Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

being placed in what are presumably therapeutic institutions. The

overuse of potent medications in nursing homes is a scandal in itself. Thousands of facilities in every state of the nation fail to meet minimal government standards of sanitation, staffing, or patient

care. The best governmental estimate is that roughly half the na­

tion’s nursing homes are ‘substandard. ’”4 In 1978, according to

Vladeck, there were still nursing homes “with green meat and

maggots in the kitchen, narcotics in unlocked cabinets, and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures. ” 5 Over 72 percent of the nursing home population is female. Women in nursing

homes are generally widows or never married, white, poorer than

most of their peers (70 percent having incomes under $3000 a year

consisting mainly of Social Security benefits), and have several

chronic diseases. According to The New York Times (October 14,

1979), the average age of the person in such an institution is 82 and

50 percent have no family, get no visitors, and are supported by

government money. Conditions are most terrible in nursing homes

supported by government funding of patient care: nursing homes

for the destitute, for those on Medicaid. The policy of the United

States government is that old people must become paupers: * spend

any money of their own that they have, after which the government takes over; the paupers are unable to defend themselves

*See “Loose Laws Make Care of Aged Costly, ” by Gertrude Dubrovsky,

The New York Times , October 21, 1979. In a subsection called “How the

Programs W ork, ” Dubrovsky explains:

“As of April 1977, the last period for which such figures were available,

a nursing-home patient under Medicaid could not have an income greater

than $533. 39 a month. However, should this same person want to remain

at home and receive community-based health-related services, his monthly

income must be less than $200.

“Thus, Medicaid laws are biased in favor of institutional care.

“Morever, Medicaid imposes strict personal-asset limits of $ 1 , 500 for a

single person or $ 2 , 500 for a couple.

“To be accepted by a nursing home under Medicaid, a person must sell

his home, liquidate his assets and turn them over to Medicaid as a gift, in

which case he stays on Medicaid.

“Or, he may give the funds directly to the nursing home as a private

payment until the money falls below the allowable level. When that happens, the patient reapplies for Medicaid, but may be put on a waiting list. ”

against the conditions in the homes in which they are kept. Once

paupers, they must accept confinement on the state’s terms because

they have no money and nowhere to go. The state’s terms all too

frequently are neglect, degradation, filth, and not infrequently outright sadism.

The nursing home population is markedly white. Blacks die

younger than whites in the United States— perhaps the result of

systematic racism, which means inadequate health care, shelter,

and money over a lifetime. Blacks alone comprise a full 11. 8 percent of the U . S. population and yet only 9 percent of the old are people of color, including Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics. N ationally, so-called nonwhites (including blacks) comprise

only 5 percent of the nursing home population. In New Jersey, for

instance, according to The New York Times (October 21, 1979), out

of 8, 683 beds in eighty nursing homes, blacks occupied 532 and

Hispanics or “others” occupied 38 (6. 5 percent). It seems that

blacks especially are left to suffer the diseases of old age on their

own and to die on their own; and that whites are institutionally

maintained in appalling conditions— kept alive but barely. If this is

true, the social function of nursing homes becomes clearer: out of

sight, out of mind. Blacks are already invisible in ghettos— young,

middle-aged, old. Black women have been socially segregated and

marginalized all their lives. Perceptions of their suffering are easily

avoided by an already callous white-supremacist populace, the so-

called mainstream. It is white women who have become poor and

extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who might be demoralized at what is in store

for them once they cease to be useful. Kept in institutions until

they die as a punishment for having lived so long, for having outlived their sex-appropriate work, old white women find themselves drugged (6 . 1 prescriptions for an average patient, more than half

the patients given drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril); sick from

neglect with bedsores, urinary, eye, and ear infections; left lying in

their own filth, tied into so-called geriatric chairs or tied into bed;

sometimes not fed, not given heat, not given any nursing care;

sometimes left in burning baths (from which there have been

drownings); sometimes beaten and left with broken bones. Even in

old age, a woman had better have a man to protect her. She has

earned no place in society on her own. With a man, she will most

likely not end up in a prison for the female old. She has more social

value if she has a man, no matter how old she is—and she will also

have more money. After a lifetime of systematic economic discrimination—no pay for housekeeping, lower pay for salaried work, lower Social Security benefits, often with no rights to her husband’s pension or other benefits even after decades of marriage if he has left her—a woman alone is virtually resourceless. The euphemistically named “displaced homemaker” foreshadows the old woman who is put away.

The drugging of the predominantly female nursing home population continues in old age a pattern established with awful frequency among women: women get 60 to 80 percent of the prescriptions for mood-altering drugs (60 percent of the prescriptions for barbiturates, 67 percent for tranquilizers, and 80 percent for

amphetamines). Women are prescribed more than twice the drugs

that men are for the same psychological conditions. One study of

women in Utah, cited by Muriel Nellis in The Female Fix , “showed