Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane, eds. Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500. New York and London: Longman, 2001. xi + 246 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-582-32902-7.
Reviewed by Colleen Seguin (Department of History, Valparaiso University)
Published on H-Albion (July, 2001)
Battling Stereotypes of Elderly Women
Battling Stereotypes of Elderly Women
Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane have brought together a fine collection of ten essays on women and ageing in this latest addition to Longman's "Women and Men in History" series. The authors modify much of what we thought that we knew about the experiences of elderly women in the British past, illuminating a complex mix of both agency and oppression operating in those women's lives. Botelho and Thane argue in their introduction both that the sources exist with which to make these often invisible women visible and that such evidence, as analyzed in this volume, "explodes" stereotypes about female ageing (pp. 1, 4). The contributors muster a dazzling array of sources with which to approach their first task. The five essays on the early modern period study wills, parish registers, churchwardens' accounts, a census of the poor, and diaries, among other types of documentation; the remaining five on the modern era variously draw from household listings, census data, memoirs, oral histories, and documents from the Mass Observation Archive. The creative and judicious use of this wide assortment of source materials is a distinctive feature of this volume.
The contributors seek to debunk two major stereotypes. First, the authors argue against generalizations that reduce the elderly to "an undifferentiated, redundant mass" (p. 5). The contributors instead emphasize how gender, differences in economic and marital status, and religious affiliation affected older people's experiences in a variety of divergent ways. Second, they reject the assumption that "old age" is a static category across time and space. Most of the book's contributors are at pains to define precisely how they are using the term and whether they consider chronological, functional, or cultural categorizations to be most appropriate. Depending on the essay, "old age" is defined as beginning anywhere from 50 to 65.
In the volume's first essay, "Strategies of Poor Aged Women and Widows in Sixteenth-Century London," Claire Schen makes a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on the English Reformation's effects on women. She demonstrates how elderly pauper women "adapted their traditional 'economy of makeshifts'" in order to cope with the elimination of monasteries, Catholic religious fraternities, and the entire industry of prayer for the dead in the post-Reformation era (p. 13). New concern for social order led Protestant parishes to place limitations on women's ability to receive boarders or even to harbor their own adult offspring. Thus the officials' quest to combat "idleness" actively discouraged multigenerational families' cohabitation, a far cry from the stereotype that elderly women often resided with their adult offspring. Using the Norwich Census of the Poor of 1570, Margaret Pelling addresses the query "Who most needs to marry?" and arrives at the provocative conclusion that perhaps men needed the security of marriage more than women did. Her findings lead her to argue that "instead of a population of desperate, dependent women" eager to marry anyone at all, perhaps men were the ones "least able to sustain an independent, albeit marginal, existence in later life" (p. 38). Pelling also takes seriously the idea that poor women may well have migrated to Norwich to work, rather than to move in with their grown children or to take advantage of poor relief, as conventional wisdom might suggest.
Botelho's "Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern Suffolk" would be especially "teachable" in an undergraduate women's history class. It is exceedingly well organized, focuses on a generally neglected topic, and would provoke lively conversation. Botelho argues that poor rural women entered "old age" when they started to "look old," at around the age of fifty, when physical decrepitude overcame them as a result of menopause, concomitant osteoporosis, and a lifetime of poor nutrition. Such findings call into question the wisdom of understanding "old age" as commencing at sixty for women and men alike, a common definition for many historians. Anne Kugler's essay focuses on how Lady Sarah Cowper analyzed ageing in her remarkable early eighteenth-century diary, a work of some 2,300 pages, composed between her fifty-sixth and seventy-second years. Kugler's work demonstrates how Cowper ably engaged in self fashioning. As a woman both learned and elderly, she crafted a distinctive personal identity that emphasized the positive aspects of female education and the wisdom acquired with age while minimizing the negative qualities associated with those attributes. In particular, religious belief helped Cowper to cope with her increasing disability.
Amy Froide's "Old Maids: The Lifecycle of Single Women in Early Modern England" demonstrates how radically our assumptions about women's ageing change when we are attentive to marital status as a category of analysis. Froide's findings refute the scholarly and cultural stereotype that "old maids" invariably led lives of quiet desperation. In fact, she demonstrates that never-married women of the middling sort, "were the women best positioned to enjoy a positive old age" in which they experienced "autonomy, activity and authority" (p. 90). Comprising between 25 and 50 per cent of early modern adult Englishwomen, "lifecycle single women, (or adult women who had not yet married, including women who might never do so)" typically did not experience old age as a time of dependency (p. 90). Instead, many found their economic and residential independence enhanced, took active roles in civic and religious affairs, and were important participants in vigorous social networks.
Susannah Ottaway notes that in eighteenth-century England people assumed "that the elderly should remain heads of a household throughout their declining years" (p. 111) and argues that this was a goal much easier for men to attain than for women. Based on household listings, she finds that "women were more likely than men to live in homes headed by their children" (p. 124), although that was the case for no more than 23 per cent of women. Ottaway's quantification of individuals' "residential security" is of great methodological interest and is effectively illustrated with graphs in the text. Richard Wall's comparative essay examines elderly women's changing residence patterns between the sixteenth century and the present day. He places his findings in a European context and demonstrates that there were similarities between English elderly people's experiences and those of their counterparts in northern France and West Flanders. In contrast, significant differences arise in comparison with parts of southern and central Europe, where "far higher proportions of elderly men and women were residing with a child" (p. 162).
Two essays address the situation of poor older women in modern Britain. Theresa Deane discusses Louisa Twining's philanthropic activism during the nineteenth century, particularly her workhouse reform. She assesses how starkly the lot of the poor older women whom Twining encountered in her charitable activities contrasted with the wealthy elderly women of her own family. Stephen Hussey's poignant "'An Inheritance of Fear': Older Women in the Twentieth-Century Countryside" demonstrates how the specter of the workhouse haunted the historical memory of the elderly poor well into the twentieth century, despite the fact that the system officially had ended in 1929. Hussey's interviews with older women who lived in rural areas between 1918 and 1950 powerfully illustrate their intense fear of dependence on institutional care and isolation from their families and communities.
Finally, Thane discusses "Old Women in Twentieth-Century Britain." She analyzes debates over appropriate pensionable age, the social significance of increasing life expectancy, and the evolution of retirement. She makes fine use of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which in 1992 asked its largely middle class panel of 600 people to assess the meaning of ageing in modern English life. Those individuals surveyed particularly stressed "the relativity of the process of ageing" (p. 220). Similarly, the contributors to this book emphasize the impossibility of generalizing about old age without attending to gender, and the inadequacies of addressing the experience of older women without sufficient attention to a host of other variables--notably social and marital status. The thoroughness of this fine volume notwithstanding, significant issues still await sustained exploration. The author's findings raise questions for further research: What effect does race have in understandings of the ageing process in modern Britain? What role have grandmothers historically had in childrearing? How have the explosive divorce rates of the twentieth century affected women's experiences in old age? Although these questions deserve future attention, this book provides an excellent introduction to the state of an academic field which has obvious relevance to current political, social, and economic concerns in Western societies.
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Citation:
Colleen Seguin. Review of Botelho, Lynn; Thane, Pat, eds., Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5270
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.