German Historical Institute, London; Christina von Hodenberg and Helen McCarthy (Univ. of Cambridge) (Web)

Time: 12.-14.09.2024
Venue: London

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: Papers will cover Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland, Soviet and post-Soviet countries, France, and colonial India.
While engaging closely with the more established historiography on pension reform, welfare, and ideas of ageing, the organisers seek to centre the changing experience of ageing and the life worlds of old people in different European contexts.

Programme (PDF)

Panels: Work, Ageing and Retirement | Health, Ageing, Bodies and Minds | Ageing and the Family | Ageing, Gender and Feminism | Old Age, Agency and the Mass Media

The paper from Austria is: Brigitte Semanek (Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten), “My world became smaller and smaller”: Domestic care for the elderly in rural Austria from the 1960s to the 2000s. She compiled her findings also by using diaries from the Sammlung Frauennachlässe („Collection of Women’s Personal Papers“) at the Univ. of Vienna (Web).