Social histories of old age and aging (1).

One of the many important changes in approaches to social history in many countries in recent decades has been increasing awareness of the multiple forms of social diversity within all societies and, in consequence, the need for greater complexity of analysis. Whereas in the nineteen sixties and early seventies social historians perceived class as the primary social division, increasingly the importance of gender, ethnicity and, more recently religious belief, region and age have been recognized, and historians have learned to seek to understand and relate these multiple diversities to one another. Much of my recent work has been engaged with the history of and social meanings of aging and old age, an important phase of life throughout history but one which, with a cluster of rare exceptions written in the nineteen seventies, (2) was hardly at all studied by historians until comparatively recently. It is field of study which has engaged closely with work in other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and which requires, if all of its dimensions are to be understood, engagement with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. Like many areas of social history it has gained from the insights of the 'cultural turn' whilst continuing to benefit from and to develop older approaches drawn from demographic, economic and political history. Ideally, it fuses all of these approaches. I hope that a brief survey of recent work in this field will contribute to discussion about the current state and, I believe, the continuing strength, of social history.

The skepticism of historians about simplified grand narratives, combined with the use of a greater variety of sources to explore the past (literary, visual and personal for example, as well as statistical and official sources) has, in recent years, moved us towards a more complex understanding of the historical experience of old age. This is appropriate for the stage of life which encompasses greater variety than any other. It can be seen, in any time period, as including people aged from their fifties to past one hundred; those possessing the greatest wealth and power, and the least; those at a peak of physical fitness and the most frail. In consequence of this variety many different histories and fragments of histories of old age are emerging. This does not imply that there are no overarching narratives, that the history of old age is no more than an accumulation of small stories; rather it suggests that we are at an exciting, if incomplete, stage of assembling both small and large stories about different times and places in the search for a more complete history of old age.

This process encompasses the different preoccupations of historians of different national and cultural backgrounds. Histories of old age in Britain have been centrally preoccupied with demography and material concerns: the numbers of old people, their geographical distribution, their living arrangements; with household structures and family relationships; with welfare arrangements, medical provision, property transactions, work and retirement. Studies in France have not neglected these obviously important matters, especially demographic studies, which in their modern form were invented in France, or the history of medicine; but more attention has been paid to representations of old age, to how the idea of old age has been constructed in the past (3). The relatively sparse, but fine, work on old age in Germany (4) provides examples of both approaches, as do the more extensive studies of the United States and the growing body of work from, and about, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This essay focuses, regrettably, upon studies of Europe, North America and other societies strongly influenced historically by White, European culture. There is a need for more studies of old age in other cultures and for comparisons across cultures which transcend a common and misleading trope of popular and social science discourse which compares a 'western' experience of ageing with a romanticized other, where older people are respected and cared for, as they are said no longer to be in 'our' culture. There are important discursive and structural differences in inter-generational relationships across different cultures but they have themselves changed over time and are less fixed and simple than is sometimes thought.

Even within the cultures of Europe/North America/Australasia it is difficult to examine similarities and differences in the experience and treatment of old age and aging between different countries and regions as systematically as is, in principle, desirable. There have been important gaps in historical writing in all countries and for many places and times. New approaches are being drawn upon in the study of old age, though sometimes extremely slowly. For example, awareness of gender is hardly a novelty in historical scholarship, but it has been surprisingly slow to enter studies of old age, in view of the predominance of women among older people in many times and places. (5) This is perhaps because historians share the, mistaken, view of Georges Minois that until the relatively recent past, the history of old age is largely a history of men, because few women survived the rigours of childbirth to reach old age (6); or that of the medievalist, Joel Rosenthal that "Matriarchy and the culture of old women, whether on their own or in extended family households, is mostly a lost topic, worth investigation, but hard to treat other than anecdotally." (7) Historians have recently proved them both wrong, through the imaginative use of a wide range of sources. (8)

A full history of old age must unite all of the approaches currently available to historians, and no doubt others of which we are not yet aware. We need to draw together historical knowledge of the demographic and material experience of old age in different times and places with cultural histories of representation and self-representation and of the varieties of experience of older people, since these approaches to history can never be wholly separate from one another. Image is not distinct from experience, nor cultural history from economic, social and political history. Cultural representations of old age, whether drawn from philosophical or medical texts, literature, paintings, film, recorded expressions of everyday opinion or any other source, shape individual imaginings of the life course and hence individual and collective action. If people are culturally conditioned to expect to be dependent and helpless past a certain age, they are more likely to become so, with consequences for their own lives and those of others, which may include provision of formal or informal welfare services. Reciprocally, what takes place in the political and economic spheres--for example the provision of retirement pensions--helps shape private experiences and perceptions. Official sources such as those of poor relief administration or debates about pensions policy in representative assemblies tell us much about political and administrative history, but they are also texts which can reveal a great deal about the cultural construction of old age in past societies.

How far have we come in integrating these various approaches? To begin with the demographic picture. Did people in 'the past' grow old? Clearly they did, and in larger numbers than is often thought. However the numbers surviving to what was defined as 'old age' varied across time and place. English population figures have been studied over a long time period. Life expectancy at birth in England averaged around thirty-five years between the 1540s and 1800 (9) and is unlikely to have been higher at any earlier time. But the high infant mortality rates at all times before the mid-nineteenth century drastically pulled down such averages. Those who survived the hazardous first years of life had, even in the sixteenth century, a respectable chance of living at [east into what would now be defined as middle age, and often longer. (10) It is estimated that the proportion of the English population aged over sixty fluctuated between six and eight per cent through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the numbers varied from place to place. In the rapidly growing town of Manchester, full of young migrants at the end of the eighteenth century, during the industrial revolution, only 3.4 per cent of the population was over the age of sixty, 1.9 per cent over seventy. In depressed rural Sussex, which young people were fleeing in search of work in the towns, nineteen per cent were over sixty, seven per cent over seventy. The national average fell to six per cent in the nineteenth century, when high birth rates raised the percentage of the very young. Then from the late nineteenth century through to the late twentieth, as birth rates dropped and death rates in childhood, youth and middle age fell, came the long climb in the proportion of the population living past sixty: six per cent in 1911, fourteen per cent in 1951, eighteen per cent in 1991. Most developed countries have experienced this climb in the twentieth century. (11)

