Generativity in Culture Context: The Self, Death and Immortality as Experienced by Older American Women

Theoretical approaches to conceptualising the notion of generativity have been psychologically or psychosocially based and assume generativity to be a universal phenomenon. Because psychological issues are subsumed within a cultural context, we suggest that generativity is not a universal psychological principle but rather a cultural construct. In this paper we argue that generativity must be analysed as a product of American culture and its embeddedness in individualism. Through an analysis of ethnographically based interviews with 161 older women we illustrate how generative behaviour is inextricably tied to a constellation of American beliefs about the nature of the self, the meaning of death, and attempts to attain immortality that are informed by the ideology of individualism.