Conveners: Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL) and Helen McCarthy (University of Cambridge)

Venue: GHIL

To date, the social history of ageing and old people has received comparatively little attention from historians. Recent works have begun to explore the topic from multiple perspectives, building on oral history, archival materials, media sources, and quantitative and qualitative data produced by twentieth-century social science. From this scholarship it emerges that ageing was a dynamic process across the period and the aged themselves were a highly differentiated group. Gender, class, racial background, and marital status, among other intersectional categories, produced marked differences in the social experience of old people. This conference aims to bring together scholars working on ageing and old age in twentieth-century Europe, including Europe’s colonial and global entanglements. While engaging closely with the more established historiography on pension reform, welfare, and ideas of ageing, we seek to centre the changing experience of ageing and the life worlds of old people in different European contexts.

Papers will cover Germany, the UK, Ireland, Soviet and post-Soviet countries, France, and colonial India. Five panels will address topics such as age and work/retirement; the agency of older people in the mass media; health and the older body; old women and feminism; and the ‘family life’ of older people.