ABSTRACT
If coverage in academic literature is a valid measure of importance, then older women must be singularly unimportant. Until recently, the subject of older women was conspicuous only by its absence from sociological, gerontological, feminist and social work literature. Early investigations of the community and institutional life of older people exposed poverty and disadvantage in the daily lives of many old people (Townsend 1957; Tunstall 1966). Yet despite this evidence of the need for further empirical and theoretical research into the social lives and structural position of old people, it was left to one or two tenacious sociologists to continue this exploration (Phillipson 1972; Townsend 1981; Walker 1981). Most official literature was permeated with images of old age as a time of decline and dependency. It was generally assumed that dependency, whether physical, mental, social or economic, was a natural and inevitable consequence of the biological process of ageing. This construction of old age was legitimated by the theory of disengagement which saw the withdrawal of older people from social roles and the mainstream of social life not only as desirable for older people themselves but also functional for society (Cumming and Henry 1961). This ideology permeated social policy towards older people on both sides of the Atlantic for many years.
