1st Edition

Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500

By Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane Copyright 2001
    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    Women have always made up the majority of older people: this examination of the lives of elderly women in Britain in the period 1500 to the present reveals attitudes towards the ageing process. It sheds light on household structures as well as wider issues - including the history of the family, the process of industrialisation, the poor law, and welfare provision - and questions many common beliefs about elderly women, particularly that female old age was a time of poverty and want. An important book for students of history and sociology alike.

    List of Figures and Tables, List of Contributors, Acknowledgements, Introduction, 1. Strategies of poor aged women and widows in sixteenth-century London, 2. Who most needs to marry? Ageing and inequality among women and men in early modern Norwich, 3. Old age and menopause in rural women of early modern Suffolk, 4. 'I feel myself decay apace': Old age in the diary of Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720), 5. Old maids: the lifecycle of single women in early modern England, 6. The old woman's home in eighteenth-century England, 7. The residence patterns of elderly English women in comparative perspective, 8. Old and incapable? Louisa Twining and elderly women in Victorian Britain, 9. 'An inheritance of fear': older women in the twentieth-century countryside, 10. Old women in twentieth-century Britain, Bibliographical essay: Older women in Britain since 1500, Index

    Biography

    Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane

    "A fine collection...excellent introduction to the state of an academic field"

    Colleen Seguin, Valparaiso University