By Oded Marom

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

University of Southern California

In his new book, Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance, Gary Fine takes on two distinct, yet related tasks. First, the book seeks to solve an original empirical puzzle regarding senior citizens and political action., Seniors in America, Fine tells us, face a curious predicament. On the one hand, they are well-positioned to become civically active. Having fewer obligations for family care or career advancement and being in much better health than at any time in the past, elderly Americans have the time and the capacity to pursue an extended career in civic participation. And they do not lack motivation either. Seniors already demonstrate their public commitments with high rates of voting, contribution to campaigns and charities (they are the wealthiest age group), and participating in their Churches. And yet, on the other hand, seniors represent a social category often dismissed, marginalized, and even oppressed in social movements. If motivation, time, and money are the civic resources that seniors have in abundance, their elderly status denies them the opportunities to utilize these resources effectively. The puzzle Fine is trying to solve, therefore, is about how and when seniors manage to garner political power, despite these unfavorable conditions.

The empirical challenge with answering this question, as Fine explains, is to explain those features of seniors’ culture, interaction, and relations that permit this apparent coexistence of power and powerlessness. To do so, Fine draws on the analytical approach he developed in his previous book, The Hinge. In The Hinge, Fine advanced the claim that civic order depends on the local relations that people form and that connect their personal circumstances and motivations to structural societal forces. To put his argument simply, people’s motivations are formed in local settings. Therefore, to understand how individuals connect to social institutions, we should focus on the local groups and places in which people create systems of recognized meaning and establish rules of order and dispute. For this purpose, Fine suggested four meso-level analytical strategies, or themes, to reveal how the micro- and macro-level are linked. And whereas The Hinge offered a medley of exemplary cases to illustrate the use of this analytical approach, here in Fair Share, Fine takes on the task – the second task in this book – of demonstrating how these analytical strategies can be utilized to solve one illusive puzzle by fully and deeply engaging with one case study of a senior citizens movement in Chicago.

The advantages of this approach are revealed through the seven empirical chapters of the book, illustrating vividly how seniors’ unique circumstances come into play in their daily dynamics of civic participation, and how those translate into unique challenges – but also opportunities – for gaining political influence. Thus, for example, in Chapter 1, “Causes, Commitment, And Culture,” Fine shows how common tropes about elders’ cognitive and behavioral competencies limited the range of emotions activist seniors could display in public protest. Rather than expressing anger or outrage, standard to many protest events, elders opted to publicly express fear, an emotion that offered more room for empathy and bore less risk of stigma.

Chapter 2, “Coming of Age,” particularly engages with the explicit ways old age plays out in protests. As Fine shows, age is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, for example, seniors were limited in their ability to join long marches in harsh weather and had to take extra precautions in preparation for possible clashes with law enforcement. On the other hand, police tended to treat elderly protesters with relative leniency, even when those engaged in disruptive acts of civil disobedience. Then again, encounters with the police were not necessarily something the activist seniors always hoped to avoid. As Fine shows in the third chapter, “Where the Actions Are,” such encounters carried a particular badge of honor for elderly protesters and made for a powerful image to garner public attention. While clashes with authorities may rattle excitement for any activist, putting your body on the line takes on a whole new meaning when your body is that of an eighty-year-old woman in a wheelchair.

Seniors also have a much richer and more complex relationship with the past. Seniors’ activism was colored by their experience, not only within their current movement, but of living during historical moments of protest and political change. In Chapter 4, “Movement Memories and Eventful Experiences,” Fine shows how seniors’ biographic memories weaved together historical events, personal narratives, and shared experiences into powerful common emotions that fueled collective action. Yet again, those powerful memories stood in stark contrast to their owners’ growingly weakening bodies. As the fifth chapter, “Staff Power and Senior Authority,” shows, health constraints required activist seniors to leave much of the responsibility over managing their movement to younger staff, some of whom struggled to accommodate for the needs and temperament of the older members. This conflict between members and staff, Fine admits, is not uncommon for organizations that aim to be both grassroots and professionally organized. But ironically, in the seniors’ movement, members’ acknowledgment of their health-related limitations made them more willing to delegate authority to the young, reducing such conflicts and allowing the organization to run relatively smoothly.

Disparity between the young and the old also colors the sixth and seventh chapters, which focus on questions of diversity within the movement, and its relationship with the broader political world, respectively. For example, issues of gender and the use of pronouns raised by young staff encountered confusion and even pushback from elderly members. And on a broader scale, struggles to incorporate causes such as senior housing or social security in the agenda of national coalitions served to remind activist seniors of their limited influence and marginal position within the wider activism cosmos. Throughout these chapters, Fine walks the reader through the colorful and often messy world of senior activism. His analytical approach captures the complex and often nuanced ways age becomes meaningful in civic participation. As the reader learns, capacities and opportunities for political power are not pre-given, but are formed through the ongoing interactions and relationships between members, staff, and the political environment. For this reason, this book would not only interest those who care about senior activism. Rather, it offers a powerful illustration of how a cultural analysis of small groups can uncover the mechanisms that shape and distribute power across civil society. In this sense, the book can be said to succeed in its two tasks: First, it shows the reader how, in civic groups, age is far from just a number. It is a quality that manifests in varied ways with diverse, sometimes contradictory effects. And second, it offers a vivid illustration of how to apply a powerful analytical approach for reexamining classic sociological variables and unpacking the intermedial sphere in which people and structure meet and where the links between them gain substance and meaning.