France, by contrast, experienced failing rather than rising birth-rates in the nineteenth century, which influenced the overall age structure. In the mid eighteenth century seven to eight per cent of the population were aged sixty or above. By 1860 the proportion was ten per cent; by the early twentieth century twelve per cent, by 1946 fourteen per cent. (12)

In Britain, women were a clear majority among those aged 60 and above from the time that vital statistics began to be officially and comprehensively recorded, in 1837; and women appear to have had a longer life expectancy, on average, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe for long before. Medieval commentators noted that women seemed to have the longer life expectancy and wondered how that could be when it seemed natural that men were stronger and should live longer. (13) Physicians in eighteenth century France were still puzzled by the consistency with which females 'went against nature' and outlived men. It is sometimes thought that before at [east the nineteenth century female life expectancy must have been sharply reduced by the ravages of death in childbirth. (14) But though such deaths undoubtedly, tragically, occurred more frequently than in the twentieth century, childbirth was never a mass killer of women in western societies. (15) It was not comparable with the ravages of work, war and everyday violence on the lives of men. (16) In France in the mid-nineteenth century there were more old men than old women, but by the time of the First World War women had gained the advantage in life expectancy, which they have never since relinquished. (17)

If there were divergent demographic experiences within the 'old world' of Europe, the 'new world' of outposts of European culture far from Europe, was different again. Migrant countries disproportionately imported males. Hence in Australia and New Zealand by the later nineteenth century, most older people were male. In Ontario, Canada, the balance shifted from a majority of older men in 1851, to a female majority in 1901. (18) In the United States the picture varied from place to place, according to length of settlement. Women in the US are estimated, on average, to have had a lower life expectancy than men from the mid-seventeenth century to the eighteen nineties. (19) The proportion of the US white population aged sixty and above rose steadily from four per cent in 1830 to 6.4 per cent in 1900 to 12.2 per cent in 1950. The survival rates of black Americans were somewhat lower; (20) and those of native Americans (as of Australian aboriginal people) one assumes, considerably so. Another absence in historical work on ageing concerns such excluded and persecuted groups. The population of Ontario aged as the colony made the transition from migration to long-established settlement. Three per cent of the population was aged over sixty in 1851, 4.6 per cent in 1871, 8.4 per cent in 1901. (21) Different 'western' societies indeed 'aged' at different paces and with different gender balances. It took France 140 years to double its population of people over aged 60 from nine per cent to eighteen per cent (from 1836-1976), Sweden, 86 years (1876-1962), the United Kingdom 45 years (1920-65); the proportion over 60 had not reached eighteen per cent in the USA by the end of the twentieth century. Such varying paces of demographic change had probable, broad cultural effects on the societies in which they occurred, but these have barely been explored. (22)

The growing proportions of older people in western societies over the twentieth century have, periodically, caused panics which are revealing about attitudes to old age, and of much else, in those societies. This panic first became acute in the nineteen twenties, at least in France and Britain, the only countries for which it has been studied. (23) The combination of rapidly falling birth-rates and lengthening life-expectancy in a period when there was a perceived military threat from apparently 'younger' countries, in particular Germany, and a perceived cultural threat from the growth of non-white populations in other continents, produced in France and Britain doom-laden predictions from demographers and social scientists about the social conservatism and economic, imperial and military decline which was anticipated, as these nations lost their youthful vitality. In France, according to Bourdelais, such fears reinforced negative views of old age. In Britain, however, the initial negative assessment of an 'ageing society' led to demonstrations of the positive capabilities of older people (at work, for example) and to government-led attempts to improve both their social conditions and their cultural value, though with only partial success. (24)

The panic about ageing in the mid-twentieth century, which was replicated in the nineteen eighties and nineties, suggests a close link between demographic change and cultural change: that changing proportions of old people in a society may influence attitudes towards them and affect their own behaviour. But the different responses in Britain and France to similar demographic situations in the twentieth century suggests that the relationship between demography and culture is complex, variable and, as yet, little understood. A similar contrast can be found in interpretations of the eighteenth century, for much of which both the proportions of older people and the average expectancy of living to later ages in the two countries was comparable, in both cases rising. In France this has been seen--by means of the use of a great variety of sources--as a period in which older people came into favour and acquired a positive image, in contrast to previous denigration. (25) One sign of this increased social esteem was the establishment of pensions for public servants for the first time. No parallel change in esteem has been detected in Britain. Rather, by the end of the century impoverished old people were less rather than more likely to receive poor relief. The eighteenth century in Britain also saw the introduction of systematic pensions for public servants, but, rather than signs of esteem, these were outcomes of the professionalization of government: pensions explicitly provided an acceptable means to rid the public service of those thought to have aged past their usefulness. (26) Similar demographic regimes may have different cultural outcomes in different social, economic and political contexts.

But how much can age-based statistics tell us about any society? Conventionally gerontologists and demographers choose sixty or sixty-five as the lower limit of 'old age'. It is essential to choose a fixed age threshold if statistical comparisons of age structure are to be made over time. But have these ages always had the same cultural meanings? Sixty and sixty-five are the ages at which state or private pensions are most frequently paid in present-day societies and they have become common ages of retirement from paid work. These ages were generally fixed early in the twentieth century when both pensions and retirement gradually became normal features of ageing in most developed countries (nowhere were they universal before the nineteen forties). At that time they were thought--probably accurately--to approximate the ages at which most people were no longer fit for full-time work. Standards of physical fitness of people in their sixties rose in most western countries over the twentieth century. In some countries, ages of retirement were raised or abolished at the end of the century, though in others they fell for reasons connected with the state of the national and international economy, or with personal preference, rather than with physical aptitude. (27) Increasingly, physical condition was detached from social and bureaucratic markers of 'old age' and established age boundaries were destabilized. Were they more stable in the more distant past? Did people become 'old' at earlier ages in previous centuries when living standards were lower for most people?

