Old Age and Radical History

This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts their centrality to contemporary history and politics. Age scholars and critical gerontologists push back against perspectives that individualize and medicalize old age as a natural or universal stage in a singular life course explained solely by biology, psychology, or personal choices. Instead, they challenge us to see contemporary life stages and even chronological age itself as historically and culturally specific structures. The contributions in this issue demonstrate the power of this approach, exploring histories of later life in the context of slave societies, retirement, social movements, and gendered embodiment. Together, contributors model a radical history of old age that centers power, historical struggle, and linked lives.

Old-Age Justice and Black Feminist History

This essay outlines Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s articulations of an intersectional black feminist agenda for old-age justice. The two most famous formerly enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States, Truth and Tubman in their speeches, activism, and published Narratives revealed the mechanisms of domination through which enslavers and employers of domestic servants extracted productive and reproductive labor from black women, who in turn faced premature debility and immiseration at the end of life. Truth and Tubman linked what is now called necropolitics—“subjugation of life to the power of death,” in Achille Mbembe’s phrase—to the coercive organization of care work, what Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to as being “forced to care.” They point to the importance of gendered and racialized labor to the history of old age in America.

Aging and Twentieth-Century Britain

Existing scholarship on the history of old age displays several puzzling contradictions. Its chronological definitions of old age, which usually begin at around sixty, encompass people of enormous diversity in health, wealth, and even age. Meanwhile, older people themselves reject such definitions. Instead, elderly Britons have typically looked to their own lives in order to understand what it has meant to grow old. In the twentieth century, experiences of old age were shaped by the increasingly humane treatment of older Britons. Yet the British state simultaneously tolerated persistent poverty among the aged. This book addresses these tensions by uniting the public and private histories of aging and by putting the particular challenges of researching old age at the heart of its account.

REPRESENTATION OF THE OLD AGE IN THE TOWNS OF THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES

From ancient times, philosophical treatises divided human life into separate periods. The most extreme of them were childhood and old age. If the first of these stages is relatively well represented both in legal literature and documentary sources, the second one is paid much less attention. There was no clear dating of the beginning of old age. The attitude towards older people was ambivalent, which was dictated by both Christian views and the practice of life. These views were widespread in the towns of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries. The town law to some extent protected older people, but in most cases, they did not act as subjects of law. The important groups of sources for the history of old age are the codes of law and burghers’ testaments.

When Someday Is Today: Carrying Forward the History of Old Age and Inheritance into the Age of Medicaid

This review essay of Hendrik Hartog's (2012) Someday All This Will Be Yours undertakes a brief overview of some of the massive changes in middle‐class planning for old age and inheritance in the United States over the course of the past century, focusing on the increased role of the state as a source of funding and regulation, the rise of the elder law bar, and the resulting new tools and motives for the transfer of property in exchange for care in the age of Medicaid.

Old Age and Poverty in Poland, 1945-1989: The Status Regarding Knowledge And Research Problems

The history of old age has only relatively recently become explored as a research topic in Poland. This sketch focuses on the relationship between old age and poverty in People’s Republic of Poland. Old age, however, was a significant object of interest of the PRL authorities in at least two aspects. The first was the social security system, particularly in relation to old age and disability pensions, and the second, social care for the aged.

Medicine and Old Age

This article attempts to pull together recent developments and to summarize our knowledge of old age. It primarily focuses on the history of ageing in the West and compares it with other cultures. It concerns the limits and possible extension of the human life span. It includes discussion almost exclusively on male ageing. There are a few medical texts written specifically on female ageing and these focus primarily on menopause. Most studies of the history of ageing, and certainly those most relevant to the history of medicine deal with the demographic and social history of old age and a few larger works have framed the discussion of old age history more generally as centred on the question of continuity versus change in the historical expectations and experiences of old age. There is currently a burgeoning literature on pensions and on old age institutions.

Old age in the Dark Ages: the status of old age during the early Middle Ages

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews the position of old age in the societies of post-Roman Europe, from the fifth to the 10th centuries. Drawing on both primary and secondary literary and material sources of the period, I suggest that living beyond the age of 60 years was an uncommon experience throughout the early Middle Ages. Not only was achieving old age a minority experience, it seems to have been particularly concentrated among the senior clergy. This, together with the growing importance of the Christian Church as the institution that stabilised post-Roman society, the decline of urban living and its attendant culture of leisure and literacy, and the transformation of kinship into a symbolic ‘family under God’ contributed to a more favourable status for old age, or at least one that was particularly favourable for older men. This was based not so much upon the accumulation with age of wealth and privilege, but upon the moral worth of old age as a stage of life. The early Middle Ages, the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, was in this respect a relatively distinctive period in the history of old age. With all around instability and the future uncertain and often threatening, survival into old age was a rare but frequently revered attainment.