examination of income, gender, racial, ethnic, and age differences in the United States. Conclusions raise questions of social exclusion and the future of successful aging research.

Theories of gender differences in the performance or quality of care work should tie these to structural arrangements. Unless the gendered bases upon which different styles or experiences are removed (i.e., structural inequality), designers of interventions cannot and should not expect to use the experience of one group to inform appropriate strategies for the other.

This article outlines feminist gerontology and shows how its focus on power relations lends insight into the lives of those people disadvantaged by them as well as the people privileged by social inequalities. To illustrate the latter, I discuss how feminist gerontology might examine old men, using the topic of health as an example. For instance, arrangements that maintain privilege in young adulthood and middle age can lead to poor health in old age. These practices of masculinity include physical risk in competition with other men, neglect of social networks and medical care, and avoidance of any self-report of emotional strain. However, with its focus on diversity, feminist gerontology also emphasizes that experiences of manhood, aging, and health vary by one's location in a network of inequalities.

This study seek to extend the research on retirement in two ways. First, using a nationally representative sample, I attempt to clarify the relationship between gender and life satisfaction in retirement by explicitly considering how gender structures preretirement employment experiences. Second, I ask whether the "male model" of life satisfaction in retirement can be used to assess women's life satisfaction in retirement. It is hypothesized that employment structures, through their influence on sources of work satisfaction and world view, influence the sources of life satisfaction in retirement. While this hypothesis is generally supported, gender still appears to define a context for the variables of the male model beyond that encompassed by employment structures. The sources and implications of this gender influence for future social gerontological research, particularly in the area of retirement, are discussed.

As a concept in gerontology, gender appears as lists of traits learned through socialization when theorized at all. I argue for a framework that theorizes the intersections of relations of gender inequality with those of age. This framework holds that men and women gain resources and bear responsibilities, in relation to one another, by virtue of mundane categorization into naturalized stratified groups. Current research shows that this approach allows explanation of gender differences, which appear in many reports but which usually go untheorized, as responses to social inequality. I illustrate applications to research and practice in relation to three areas of old age experiences: financial security, spousal care work, and health. Throughout, I discuss implications of focusing on inequality to enhance our abilities to engage in effective research, practice, and policy for older people, women and men alike. For instance, an understanding of the gender division of labor and workplace discrimination makes clear that financial status in later life cannot be reduced to individual choices concerning paid labor or retirement planning. And understanding that people orient their behaviors to gender ideals allows us to see that men and women perform spousal care in similar and different ways that require varied responses from practitioners; it also reveals contexts in which men engage in positive health behaviors. Finally, I argue that gerontologists interested in facilitating favorable outcomes for old people should consider research and practice that would disrupt, not reinforce, the bases of gender inequalities in later life.