The concept of old age was firmly present in all known past cultures and it had multiple meanings and uses. Significantly, the ages of sixty and seventy have been used to signify the onset of old age in formal institutions in Europe at least since medieval times. Sixty was long the age at which law or custom permitted withdrawal from public activities on grounds of old age. (28) Even in ancient Greece the formal obligation to military service did not end until age sixty and men in their fifties were indeed conscripted. (29) In ancient Roman writings people were defined as old at ages varying from the early forties to seventy. (30) In medieval England, in a succession of enactments from the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 onwards, men and women ceased at sixty to be liable for compulsory service under the labour laws, for prosecution for vagrancy or for performing military service. From the thirteenth century, seventy was set as the upper limit for jury service. (31) Similar regulations held elsewhere in Europe. It can be argued that governments generally had an incentive to set such age boundaries as high as possible, especially when they might exact taxation in lieu of service. However, it is unlikely that such age-limits could have been set at levels far removed from popular perceptions of the threshold of old age. (32) Furthermore, there was in medieval and early modern Europe (and this remains so in many societies in the early twenty-first century) no fixed retirement age for many elite positions, and appointments could be made at advanced ages.

On the other hand, it was long assumed that most manual workers could not remain fully active at their trades much past age fifty, especially when performance depended upon such physical attributes as good eyesight. Literary evidence from the sixteenth century suggests that the fifties were regarded as the declining side of working maturity, the beginning of old age, as is still popularly assumed. For women old age was often thought to start earlier, in the late forties or around fifty, when the physical concomitants of menopause became visible; (33) for men the defining characteristic was capacity for full-time work. For both men and women in pre-industrial Europe old age was defined by appearance and by capacities rather than by age-defined rules about pensions and retirement, hence people could be defined as 'old' at variable ages. English poor relief records of the eighteenth century first describe some people as 'old' in their fifties, others not until their seventies. Supplicants for public service pensions in eighteenth century France ranged in age from 54 to 80 years. (34)

This suggests that over many centuries 'old age' has been defined in different ways in different contexts and for different social groups. Old age is defined chronologically, functionally or culturally. A fixed threshold of 'chronological' old age has long been a bureaucratic convenience, suitable for establishing age limits to rights and duties, such as access to pensions or eligibility for public service. It became more pervasive in the twentieth century, when societies became more rigidly stratified by chronology, especially earlier and later in life, as ages were fixed for attending and leaving school, for retirement and receipt of pensions. 'Functional' old age is reached when an individual cannot perform the tasks expected of him or her, such as paid work. 'Cultural' old age occurs when an individual 'looks old', according to the norms of the community, and is treated as 'old'. This combines aspects of the other modes of definition; it is an expression of the value system of the community and may define individuals as old according to codes of dress or other commonly accepted signifiers. Undoubtedly a high proportion of survivors in medieval and early modern society felt and looked 'old' at earlier ages than has become the norm in the second half of the twentieth century. In consequence the numbers of people who appeared to be 'old' in past communities might have been greater, and consequently they would have been a more visible cultural presence than is revealed simply by calculation of the numbers past age sixty.

Also, it has long been recognized that there is immense variety in the pace and timing of human ageing, that people do not all age at the same rate or in the same ways. In consequence, since antiquity (35) old age has long been divided into stages. Some of these were elaborate, such as medieval 'ages of man' schema, which divided life into three, four, seven or twelve age. (36) These stylized age divisions often had didactic or metaphorical purposes. More commonly, in everyday descriptive discourse, old age has been divided into what in early modern England was called 'green' old age, a time of fitness and activity, with perhaps some failing powers, and the later, last, phase of decrepitude; a division which in the twentieth century is less imaginatively labeled 'young' and 'old' old age, or, in France, the Third and Fourth ages. Texts referring to the decrepit final age cannot be taken to express attitudes to old age in general. The sad decline with which some, but not all, older lives end has never been represented positively, in any age or culture, with good reason. (37)

Historians have also discovered more about the ways in which older people supported themselves and were supported in different times and places and consequently about how they lived and perceived their own lives. Such public documents as wills, legal documents, inventories, poor relief records, census statistics, records of pension funds and such private ones as diaries, letters, biographies and autobiographies can be combined to provide a greater understanding of these processes. Again the picture is one of variety, among social groups and across space and time. (38)

Some older people, of course, have always possessed property, often in substantial amounts, (39) with which they could support themselves to the end of life, employing others to care for them, if necessary, either in institutions or in their own households. From at least medieval times in most west European countries ageing individuals could legally assign property to relatives or non-relatives in return for guaranteed support until death, and they could invoke the protection of the law if the agreement was not honored. Old people determinedly sought to control their own lives and to retain their independence throughout Europe, North America and Australasia through time. For the propertyless and impoverished there was, through most of time, little choice but to work for pay for as long as possible, whereas the propertied minority could in all times afford to retire from work when they chose. (40) As states, and later business enterprises, began to bureaucratize on modern lines, from the eighteenth century, and became concerned to maintain the efficiency of their officials, pensions were introduced to encourage retirement when ageing was thought to impair performance. (41)

The poorest people expected, and were expected to, work to late ages. In a census of the poor taken in Norwich, England in 1570, three widows, aged 74, 79 and 82 were described only as 'almost past work' and they were still earning small sums at spinning. (42) This remained so in most western countries until the twentieth century. Poor relief systems encouraged older people to work, supplementing but not replacing meagre incomes for both men and women. In early modern Europe, most communities provided specified tasks for older people. Such activities as road mending, caring for the churchyard, fetching, carrying or caring for horses on market days were tasks for old men. It was often easier for women to support themselves at later ages. They could care for children, engage in casual domestic labour, such as cleaning or washing; commonly they earned an income by taking in lodgers, running small shops or alehouses. (43)

