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The Other Dr. Ruth

BOLLI’s senior course leader is audacious, courageous, and—she wants the world to know—utterly outrageous.

By Theresa Pease

Want to see something outrageous? Try getting a gander of Ruth Harriet Jacobs, MA’66, PhD’69, as she lumbers down the hallways of Brandeis, talks to groups of medical-care providers, or traverses her home town of Wellesley giving a piece of her eighty-three-year-old mind to anyone who would question her competence.

An outsized hat cantilevers over flowing layers of colorful clothes selected for both comfort and drama. Her gait is unsteady, the byproduct of successful surgery for a brain tumor. Moreover, her shoulders define her attitude with a display of hardware that would rival the most decorated general. “I’m Not Over the Hill, I’m on a Roll,” reads one of a dozen-plus buttons, while others say, “RASP: Remarkably Aging Smart Person,” “Older Women’s League,” and “80+ Is Awesome.”

But outrageousness is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s a proclamation from Jacobs, who also sports a medal saying “Outrageous Ladies’ Lodge.” She even wrote a book titled Be an Outrageous Older Woman.

“I divide the word into three syllables,” she says. “Out, rage, and us. So many older people are in rage because of the disrespectful and dismissive way people treat them. I push people to live in such a way that the rage goes out of us.”

Spreading the O-Word

While the ranks of senior militants are burgeoning, Jacobs is not some quirky character who recently jumped on the anti-ageism bandwagon. She is a distinguished gerontologist whose PhD in sociology predated by decades the first group of women to don purple dresses and flamboyant red chapeaux and celebrate their seniority. And instead of giving tea parties, she spreads her message of elderly empowerment by teaching courses on “Aging Outrageously and Courageously” in the lifelong learning program at Weston’s Regis College, working as a researcher and lecturer at Wellesley College’s Wellesley Center for Women, and teaching credit-bearing courses for doctors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers who deal with the elderly. She pens a column for the Senior Times, a tabloid distributed in three New England states. She also addresses groups at libraries, senior centers, and councils on aging, as well as in convents and elderly housing complexes. One of her favorite programs involves drafting audience members to enact her play Happy Birthday, which challenges assumptions about aging.

The purpose of the play, which has been distributed by the Wellesley women’s centers to groups throughout the nation, is to get older folks to confront what Jacobs calls their own internalized ageism. Some participants have adamantly refused to divulge their ages, as if saying the number would create a stigma. The plot of Happy Birthday concerns a woman who is angry at her daughter for throwing her a surprise eightieth birthday party—outing her, so to speak, as an octogenarian.

“I didn’t invent that woman,” Jacobs says. “There are people like her everywhere—people who lie about their ages because they think there is something wrong with being old. I find the play provides a much better way of reaching people than lecturing because they really identify with the characters.”

Bringing It to Brandeis

In the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis (BOLLI), Jacobs is a fixture. She helped start the seven-year-old adult-education program and is one of a handful of member of its all-volunteer faculty to have led courses from the very beginning. That translates into seven semesters each of memoir-writing and poetry-writing classes. Jacobs says she’ll keep teaching them until there’s no one left to enroll.

“Writing is good for older people because it’s cheaper than therapy, it has fewer side effects than medication, and it can help you see where you’ve been in order to figure out where you want to go. Sharing one’s life story with others in a program like BOLLI can also be a tremendous source of friendship and support,” says Jacobs, who began her career as a journalist.

After graduating from high school, Jacobs took a wartime job as a “copy girl”—the “boys” were off fighting on foreign soil—for Boston’s Herald Traveler newspaper, which eventually signed her on as a writer. Unlike many early female reporters, she was not conscripted to write “lifestyle” pieces, but covered important issues of the day, interviewing Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other luminaries.

After a pause for child-rearing, Jacobs decided to find a field that would keep her closer to home. She entered Boston University to major in education. A riveting sociology course changed her trajectory, though, and after getting a bachelor’s degree she joined Brandeis’s fledgling graduate program in sociology, where she became interested in studying the elderly. Given the tender age of the university, in combination with the fact that she was over forty when her program started, Jacobs fancies herself the oldest PhD graduate of Brandeis. Regarded as a pioneer in the field of gerontology, she taught full-time at Boston University, Clark University, Regis College, and Springfield College in Vermont. She is also the author of nine books and myriad scholarly papers.

