Old Age

John Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134496617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gerontology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent decades have seen a fundamental change in the age structure of many western societies. In these societies it is now common for a fifth to a quarter of the population to be retired, for fewer babies to be born than is required to sustain the size of the population and for life expectancy to exceed eighty years old. This book provides an overview of the key issues arising from this demographic change.

1

THE EXPERIENCE OF OLD AGE

The Patriarch: We came slowly up the track from Konjic, past the meadows sweeping back to the dark conifers which covered the mountains. Along past the old rustic poles fencing the paddocks and into a small group of wooden farm houses. We picked our way through the narrow cobbled alleys to ask for Mohammed Ibrahamivic. We were shown into the large kitchen-cum-living room and sat on the sofa. Strong coffee and blackcurrant juice was served and we explained our purpose – to ask him to tell us his life story. The large, busy, woman in the kitchen organised everything. He arrived and settled down opposite us and the tape recorder. In came three men of various ages, more women and many children. Mohammed was quiet but fit and strong, over 78 but firmly in charge. He told us how he was born and raised in a big family some kilometres away; how he survived the war by keeping his head down; about his marriage – joking at his small wife tucked in the corner of the crowded room. He detailed his family – including the twenty-four people in the room and the rest around about the village or in Germany. He listed with some help all his many grandchildren. He joked about old age, and made it clear he was still fit and still felt frisky when he saw a young maid. Here was a man who was able to present his old age to us as fulfilment.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF OLD AGE

When, where and how do people begin to think of themselves as old? The same questions may be asked about how others are identified as ‘old’. This chapter is about the social construction of old age. If something is described as ‘ageing’, what is being denoted is an organisation of time; a sequence of stages. It refers to the timing and sequencing in some specified process. With human beings, it is ageing which gives the individual's life its rhythm, and links the duration, timing and sequence of stages in life. It is the social sequencing of the stages that creates the category ‘old age’ and gives the life course its meaning.

There are approaches to old age that concentrate on the individual experience of ageing. These perspectives seek an understanding of old age using as reference points one's own former (younger) self and in particular other people's reaction to the individual ageing persona we express. The ‘mask of ageing’ describes the experience whereby there is felt to be a distance between one's interior age and the externally manifest ageing appearance which is seen in the mirror and to which other people respond.¹ This chapter will start by looking at the social practices by which old age is constructed at the level of interpersonal interaction and then move on to the cultural significance attributed to old age. We can ask a very basic question: How do people know how old they are?

SOCIAL REGULATION OF AGE IN BRITAIN

People know their age from the way other people behave towards them. Most significantly people in Britain know because their family celebrate their birthday and have done so since they were born. Every year they mark the passing of another year with cards and presents, perhaps a party or other forms of celebration. Its importance is symbolically marked by ritual. Key birthdays, for example, the twenty-first or one-hundredth, are particularly ritualised. To have one's birthday forgotten is deeply hurtful and to have no one who knows or cares when it is marks a nadir in social isolation. Thus it seems very odd for those raised in the British cultural tradition that some people do not know how old they are. It is hard to understand that in many cultures and societies it is not of significance and people simply have no reason to remember their exact chronological age. Birth dates, even if they are known, are not universally counted or celebrated. In the Slav tradition it is on one's ‘Slava’ – the day of one's saint – when one is expected to give presents to others. Social time is constructed ritually. These rituals create special moments which break up and pattern the uniform flow of time. They may be counted and used to mark transition from one life stage to another and indeed can be used to create a sense of historical identity and continuity.²

People in the West know their age because society regulates public life according to chronological age. Age is not only ritualised but it is also bureaucratised. There are legal rights and duties based on age. Institutions regulate access and prescribe and proscribe certain behaviours by age. As a consequence it becomes important for the state to officially register births and thus certificate age. Other institutions also certificate age; for example, bus companies issue passes to schoolchildren and to older people to regulate access to cheap fares. Public houses and licensing authorities introduce card schemes to regulate age-based restrictions on the purchase of alcohol. The institutional arrangements of modern society require us to be able to demonstrate our age to others.