This unremitting lifetime toil was relieved for the poorest people with the emergence of retirement as a normal phase of life only in the mid twentieth century. Census data can give the impression that mass retirement first emerged in the later nineteenth century, but deconstruction of the US and British censuses (there appear to be no equivalent studies of other countries) demonstrates that most of the apparent nineteenth century decline in employment at older ages was due to the decline of agriculture. Retirement from white-collar occupations, combined with improved occupational pensions was visible through the first half of the twentieth century. Retirement from blue-collar occupations did not increase significantly until the nineteen forties and beyond. (44)

Why did retirement become a mass phenomenon at this time? Attempts to explain it as a feature of capitalist manipulation of a reserve army of labour (45) are unconvincing, since the most rapid spread of retirement coincided with the post second world war labour shortage in most developed countries, when older people were needed in the labour force rather than in reserve. Rather, retirement became a social norm along with the introduction of improved pensions, provided by the state, which promised at least tolerable incomes in later life. This coincided with increased capacity of relatives to help in a period of generally rising living standards and full employment. Individuals chose at the end of life the leisure always previously denied them, though by the end of the twentieth century increasing numbers of people retired in their fifties, sometimes willingly, often under pressure from management engaged in 'downsizing' their operations. (46) As retirement became a norm it perhaps reinforced the prevailing view of business management that older people were marginal workers, and popular views of older people as redundant and dependant. Once again, cultural and material phenomena were mutually reinforcing.

Older people who had little or no savings or property, and who could not earn a living from a single source of employment throughout time have been locked into what early modern historians term an 'economy of makeshifts', and twentieth century economists less picturesquely label 'income packaging': pulling together a shifting variety of resources for survival. There has been much debate among historians about the role of family support in these individual economies.

It has long been clear that as far back in time as can be traced, it has not been the norm in all 'western' societies for older people to share households with their married children. To do so was conventional in Mediterranean societies and in some north European peasant cultures, such as Ireland and parts of France, where land was the family's only asset and the heir shared land and household with the elders until their death. (47) In much of north-western Europe, however, elders retained control of their own households for as long as they were able, rarely sharing them with adult married children, though they might move to the home of a relative when they were no longer capable of independence, perhaps for a short time before death. North European folklore, even in medieval times, expressed few illusions about inter-generational support, but long conveyed warnings of the danger to older people of placing themselves and their possessions under the control of their children. Such stories achieved their most sublime expression in William Shakespeare's King Lear, itself a re-working of a number of medieval folktales. In the eighteenth century the gates of some towns in Brandenburg were hung with large clubs bearing the inscription:

   He who made himself dependent on his children for bread and
   suffers from want, he shall be knocked dead by this club. (48)

Most countries incorporated into law some obligation upon adult children and sometimes other close relatives to support their elders. (49) How frequently such practices were implemented was variable, not least because the kin of the aged poor were often very poor themselves and could not realistically be expected to give support from already inadequate resources. (50) The customs and practices of the Old World were transported to the New, with adaptations to new circumstances. Settler societies gave even greater salience to the independence and self-help which were necessities for survival in the early years, and such societies necessarily took time to build the communal, often religious based, institutions which supplemented self- and family support in much of Europe. (51)

But the fact that older people did not conventionally share a home with close relatives, and determinedly retained their independence, does not mean that there were not close emotional ties and exchanges of support between the generations. Before his death Peter Laslett softened his belief in the universality of the nuclear family in pre-industrial Europe and the slight obligations of younger to older generations, and recognized the variability of family forms and relationships in European history, (52) though this is not to question the importance of his original challenge to the sociological orthodoxy that the extended family was the norm in 'pre-industrial' societies. (53) Parents and adult offspring might not share a household, but they often lived in close proximity. Generally in western societies kinship did not stop at the front door'. (54) The Austrian sociologist Leopold Rosenmayr has described the north European family as characterized by 'intimacy at a distance', (55) the intimacy being as important as the distance. Family members at all social levels have been found to have exchanged support and services from a mixture of material, calculative and emotional motives. (56) That it was often an exchange relationship should be emphasized. Older people in the past, as now, were rarely simply dependent upon others, unless they were in severe physical decline. They cared for grandchildren, for sick people, supported younger people financially when they could afford it and performed myriad other services for others. With lengthening life expectancy, over time the co-existence of three or more generations and hence the opportunity for exchange became more frequent. (57) Although over the twentieth century increasing numbers of old people have lived alone, they are relatively rarely isolated or neglected by younger relatives. Rather, greater numbers are able to seize the opportunity provided by greater affluence to preserve the independent control of their own lives for which older people have long aspired. (58)

The importance of such intergenerational exchange has been underestimated by historians because it often took the form of services or gifts in kind which are difficult to trace historically because there was no reason for systematic records of such private, non-monetary, transactions to be taken or to survive. It was a taken-for-granted activity of everyday life of the kind that is most difficult to reconstruct in the distant past. Even the participants might so take for granted such transfers that they denied their significance, as when a 67 year old retired market gardener gave evidence to a British Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Condition of the Aged Poor in 1895. He lived alone in a country village. He had a cottage and garden, rented an allotment and kept a pig or two; both were useful sources of food and of earnings and/or exchange. He had occasional earnings from road mending. When asked if his five surviving children gave him help, he replied: "No, I have had to help them when I can. They have got large families most of them. I do what I can in that sense. I do not get anything from them in any way. The daughter that I have lives the length of this room perhaps from me and she looks after my house." His daughter's housework was a service which must have contributed greatly to his comfort and to his capacity for independent living, but he so took it for granted that he did not define it as 'help'. In other respects this man's story exemplifies family relations and the survival strategies of older people, which were not peculiar to England or to the later nineteenth century. His children were too poor and too burdened with children to given him financial support; instead he gave support to them when he could. He was no longer in regular paid work but packaged together a living from the produce of his garden and from occasional earnings. It would be surprising if he did not sometimes share meals with his daughter's family and give them some produce from his garden, both common forms of intra-familial exchange among those too poor to offer cash, part of the network of exchange which held together poor communities through the ages, enabling survival in conditions of poverty. (59)

Not all older people had families to support them through the centuries when high death rates meant that parents might outlive children. It has been estimated that up to one-third of women who lived to the age of sixty-five in seventeenth and eighteenth century England had no surviving children. By the mid-nineteenth century perhaps two-thirds of sixty-five year olds had surviving children. In eighteenth century France the average age at which a person became both fatherless and motherless was 29.5; in the nineteen seventies it was fifty-five. (60) Geographical mobility in centuries when transport was slow and many people were illiterate might break contacts even with survivors. Migrants to faraway, 'new' countries often lacked older relatives around them, though they strove to keep in touch with them at a distance.

