Women writers are pioneers in telling stories of growing old, and what it means.

Stories, poetry, plays, biographies, autobiographies, journals, and memoirs tell us about how we age. They offer strategies of survival and philosophies of later life that can sustain us through trials and afflictions. Fortunately, publishers have discovered that older readers want to read about situations similar to their own. Aging women's voices are beginning to be heard. It can be painful to read the accounts of women elders who write about their suffering, fear of the future, and sense of loss, but we will never grasp the nature of aging or respect the achivements of the old without such an effort.

To represent the varied reactions of older women, I have chosen the following writers: Anzia Yezierska, an immigrant writer who achieved renown during the 1920s when she was in her 40s but wrote some remarkable short stories about aging in her 80s; May Sarton, the well-known poet, novelist, and journalist, who kept a journal recording her own aging until less than a year before she died; and Doris Grumbach, a novelist, teacher and journalist, who wrote two memoirs of aging in her 70s. Each of these women has a distinct voice, but some of their observations overlap. These similarities suggest that old age is a leveling experience, one in which the advantages — or difficulties — of ethnicity, class, and gender tend to diminish.

In 1962, 81-year-old Anzia Yezierska started to compose a story of old age, "The Open Cage." In her 40s she had written about the plight of immigrant women, who were aspiring storytellers, most of whom longed to "make . . . [themselves] for a person." In her 80s, troubled by physical decline, Yezierska dramatized the problems of aging women who lacked money and a nurturing environment. "The Open Cage" compares an old woman and an ailing bird. The old woman says plaintively:

I live in a massive, outmoded apartment house, converted for roomers — a once-fashionable residence now swarming with six times as many people as it was built for. Three hundred of us cook our solitary meals on two-burner stoves in our dingy furnished rooms. We slide past each other in the narrow hallways on our way to the community bathrooms, or up and down the stairs, without speaking.

Like Yezierska's earlier stories, this one makes the most of her bleak surroundings. Her narrator rails against her failing eyesight and faulty memory, problems that plague many older folk. Poverty and cramped quarters add to the litany of woes.

We are invaded by the sounds of living around us; water gurgling in the sinks of neighboring rooms, the harsh slamming of a door, a shrill voice on the hall telephone, the radio from upstairs colliding with the television set next door. Worse than the racket of the radios are the smells — the smells of cooking mixing with the odors of dusty carpets and the unventilated accumulation left by the roomers who preceded us — these stale layers of smells seep under the closed door. I keep the window open in the coldest weather to escape the smells.

Suddenly "a frightened little bird" flies into the open window. The narrator takes it to Sadie Williams, a neighbor whose room is filled with parakeets. Sadie feeds the bird but fails to show much friendliness to her fellow resident. Despite the rebuff, the narrator invests the bird with great meaning: "Now it had become my only kin on earth. I shared its frightened helplessness away from its kind." When the bird fails to thrive, Sadie determines to set it free and advises the narrator to buy a parakeet. The narrator is shocked. "A bird bought to love me? She knew so much about birds and so little about my feelings." Yet when the bird gleefully leaves its cage, she says, "I felt myself flying with it, and I stood there staring. . . . I saw it now, not only with sharpened eyesight, but with sharpened senses of love." Returning to the apartment house, she muses, "We were leaving the bird behind us, and we were going back into our own cage."

The early lives of Doris Grumbach and May Sarton were considerably more advantaged than Yezierska's, but both needed creativity and introspection to survive the decline of physical powers in old age. Grumbach's Coming into the End Zone appeared in 1991, years after Sarton had begun her series of journals. Sarton's At Eighty-Two was published in 1996 after her death. Grumbach was about to turn 70 when she started writing her memoir; Sarton was 81 and debilitated from years of illness.

Despite being 10 years younger, Grumbach displayed much gloom. In her memoir she complains about memory lapses: "Now, my memory is much diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver what has been stored there." Like most of us, both had many "tip of the tongue" experiences during which they inconveniently failed to recall the names of people, things, and events until the moment for speaking had passed. During visits they observed each other carefully. Sarton compares Grumbach's memoirs to her spontaneous journals. In return Grumbach records Sarton's strengths and weaknesses, noting that the older woman showed great courage but complained excessively about the people who "oppress her with letters and demands." Officially ignoring each other's negative remarks, they maintained their friendship to the end.

Grumbach develops the metaphor of old age as a cage, which Yezierska uses in her story. Watching moldy lions in a cage, she shares their sense of imprisonment. "What remains of their lives is a dirty joke," she complains. "What remains of mine is not much more elevated: There are too few years left to make another life. My age is my cage; only death can free me." Curiously, Grumbach's words apply much more appropriately to Sarton's situation. The older artist repeatedly reports depressed feelings, for she was on the downward slope to death. Yet, At Eighty-Two demonstrates that creativity sustained Sarton. New poems kept emerging, and modern technology — the tape recorder which sometimes baffled her — made journal keeping possible even as her health declined.

The work of aging writers reflects the struggles, successes, and failures of their lives. In youth Anzia Yezierska made her literary reputation by describing the uncertainties and discomforts of immigrant life and denouncing mainstream Americans for their xenophobia. Sometimes she exaggerated the negative to make her point more emphatic. In old age, she continued to fight, this time by creating a bleak picture of aging in a residence hotel. Sarton and Grumbach write from their position as middle-class, successful individuals. They have money and friends to cushion their lives. From these women we learn that age has many faces and voices, all of which have something to teach us.

Anne M. Wyatt-Brown teaches in the linguistics program at the University of Florida in Gainesville.