Social Histories of Old Age and Aging (1) (Central Issues‪)‬

One of the many important changes in approaches to social history in many countries in recent decades has been increasing awareness of the multiple forms of social diversity within all societies and, in consequence, the need for greater complexity of analysis. Whereas in the nineteen sixties and early seventies social historians perceived class as the primary social division, increasingly the importance of gender, ethnicity and, more recently religious belief, region and age have been recognized, and historians have learned to seek to understand and relate these multiple diversities to one another. Much of my recent work has been engaged with the history of and social meanings of aging and old age, an important phase of life throughout history but one which, with a cluster of rare exceptions written in the nineteen seventies, (2) was hardly at all studied by historians until comparatively recently. It is field of study which has engaged closely with work in other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and which requires, if all of its dimensions are to be understood, engagement with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. Like many areas of social history it has gained from the insights of the 'cultural turn' whilst continuing to benefit from and to develop older approaches drawn from demographic, economic and political history. Ideally, it fuses all of these approaches. I hope that a brief survey of recent work in this field will contribute to discussion about the current state and, I believe, the continuing strength, of social history. The skepticism of historians about simplified grand narratives, combined with the use of a greater variety of sources to explore the past (literary, visual and personal for example, as well as statistical and official sources) has, in recent years, moved us towards a more complex understanding of the historical experience of old age. This is appropriate for the stage of life which encompasses greater variety than any other. It can be seen, in any time period, as including people aged from their fifties to past one hundred; those possessing the greatest wealth and power, and the least; those at a peak of physical fitness and the most frail. In consequence of this variety many different histories and fragments of histories of old age are emerging. This does not imply that there are no overarching narratives, that the history of old age is no more than an accumulation of small stories; rather it suggests that we are at an exciting, if incomplete, stage of assembling both small and large stories about different times and places in the search for a more complete history of old age.