Through the twentieth century birth-rates fell in all developed and many less developed countries, but so did death rates, and both marriage rates and levels of fertility rose. In consequence more people had children and they survived. In the later twentieth century, most older people with surviving children were in close contact with some or all of them. (61) At all times, recipients of welfare relief have been more likely to be people without surviving children, which further suggests the historical importance of family support. (62) Modern forms of communication facilitate contact even over long distances. Far from 'crowding out' family support, as social scientists once feared, modern European welfare states facilitate it, enabling intergenerational relationships to be easier and less tension-ridden by removing some of the emotional and material costs from the family. The relationships between older people and their close relatives show striking long-run continuity and closeness in 'western' culture, even when they do not share a household.

Even those who had no conventional families could create them. Older men would marry younger women able to look after them; rich older women married younger men; widowers with children married older women able to care for them. Orphan children were adopted by older people, gaining a home in return for giving service. Unrelated people shared households for mutual financial and emotional support. Gay people created 'families of choice'. Examples can be found as far apart as Norwich, England in the sixteenth century and Ontario, Canada in the mid nineteenth century and throughout early modern and modern continental Europe, North America and Australasia. (63)

But when families have not been able, willing or available to help, many older people have needed the support of publicly financed welfare. Not all older people are, or ever have been, poor but in most past, and present, societies they have been more likely than younger people to be very poor, especially if they were female. In consequence, the study of poor relief systems and welfare states can tell us much about the histories of the older people with whom they so often dealt. Such studies are numerous, but they cannot tell us everything and we should be cautious about giving this theme too much weight. A focus on the relief of the aged poor runs the risk of conveying the message that most old people in the past were dependent as well as poor, when very many were not, and it diverts attention from the remainder, who were independent and sometimes wealthy. Also there is a danger of over-estimating the importance of poor relief in the lives of older pople because poor relief systems leave records behind whereas other, perhaps equally important, sources of support, such as that within families do not.

Nevertheless, poor relief and welfare have been important in the lives of many impoverished old people and many old people have been impoverished. All modern states have to some degree become 'welfare states', though the meaning of this term varies from place to place and over time. In Europe modern welfare states are profoundly marked by each country's long and varying traditions of poor relief. These traditions were transported and transformed by migrants to 'new' countries. All European countries for many centuries had some system of provision for the aged, and other poor, who could not help themselves and had no family or other source of support. This was financed to varying degrees through public taxation (probably most extensively in England, through the mechanism of the national Poor Law which was in place from 1597 to 1948, though it had still earlier antecedents (64)) or by philanthropy, often religious in motivation, and institutionalization; most often by a combination of the two. 'Relief' could take the form of payments in cash or kind (food, clothing, medical care) or shelter in a hospital or workhouse. Provision was of variable quality, within each country as well as over time, and it was guided by varied principles: supportive, rehabilitative or punitive. Everywhere old people were numerous among recipients of relief, along with widows and children, but nowhere did reaching a defined age automatically qualify anyone for relief. The essential qualification was destitution, access to insufficient resources for survival. (65) Even where the poor relief system was relatively generous (66) relief could be refused even to the very old if they were judged capable of earning some income. This is an important contrast with modern pensions systems, which, whatever their inadequacies, normally provide for most of the population on attaining a certain age.

Countries of the 'new' world tended to reject publicly funded welfare systems because initially they lacked both an established, substantial wealthy class capable of funding them and the mass of miserable poverty which required them. Also nineteenth century migrants were often fleeing from punitive relief systems in Europe and had no desire to replicate them. Ideologically, too, they placed a premium upon independence and self-help. Australia and New Zealand never introduced publicly funded poor relief systems, relying instead upon voluntary charity, sometimes (and increasingly over time) subsidized from public funds. (67) The picture was similar in nineteenth century Canada. (68) In parts of the United States the extent of unmet need necessitated the introduction of poor relief, but 'welfare' early acquired and retained more stigmatizing associations than in Europe. Most nation-states at least by the eighteenth century and commonly in the nineteenth and twentieth, provided publicly funded pensions for public servants and for the disabled veterans of war and sometimes for their families.

Old people were in most countries the first to benefit from the transition from residual and often punitive poor relief systems to theoretically, and generally actually, more comprehensive and generous state welfare systems. This was because, being mostly marginal to the labour and capital markets, they were generally the last substantial social group to gain from the general improvement in living standards which took place in the west over the course of the nineteenth century. Also the 'deservingness' and respectability of older people were more readily apparent to reluctant taxpayers than was the case with other impoverished groups such as the unemployed.

