ABSTRACT
There is a common conception that the experience of old age has changed fundamentally over time. The conventional narrative suggests that relatively few people lived to old age, and that those that did were generally more respected, even venerated, than in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A powerful misconception, although perhaps since the work of Peter Laslett and his colleagues one that lingers more in the popular imagination than in the work of academic historians, is that “in the past” the elderly would be generally taken into the homes of their children, and cared for by close family, rather than by the state. 1 Modern society, by contrast, is replete with elderly people and, rather than being venerated, their dependence upon systems of social welfare and their need for health care is seen as a potentially insupportable burden. The arrival of mass retirement at the age of sixty or sixty-five has widened the gap between the “economically active” and the elderly, and has driven a further rift between generations, whereas the medicalization of old age has placed the elderly in a position of “structured dependency.” As the leading English historian of old age has written, “[p]opular and social science discourses have united in representing the history of old age, up to the present, as a narrative of relentless decline.” 2
