Ageing as a cultural construct

The most common single error in popular history is the belief that people in the past died young. It is repeated constantly, usually in the form that life expectancy in some earlier period was thirty or forty, with the implication that a person of fifty was a rarity and that old age is a modern invention.

The figure is real. The inference is wrong, and correcting it is the necessary first step to thinking about ageing at all.

Where old age begins, and who decided

If old age is not a fixed biological threshold, something has to set it, and in modern states that something is administrative.

In Britain the Old Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced a non contributory pension for people over seventy, subject to conditions. That single number did an enormous amount of work: it defined, for administrative purposes, when a person became old, and it did so on the basis of what the Treasury could afford rather than on any finding about human capacity. Pension ages have been moved repeatedly since, in both directions, for fiscal and demographic reasons, and each move has quietly redefined the category.

Retirement did something similar in employment. Compulsory retirement ages, where they existed, made old age a status you entered on a date rather than a condition you arrived at. In the United Kingdom the default retirement age was abolished in 2011, which means that for legal purposes the threshold has moved again, this time towards not existing.

Census categories, insurance tables, medical guidelines and marketing segments all draw their own lines, and none of them agrees with any other. There is no age at which a person becomes old. There is only a set of institutions each of which has picked a number for its own reasons.

The veneration myth

The second durable error is the belief that older people were venerated in the past and are disrespected now, usually accompanied by a gesture towards some other culture where matters are said to be better arranged.

The historical work does not support the simple version. Pat Thane's study of old age in English history, which is the standard survey, finds neither a golden age of respect nor a uniform history of neglect. What it finds is variation determined by resources: an older person with property, income or useful skills held authority, and one without them was dependent on family, on charity or on the poor law. Older women without property were among the most vulnerable people in early modern society, a vulnerability that intersected with witchcraft accusation in ways historians have examined closely.

The comparative claim is similarly unreliable. Anthropological literature on ageing across cultures records enormous variation, including societies with strong formal deference to elders that nonetheless treat particular categories of older people very poorly, and the practice generally diverges from the stated ideal. Wheeling out another culture as a reproach usually says more about the speaker than about the culture.

There is no age at which a person becomes old. There is a set of institutions, each of which has picked a number for its own reasons, none of which agree.

The visible markers

What actually signals age is a small set of visible changes, and their social weight has shifted considerably.

Grey hair is the clearest single marker and the most easily altered, which is why hair colour is one of the largest categories in the industry. The social meaning of grey has shifted noticeably within living memory, and it differs sharply by gender in ways that have been documented in employment research.

Skin change is a mixture of intrinsic ageing and cumulative environmental exposure, principally ultraviolet radiation. This distinction is well established dermatologically and it matters for the history, because a great deal of what has been treated as inevitable ageing is photoageing, which is why the twentieth century enthusiasm for tanning described in the tanning essay has a long tail.

The menopause occupies a peculiar position: a universal biological event that was barely named in European medicine until the early nineteenth century, when the term was coined in French medical writing, and that was then medicalised, pathologised, ignored and rediscovered in successive waves. The recent surge of public discussion in Britain is best understood as one of those waves rather than as a first discovery.

The vocabulary problem

Regulators have taken an interest in the language, and the position in Britain is more interesting than it sounds. Advertising rules require objective claims to be substantiated, which means that a claim to reverse ageing is a claim about a physiological process and needs evidence, while a claim to reduce the appearance of lines is a claim about an optical effect and needs much less.

This has shaped the entire vocabulary of the category, as discussed in the essay on beauty copy. Anti ageing has been progressively replaced in marketing by terms including pro ageing, age positive and longevity, partly in response to changing sentiment and partly because the older term makes a claim that is harder to defend.

This magazine has no position on what anyone should do about any of this, and declines to acquire one. The historical observation is narrower and sturdier: the meaning of an ageing face is assigned rather than inherent, it has been assigned differently in different periods, and the current assignment is neither natural nor permanent.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The legislation.gov.uk and the Royal Historical Society both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.