Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age (review)

Constructed from papers first given at a conference at Bowdoin College in the spring of 1990, Aging in the Past is the first book devoted entirely to the historical demography of aging and old age. It consists of two synthetic chapters (an introduction by Laslett and a conclusion by Kertzer) and eleven research chapters shaped into three sections:” Living Arrangements,” “Widowhood,” and “Retirement and Mortality.”

Peter Laslett’s long (and somewhat pretentious) introduction sets the stage. He summarizes well-known data from Western countries and Japan demonstrating that within the last century, a revolutionary change has occurred in two basic measures: longevity (or life expectancy, measured from various ages) and age composition. This rapid and recent aging of Western and Japanese populations gave rise in the twentieth century to what Laslett (in A Fresh Map of Life [1989]) has, borrowing the French phrase, called the “Third Age”: a historically unprecedented situation in which at least one quarter of all adults are over age sixty— largely healthy, retired from the workforce, and (often) living alone.

The research chapters focus on local areas within central and Western Europe and the United States, mostly since the mid-nineteenth century, when these countries began keeping vital records. These papers emphasize that the feminization of old age is a recent phenomenon, though the history of sex-ratio disparities is not yet well researched. They also cast doubt on the assumption (derived from Laslett’s earlier work in England) that old people in the European past lived in pure, nuclear family settings and not in multigenerational households. In preindustrial central and northern Italy, joint family households similar to those of South Asia were common. In Hungary as well as much of central and Eastern Europe, complex family household arrangements were as common as nuclear families. Even in preindustrial England and the United States (before World War II), it was common for older people to live with their children. These findings lead to the volume’s most significant conceptual point: Kertzer’s suggestion that scholars abandon the notion of a pure nuclear family system and incorporate the cultural norm mandating that frail or widowed parents live with married children at the end of their lives. More research along these lines will surely add historical perspective to current debates about state vs. family responsibility for the elderly.

One hopes that future volumes on the historical demography of aging will experiment with measures of aging other than chronological years (e.g., using the number of years until death at various ages)—testing Bourdelais’s suggestion that by such health-related measures, the population of France has actually gotten younger in the twentieth century! Historical demographers also need to collaborate with epidemiologists: we need more historical research on changing causes of death, patterns of morbidity, and health care utilization to illuminate the contemporary debates about whether our rapidly aging population is becoming healthier or sicker.