Resilience and Successful Ageing: A Feminist Study of Educated Young-Old Women

Resilience and successful ageing: A feminist study of educated young-old women explores cognitive and affective responses to non-life-threatening pain of women between 65 and 79 to determine which resilience characteristics are most important for successful ageing, defined as maintaining cognitive and affective equanimity enabling self-managed ageing with minimal medical intervention. Strong self-efficacy beliefs, an internal locus of control orientation, and agency emerged. These develop along with the embedding of a strong skills and knowledge base, in the process of mastery learning and educational achievement. Educational experiences and social narratives can be reoriented to support self-managed ageing for burgeoning ageing populations.