ABSTRACT
In 1972 Simone de Beauvoir wrote:
Society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention…. Sheltering behind the myth of expansion and affluence, it treats the old as outcasts. The aged do not form a body with any economic strength whatsoever and they have no possible way of enforcing their rights: and it is to the interest of the exploiting class to destroy the solidarity between workers and the unproductive old so that there is no one at all to protect them…. If old people show the same desires, the same feelings and the same requirements as the young, the world looks upon them with disgust: in them love and jealousy seem revolting or absurd, sexuality repulsive and violence ludicrous.
(1972: 1–3)