Old age pensions have been introduced in all developed countries since the eighteen eighties, but according to different principles and for different reasons in the various countries. Where the motivation was mass deprivation among older people due to the absence or the deterrent and stigmatizing effects of a poor relief system, pensions were non-contributory and targeted upon the very poor, often especially providing for women, as in Denmark in 1891, New Zealand in 1898, most of the Australian states by the time of Federation in 1910 and in Britain in 1908. Where the main motivation was pressure from, and or the desire of politicians to undermine, a growing labour movement, as in Germany in 1889, they tended to be insurance based and to target primarily the securely employed, generally male worker. (69) Again, different cultural and political contexts produced different outcomes in both the origins and subsequent development of pensions systems through the twentieth century. (70)

Old people have also gained from increasing medical knowledge over time. Knowledge of the history of geriatric medicine is sparse but growing. Interest in the physical condition of ageing people has been continuously present among medical specialists since ancient times, though always as a minority interest. It was for centuries uncertain whether old age should itself be defined as a disease and for centuries little could be done to alleviate the diseases accompanying old, or indeed younger, age other than to enjoin (as specialists still do) temperance, good diet, exercise. Investigation and understanding of the pathology of physical deterioration with ageing developed especially in nineteenth century France, spurred partly by the increasing numbers of older people in the French population. Only in the twentieth century did medicine acquire the capacity to diagnose and cure extensively, and only in the mid twentieth century were medical services sufficiently democratized in most developed countries to allow most old people access to medical treatment. Even so, they tended to stand at the back of the queue for such treatment, their lives deemed less valuable than those of younger people. The specialty of geriatrics developed from the early twentieth century, though most strongly from the nineteen-thirties, primarily to protect older people against such discrimination and also to maintain and enhance the physical fitness of the ageing populations of most western countries. It had only partial success. Older people have gained most from medical techniques designed for all age groups, such as coronary by-pass surgery, joint, especially hip, replacements, but geriatrics remains in most countries a low status medical specialty and older people without personal power still suffer from exclusion from treatment in favour of the young, though not to any greater degree than in the past.

Social scientists have sometimes argued that their marginalization by medical systems, together with the spread of pensions and retirement in the twentieth century, has increased the dependence of older people and that they have become less valued in modern society than in some unspecified 'past'. The belief that the status of older people is always declining has a very long history. It is discussed, and dismissed, even in the opening pages of Plato's Republic and in a long succession of texts through the centuries. The longevity of this narrative trope in the discussion of old age suggests that it expresses persistent cultural fears of ageing and neglect, and real divergences in experience in most times and places, rather than representing transparent, dominant, reality.

Early historical enquiry into old age tended to echo this narrative of decline. George Minois' history of old age in Western culture from antiquity to the Renaissance acknowledged variations and complexities in experiences and perceptions of old age over this long time-span, but he concluded that "the general tendency however is towards degradation." And he had no doubt that the degradation was still greater in modern society. (71) An extensive body of work on old age in the United States since the eighteenth century finds the status old people to be in decline over a variety of time-scales: from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, (72) in the mid-nineteenth, (73) between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (74) Historians have reconstructed the different experiences of the political elite of New England in the late eighteenth century, (75) attitudes to East Coast Protestant clergy in the late eighteenth century, (76) along with studies of labour force participation and the antecedents of social security legislation, (77) or of the emergence of geriatrics and the attitudes of social welfare professionals in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (78) These are mostly studies of white males. They have tended to represent the (scrupulously researched) experience of specific groups as representative of broader, even hegemonic values, rather than serving as micro-studies, valuable in themselves, contributing part, rather than representing the whole, of a complex total picture. The fact that some older men exerted power at a particular time is important, but it does not necessarily suggest that all old people at that time and place were highly regarded. In all times older people (female and male) who retained economic or any other form of power, along with their faculties, could command, or enforce, respect. At all times also poor and powerless older people have been, though not universally, marginalized and denigrated. (79)

More recent studies of old age in ancient (80) and medieval (81) Europe and of France, (82) Germany (83) and the United States (84) in more modern times, acknowledge the variety of experience in old age and abandon the pessimistic framework. In consequence a richly textured history is emerging which is making clearer the differences between social groups, and between times and places. For example, Troyansky describes the new confidence with which public servants requested pensions from the state in post-revolutionary France, asserting a sense of right to such a reward and in the process coming self-consciously to review their lives and to imagine a model of the life-course which incorporated a period of retirement at its end. All of this appears to have been new in early nineteenth century France. In England, by contrast, ageing small landowners, male and female, can be found in the law-courts, even in medieval times, vigorously ensuring for themselves a period of retirement on their own preferred terms, as they negotiated and defended contracts in which they transferred their lands to others in return for care and material support. (85) English men and women at all social levels from an early date wheedled pensions from monarchs, bishops and other influential patrons, stressing the characteristics of their past lives that merited support for a dignified old age. Even poor old people, in the nineteenth century and long before, asserted their right to poor relief in similar terms. (86) The difference between the two countries may lie in the fact that formal equality before the law was very long-established in England, carrying with it a sense of equal rights which was strongly held even among poor people, however imperfect the reality; whereas in France such equality was the outcome, indeed the central objective, of the great Revolution. Such profound legal and political differences shaped different cultural experiences of old age. Such experiences produced texts from which these differences can be reconstructed.

The greatly enriched histories of old age of recent years have alerted us to the complexity of attitudes to and experiences of older age in all times and over time, and the rich range of sources and methods through which historians can seek to reconstruct them. It can be tempting for example to conclude, as Minois does, that Shakespeare's dismal conclusion to the 'seven ages of man' described by Jaques in As You Like It: "second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," is representative of 16th century English perceptions of old age. If, that is, you fail to note that Jaques is a relatively young man, but is given the conventional literary attributes of an old man, such as melancholy; and that the dismal description of the 'seventh age' is immediately followed by the entrance on stage of the octogenarian Adam, who has earlier represented himself and been represented as 'strong and lusty' and who visibly subverts Jaques' story. (87) The pervasiveness in English popular drama and literature (for example in the work of Chaucer) of such dialogue between conflicting representations of old age, and its evident familiarity to medieval and early modern audiences, suggests its deep roots in English culture and perhaps in that of other countries.

Emerging out of the social and cultural history of old age at the beginning of the millennium is a strong awareness of the plurality of representations and experiences of old age over time and in any one time and place. It is more difficult to assess whether certain values concerning old age are more dominant at certain times and places than others, though we know enough to be wary of over-arching schema of cultural decline.