Since BOLLI’s birth, Jacobs has married her expertise in writing and gerontology, drawing on her storytelling skills to help more than two hundred older students compose their lives in prose and poetry. Some—Jacobs calls them “recidivists”—have taken her classes multiple times. In intimate groups of up to fifteen, they write about their careers, reflect on their parenting years, or nail down family history for their progeny to enjoy.

Jacobs tells of a retired Brandeis science professor who chronicled his role in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he helped develop the atomic bomb. Another student, she recalls, wrote about her path-breaking work in identifying and treating dyslexia, which helped open educational doors to a population of children once considered intellectually deficient. A third BOLLI member committed to paper the memories of her flight out of war-torn Austria—an escape in which her father died. The classes have helped two famous Boston restaurateurs find their voices, says Jacobs, who complains that they never write about the celebrities they’ve crossed paths with in their glamorous careers; instead, George Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods focuses on his military service, while Ken Rosenthal, of Ken’s at Copley, fashions beautiful sonnets.

Works are read and discussed, then distributed to class members to take home and reflect upon. Jacobs helps the nascent scribes channel their ideas, and she supplies the editorial polishing. Though she encourages students to submit their finished manuscripts for publication, many have no ambition to see their memoirs go beyond inclusion in the BOLLI Journal, which comes out annually. More often, they “self-publish” through a private printer or copy center, creating just enough copies to share their personal histories with families and friends.

On Beyond BOLLI

What Jacobs doesn’t teach at BOLLI is how-to courses on aging. That, she says, is because BOLLI members are directly involved in setting the program’s curriculum, and the last thing they want to focus on is getting old. And it’s just possible that the highly involved BOLLI membership represents the elder population least in need of Jacobs’s lessons.

Those men and women who do make their way into Jacobs’s aging lectures learn not only to be at peace with their date of birth, but also to draw on the many resources available through councils on aging and other organizations committed to helping them meet their physical and emotional needs. As Jacobs puts it, “It’s not just about Bingo any more.” They learn how to navigate the health-care system, choosing and communicating effectively with their doctors, and how to value their experience and freedom. They even talk about sexuality, Jacobs notes, likening herself to TV sex therapist Ruth Westheimer as she jokes, “I like to call myself the other Dr. Ruth.”

About that Button . . . 

What’s so awesome about being eighty-plus?

“If you’re healthy and retired,” Jacobs says, “then you can command your own schedule and do all kinds of things you never had time to do before. In every town, there are so many fascinating classes and lectures available. I personally enjoy a wonderful short-story group that meets at the Council on Aging in Weston.

“Plus, you can do outrageous things. You can skip cleaning your house. You can speak your mind to power. You can goad politicians. You can call for an end to the war. What are they going to do to you?”

So what’s the most outrageous thing Jacobs does?

She pauses to think, then responds, “I love to swim. I belong to a health club and swim in their indoor pool every day. But when I am traveling I stay in youth hostels or cheap motels. So I swim in the best hotels in town. I crash their pools. If a bunch of teenagers crashed the pool, they might be accosted. I walk in and people assume that I’m a hotel guest. I just walk in like I belong there.”

The Down Side

Of course, being old is not all fun and games, even for those who are in good health and of sound mind. If Jacobs could deliver one message to the general population about how to improve the lives of elders, it would be this: Do not patronize them.

Do not, for example, speak to them in a loud, shrill voice; do look beyond their weaknesses to see their considerable strengths; do not scold them as if they were naughty children; do value the depth of their experience; do not refer to them as Honey or Dearie.

“Some people,” she says, “see my gray hair and wrinkles and assume I’ve lost my marbles. The clerk at my pharmacy, for example, always asks me whether I’ve written the payment amount in my checkbook. She would never say that to a younger person. Recently I went to my local hospital to get a cardiac Holter monitor I was supposed to wear for twenty-four hours because I was experiencing rapid heartbeat. But when I got to the cardiology department, a woman said to me, ‘Oh, you’re not scheduled for a Holter monitor; you’re scheduled for a stress test.’ 

“I said, ‘No, it’s a Holter monitor. I don’t want a stress test; it’s not a good idea to have one if you have a rapid heartbeat.’ She said, ‘Dearie, you’ve forgotten. You’ve made a mistake.’ I had to really pull a great tantrum to make her call my doctor’s office and get things straightened out. She wouldn’t have done that with a thirty- or a forty-year-old. She treated me as if I were a total idiot.”

Theresa Pease is editor of Brandeis University Magazine.