Therapeutic workshops with old women: a gender, race and class approach

Abstract

Despite being a biological phenomenon, old age is permeated by numerous social issues that include markers of gender, race, and class. This aspect has consequences such as the process of feminization of old age, which indicates the higher number of older women concerning the number of older men; in addition, there are more white elderly women than black and indigenous older women in our country, due to a lower rate of life expectancy of these racialized. As such, it is important to work with these groups, considering the social context where they are inserted; in this sense, the project "Therapeutic Workshops with Old Women" appears, in an attempt to work on specific vulnerability factors of this public, including aspects of race and class. Two students of a Psychology course have created this project and was carried out at the University Open to the Third Age (UATI) in 2019. To this end, the process of creating therapeutic workshops, in their needs and possibilities, was studied, always searching to creating a project suitable for space and its participants. The study was based on Group Psychology and had as its general objective, the search for reflections about the phenomenon of the aging of women and their particularities, considering the variants of gender, race, and class; for this, some themes such as marital relationships, racism, fear of death and self-esteem will be discussed, based on an experience report made by the intern students.