The history of old age reminds us how vital social history is in providing perspective, and a sense of ongoing issues and trajectories, on our own society. Previous work on the subject has generated a number of important findings. But it has not met, or at least has not fully met, some of the ongoing challenges of social history to come: widening the geographical network and introducing more formal comparison, and dealing explicitly with the relationship between cultural and material factors. In this sense, old age history remains a new topic area, inviting further attention and more refined analysis even as we return to issues of social structure in which age grading receives renewed attention.

Institute of Historical Research

Senate House

London WC1 E 7H4

ENDNOTES

(1.) This is a revised version of an essay, addressed to social scientists, 'The History of Aging in the West' published in Thas R. Cole, Robert Kastenbaum & Ruth E. Kay, eds., Handbook of the Humanities and Aging Second Edition (New York, 2000).

(2.) P. Stearns, Old Age in European Society (London, 1977); Keith Thomas "Age and Authority in Early Modern England," Proceedings of the British Academy, 62, 1976, pp. 205-248; Peter Laslett, "Societal development and aging" in R. Binstock & E. Shanas, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (New York, 1976), pp. 87-116; D. Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978).

(3.) P. Bourdelais, Le nouvel age de la vieillesse: histoire du viellissement de la population (Paris, 1993); D. Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in 18th and 19th century France (Ithaca, 1989); "Old age, retirement and the social contract in 18th and 19th century France" in C. Conrad & H. J. Von Kondratowicz, Zur Kulturgeschichte des Alterns (Berlin, 1993), pp. 77-95; "Balancing social and cultural approaches to the history of old age and aging in Europe: a review and an example from post-revolutionary France" in P. Johnson & P. Thane, Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernnity (London, 1998), pp. 96-109.

(4.) P. Borscheid, Geschichte des Alters 16-18. Jahrhundert (Munster, 1987); C. Conrad, Vom Greis zum Renmer: Der Strukturwandel des Alters in Deutschland zwischen 1830 und 1930 (Gottingen, 1994); H. J. Von Kondratowicz, "The medicalization of old age: continuity and change in Germany from the 18th to the 19th century" in M. Pelling and R. M. Smith, eds., Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives on Ageing (London, 1991), pp. 143-164.

(5.) Pat Thane, Old Age in English History. Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000), pp. 21-4.

(6.) G. Minois, History of Old Age: from antiquity to the renaissance. Trans. S. Hanbury-Tenison (Oxford, 1989).

(7.) J.T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1996).

(8.) T. Premo, Winter Friends (Urbana, 1990); M. Stavenuiter, K. Bjisterfeld & S. Jansens, Lange Levens, stille getuigen. Oudere Vrowen in her verladen (Zutpen, 1996); L. Botelho & P. Thane, Women and Ageing in Britain since 1500 (London, 1999); Thane, Old Age; C. Haber & B. Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington, 1994).

(9.) E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871. A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), p. 528.

(10.) E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 280-293.

(11.) Thane, Old Age, pp. 475-493.

(12.) Patrice Bourdelais "The ageing of the population. Relevant question or obsolete notion?" in Johnson & Thane, Antiquity to Post-Modernity 110-131.

(13.) Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages (London, 1997), pp. 33-5.

(14.) Ibid; Minois, History, pp. 79, 130, 180, 222, 224, 290, 292.

(15.) R. Schofield, "Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality in 'The World we have Lost'," in L. Bonfield, et al., eds., The World We Have Gained (Oxford, 1986), pp. 231-260.

(16.) Shahar, Growing Old, pp. 32-3.

(17.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," p. 110.

(18.) Edgar-Andre Montigny, Foisted upon the Government. State Responsibilities, Family Obligations and the care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal, 1997), 33-41.

(19.) Haber & Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security, p. 23.

(20.) W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land. The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore, 1976), 60-1.

(21.) Montigny, Foisted, p. 34.

(22.) Thane, Old Age, pp. 475-80.

(23.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," pp. 112-116. Pat Thane, "The debate on the declining birthrate in Britain: the 'menace' of an ageing population, 1920s-1950s," Continuity and Change, 5, (2), 1990, pp. 283-305.

(24.) Ibid.

(25.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," p. 111.

(26.) M. Raphael, Pensions and Public Servants: a study of the origins of the British system (Paris, 1964).

(27.) Martin Kohli, M. Rein, A. Guillemard, H. van Gunsteren, eds., "Time for Retirement. Comparative Studies of Early Exit from the Labour Force (Cambridge, 1991).

(28.) Shahar, Growing Old, pp. 24ff.

(29.) M. Finley, "Old Age in Ancient Rome," Ageing and Society, 3, 1983, pp. 391-408.

(30.) T. Parkin, "Ageing in antiquity: status and participation" in Johnson & Thane, Antiquity to Postmodernity, p. 9.

(31.) Shahar, Growing Old, pp. 12-30; J.T. Rosenthal "Retirement and the Life-cycle in Fifteenth Century England" in M.M. Sheehan, ed., Aging and the Aged in Medieval Europe (Toronto, 1990), p. 179.

(32.) Shahar, Growing Old.

(33.) Lynn Botelho, "Old age and menopause in rural women in early modern Suffolk" in Botelho & Thane, Women and Ageing, pp. 43-65.

(34.) Troyansky, "Old Age. Retirement and the social contract," p. 86.

(35.) Parkin, "Ageing in Antiquity".

(36.) J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man (Oxford, 1986); Mary Dove, The Perfect Age of Man's Life (Cambridge, 1986); E. Sears, Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life-Cycle (Princeton, 1986).

(37.) P. Amoss & S. Harrell, Other Ways of Growing Old: Anthropological Perspectives (Stanford, 1981).

(38.) Claire S. Schen, "Strategies of poor aged women and widows in sixteenth century London" in Botelho & Thane, Women and Ageing, pp. 13-30; Montigny, Foisted; Elles Bulder, The Social Economics of Old Age. Strategies to maintain income in later life in the Netherlands, 1880-1940 (Tinbergen, 1993); Thane, Old Age, pp. 73-160, 273-286.