The boundary between the roles of child and adult is linked to the acquisition of age-defined rights and duties. The age at which people have been considered to be adult and what is meant by being a child has changed through time. There are specific ages at which people are considered to be personally responsible for their actions. The law sets ages of criminal responsibility, to legally have sex or to drive a car. Other aspects of social responsibility – the legal right to leave home, obtain housing benefit, get married or leave school – are restricted by age. Civic responsibility, in the form of military service, the right to vote and duty to serve on a jury, is also regulated by age criteria. At the opposite end of the life course age criteria can come back into play. Over a certain age (70), you are required to renew your driving licence every 3 years and if you have a disability you must have a doctor certify that you are fit to drive. Further, you are entitled to certain benefits by virtue of age – a free television licence after the age of 75 and the right to priority housing under the Homeless Persons Act. Age-based legal restrictions exclude people from work-related benefits such as incapacity benefit. In Britain, you are excused from jury service if over the age of 70. Such institutional arrangements play a part in allocating people into the category ‘old’.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PENSIONS IN ESTABLISHING THE MODERN CATEGORY ‘OLD AGE’

The single most important transition that is seen to mark entry into old age is retirement. In contemporary Britain the terms ‘pensioner’ and ‘older person’ are used almost interchangeably. Even my 12-year-old dog was described as a ‘pensioner’ when a fellow dog walker contrasted her to the puppy she was exercising. However, retirement is a modern phenomenon and in the twentieth century it has come to dominate our thinking about and understanding of old age.³ It is modern both in the sense of a historically recent phenomenon, and in the sense that it is characteristic of the kind of society that has been labelled ‘modern’ – specifically the urban, industrial societies of Western Europe and North America. In pre-modern times people were perceived as old at the age at which they ceased to be independent, economically or physically, and this varied among individuals. The modern structure of the working life has segmented the life course into pre-work, work and post-work phases.⁴ The conventional definition of chronological old age as starting at 60 or 65 stems from standardisation and bureaucra-tisation of the life course around the administration of retirement pensions. This contrasts with the situation in more traditional rural environments. For example, the transition between generations in the rural west of Ireland in the 1930s, described by Arensberg was clearly marked and ritualised by the ‘match’.⁵ This was a formal agreement whereby the inheriting son would marry at the same time as the elderly couple would hand on the property. Traditionally the ‘old couple’ would reserve themselves a room and produce from the smallholding to see them through their retirement.

Historical research suggests that, in Britain, the definition of old age in pre-modern times was individual and flexible but that over a period from about 1850 to 1950 a new, more rigid definition of old age developed. Over this time fixed retirement ages have become the norm and the association between a person's physical condition and their giving up work, or at least paid employment, has lessened. Thane argues that before the early nineteenth century individuals retired from their occupations at whatever age they felt unable to carry them out.⁶ The rationale of those developing fixed retirement ages illustrates the forces at play in establishing the modern concept of old age. In Britain the first fixed retirement age was introduced in 1859 for civil servants and was set at the age of 65. The establishment of a widely uniform age of transition from work to retirement created the norm of the older person as someone without occupation and the conventional association of the age 65 with old age.

A peculiarity of the British pension system is the differential age of retirement for men and women. Women retire at age 60, five years before men, despite their greater longevity.⁷ The Second World War pension reforms saw the lowering of women's pensionable age to 60. This decision followed an effective national campaign by the National Spinsters Association and was argued on the basis that women received poorer wages than did men. Further, the system assumed a married couple and paid the wife's pension on the basis of the husband's National Insurance contributions at his retirement, not on the basis of her age. As women tended to marry older men, spinsters would typically draw their pensions later than married women and this was seen as unfair.⁸ In more recent years, the practice of standardised retirement ages has become less rigid. Two factors have been influential in these changes which developed through the last quarter of the twentieth century. First, there is the use of early retirement to manage fluctuations in the labour market, and using pensions to attract older workers to withdraw from paid employment. Second, there is the cultural re-evaluation of the post-work phase of life known as the ‘third age’ in which the positive attractions and opportunities fo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• KEY IDEAS
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 The experience of old age
• 2 The succession of generations
• 3 Global crises and old age
• 4 Old age, equity and intergenerational conflict?
• 5 Consumerism, identity and old age
• 6 Old age, sickness, death and immortality
• Conclusion: old age and ageism
• NOTES
• INDEX