Ladies and Pensioners: Stereotypes and Public Policy Affecting Old Women in England, 1880-1940

Roebuck, Janet; Slaughter, Jane

doi:10.1353/jsh/13.1.105

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Stearns (1980) contends that the old age period for women is one-third of their lives beginning at the time of menopause, around age 50. However, Roebuck and Slaughter (1979) caution about using menopause as a "convenient symbol of advancing age to mark the beginning of old age. Men could be presumed old when they no longer perform their life's work; women could similarly be presumed old when the 'noblest aim of their existence,' childbearing, was over" (Roebuck & Slaughter, 1979: 106).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 Similarly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton reportedly regretted selling her house following her husband's death "for now she depended on others for a home" (Banner, 1980). 15 A study of the effect on aging women of Pension Laws passed by the English government by Roebuck and Slaughter (1979) is not included here because of cultural variations and the strong possibility of the conclusions not being applicable to the American experience. As Laslett (1977) and others have pointed out, "England cannot be taken as necessarily typical of Western experience" of modernization, "except only in the final Stages" (Laslett, 1977: 176).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

Feinson¹

1985

Social Science History

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Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who were treated with a contempt which deepened all the more by their womanhood. Some were actually driven away by their neighbors, who feared an increase in the poor rates. The legal records of the colonies contain many instances of poor widows who were … forced to wander from one town to another (Fischer, 1978: 63).

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

Feinson¹

1985

Social Science History

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“…she can keep her little home together and do for herself on a small income. 22 A strikingly similar picture emerges from surveys throughout the twentieth century, of "active independent elderly women and passive dependent elderly men." 23 The form that the first old-age pensions took-a means-tested noncontributory pension aimed at the very poor-was shaped primarily by the needs of poor old women to diminish their unequal struggle against destitution.…”

Section: Old-age Pensionsmentioning

confidence: 77%

“An Untiring Zest for Life”: Images and Self-Images of Old Women in England

Thane

2000

Journal of Family History

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The prevailing view among historians and contemporaries is that old people were more highly regarded in the past and that old women were regarded more negatively than men. This article questions such simple changes over time and the uniformity and negativity of attitudes in the present. A variety of sources-diaries, letters, biographies, social investigation, and personal testimony-indicate how much can be retrieved about the images and self-images of old women. They suggest how varied these images have been. Older women, rich and poor, could belie and contest negative stereotypes and could be well respected.The prevailing view in contemporary discourse (at least in English) is that "old people" had higher status, a more positive image, and were accorded more respect in "the past" than at present. This past is an unspecific territory, sometimes, perhaps, Victorian, sometimes vaguely preindustrial. Until very recently, the common view of those few historians who had addressed the issue was that the image of old people has indeed deteriorated over time-in no matter what time or place they studied it, whether from the medieval period to the Renaissance or since industrialization. 1 In general, too, they, and present-day commentators, have believed that there is a dominant present-day stereotype that portrays old people negatively as decrepit, dependent burdens. Where historians of old age have discussed gender, and this has been rare, despite the tendency of females to outlive males in most known times and places, they have believed that generally held stereotypes of old women were, and are, more negative than those of old men.2 It has been argued that old age has popularly been seen as beginning earlier for women-at menopause. Yet, what follows suggests that a variety of sources-from private diaries to social surveys and poor law records-cast doubt on this for both rich and poor old women. Rather, they indicate that, for women as for men, old age was perceived more subjectively, in relation to social power and/or physi-235

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“…Her fears about her loss of purpose and familial position reflect widespread 'popular expressions of concern for the "surplus of women" in English society', 72 increasingly directed towards 'the growing numbers of "old maids" and widows' 73 in a post-war culture that privileged 'marriage and nuclear families with male breadwinners and dependent wives over all other family formations'. 74 Holtby herself wrote in Time and Tide that 'on all sides the unmarried woman today is surrounded by doubts cast not only upon her attractiveness or her common sense, but upon her decency, her normality, even her sanity'.…”

Section: Women's Cinemagoing In Interwar Yorkshirementioning

confidence: 99%

‘The big romance’: Winifred Holtby and the fictionalisation of women's cinemagoing in interwar Yorkshire

Stead¹

2013

Women's History Review

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This article explores fictive accounts of women’s cinemagoing in Winifred Holtby’s middlebrow interwar literature. The article looks at the ways in which Holtby’s writing engaged with notions of female self-fashioning in relation to screen fictions through her novels The Crowded Street (1924) and South Riding: an English land- scape (1936). More specifically, the article explores how Holtby’s novels present a con- sideration of cinema’s influence upon women’s lives and selfhoods as mediated through local and regional contexts of reception in her descriptions of rural and urban Yorkshire. The article begins by examining the practice of cinemagoing for women in Yorkshire during the interwar years, and moves to explore the contribution of cinema to cultural representations of femininity in this period, considering the ways in which Holtby used middlebrow fiction to actively critique cinema’s more negative representations, whilst shaping a defence of women and cinema more generally within British interwar modernity

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Ladies and Pensioners: Stereotypes and Public Policy Affecting Old Women in England, 1880-1940

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

“An Untiring Zest for Life”: Images and Self-Images of Old Women in England

‘The big romance’: Winifred Holtby and the fictionalisation of women's cinemagoing in interwar Yorkshire

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