(39.) Montigny, Foisted, pp. 53-56.

(40.) Shahar, Growing old, pp. 13-14, 171-2 and passim; B. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 110-1540 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 179-209; R. M. Smith, "The Manorial Court and the Elderly Tenant in Late Medieval England" in Margaret Pelling and R. M. Smith, eds., Life, Death and the Elderly. Historical Perspectives (London, 1991), pp. 39-61. P. J. Greven, Four Generations (Ithaca, NY and London, 1970). C. Haber, "Historians' Approach to Aging in America" in Cole, Kastenbaum, Ray, Handbook, pp. 28-30.

(41.) Troyansky, "Old Age, Retirement". Raphael, Pensions and Public Servants. G. Thuillier, Les pensions de retraite des fonctionnaires au XIXeme siecle (Paris, 1994). Thane, Old Age, pp. 236-256.

(42.) M. Pelling, "Old Age, Poverty and Disability in Norwich" in Pelling and Smith, Life, Death and the Elderly, p. 82.

(43.) R. Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 86-90.

(44.) P. Johnson, "The employment and retirement of older men in England and Wales, 1881-1981," Economic History Review, 47, 1994, 106-128; R. L. Ransom & R. Sutch, "The labor of older Americans: retirement of men on and off the job, 1870-1937," Journal of Economic History, 46, 1986, 1-30. B. Gratton, "The labor force participation of older men," Journal of Social History, 20, 1987, 689-710; J. Moen, "The labor of older men," Journal of Economic History, 47 (3), 1987, 761-767. Thane, Old Age, pp. 273-286, 385-406.

(45.) John Macnicol, The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878-1948 (Cambridge, 1998); C. Phillipson, Capitalism and the Construction of Old Age (London, 1982).

(46.) M. Kohli et al., eds., Time for Retirement.

(47.) Troyansky, "Old Age, Retirement"; Liam Kennedy, "Farm succession in modern Ireland; elements of a theory of inheritance," Economic History Review, 3, 1991, pp. 478-496; Montigny, Foisted.

(48.) D. Gaunt, "The property and kin relationships of retired farmers in northern and central Europe" in R. Wall et al., eds., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 259.

(49.) Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 88-9.

(50.) ibid. p. 83 ff.

(51.) David Thomson, "Old Age in the New World: New Zealand's Colonial Welfare Experiment" in Johnson & Thane, Antiquity to Postmodernity, pp. 146-179; Montigny, Foisted; Haber, "Historians' Approach," pp. 28-29; Premo, Winter Friends, p. 36; C. Haber and B. Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security (Bloomington, 1993).

(52.) P. Laslett, "Necessary knowledge: age and aging in the societies of the past" in D. Kertzner & P. Laslett, eds., Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age (Berkeley & London, 1995); P. Laslett & R. Wall, Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972).

(53.) Laslett and Wall, Household and Family.

(54.) Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, p. 90.

(55.) L. Rosenmayr and E. Kockeis, "Proposition for a sociological theory of aging and the family," International Social Science Journal, 3, 1963, pp. 418-9.

(56.) Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, p. 85.

(57.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," p. 116.

(58.) Thane, Old Age, pp. 407-435.

(59.) Montigny describes similar relationships in 19th century Canada. Montigny, Foisted, pp. 33-49.

(60.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," p. 116.

(61.) Thane, Old Age, pp. 428-435.

(62.) Jutte, Poverty and Deviance.

(63.) Bourdelais, "The ageing," p. 116. Jutte, Poverty and Deviance. M. Pelling, "Old Age, Poverty," pp. 85-90. Montigny, Foisted 404-8. Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, Catherine Donovan, "Families of choice: autonomy and mutuality in non-heterosexual relationships" in Susan McRae, ed., Changing Britain. Families and Households in the 1990s (Oxford, 1999), pp. 297-316.

(64.) Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (London, 1990).

(65.) Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, p. 54.

(66.) Slack, English Poor Law, pp. 39-45.

(67.) David Thomson, "Old Age in the New World: New Zealand's Colonial Welfare Experiment" Ch. 8. in P. Johnson and Pat Thane, eds., Old Age from Antiquity to Post-modernity (London, 1999); Brian Dickey, No Charity There. A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia (Melbourne, 1980).

(68.) Montigny, Foisted, pp. 82-107.

(69.) P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity. Class Bases of the European Welfare States, 1875-1975 (Cambridge, 1990).

(70.) World Bank, Averting the Old Age Crisis (Washington, 1994).

(71.) Minois, History, pp. 6-7.

(72.) D. H. Fischer, Growing Old.

(73.) Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life. A cultural history of aging in America (Cambridge, 1992).

(74.) Achenbaum, New Land; Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five (New York, 1983).

(75.) Fischer, Growing Old.

(76.) Cole, Journey.

(77.) Achenbaum, New Land.

(78.) Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five.

(79.) Haber, "Historians"; Thane, Old Age, pp. 1-16.

(80.) Parkin, "Ageing in antiquity".

(81.) Shahar, Growing Old; Rosenthal, Old Age.

(82.) Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime; "Social and cultural approaches"; Bourdelais, Le nouvel age; "The ageing".

(83.) Borscheid, Geschichte des Alters; Conrad, Vom Greis, zum Rentner; Von Kondratowicz, "medicalization."

(84.) Haber & Gratton, The search for security.

(85.) E. Clark, "The quest for security in medieval England" in M. M. Sheehan, ed., Aging and the aged in medieval Europe (Toronto, 1990); R. M. Smith, "The manorial court and the elderly tenant in late medieval England" in Pelling & Smith, Life, Death, pp. 39-61.

(86.) T. Sokoll, "Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1780-1834" in T. Hitchcock, et al, eds., Chronicling Poverty: The voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640-1840 (London, 1993), pp. 127-154.

(87.) William Shakespeare, As You Like It Act 2 Scene 7.

By Pat Thane

University of London