Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500

by Botelho; Lynn

• ISBN13: 9780582329027
• ISBN10: 0582329027
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-01-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This new collection of essays examines the lives of older women in Britain from 1500 to the present and gives a fascinating insight into the lives of elderly women from a range of different social strata and different times.This latest book in theWomen and Men in Historyseries will break down some widely held assumptions revealing attitudes towards the aging process and challenging common beliefs and stereotypes. The book sheds light on the history of family relationships, welfare provision, changing female self-images and the structure of the family in pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial Britain and, in doing so, the book can also modify our understanding of wider society. The essays draw on women's diaries, autobiographies, social surveys, mass observation and a fascinating variety of other sources.This an important book for anyone interested in sociology, history, social policy, gerontology or women's studies. Also available in Hardcover - 0-582-32901-9 $79.95Y

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	vii
List of Contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(12)
Lynn Botelho
Pat Thane
Strategies of poor aged women and widows in sixteenth-century London	13	(18)
Claire S. Schen
Who most needs to marry? Ageing and inequality among women and men in early modern Norwich	31	(12)
Margaret Pelling
Old age and menopause in rural women of early modern Suffolk	43	(23)
Lynn Botelho
'I feel myself decay apace': Old age in the diary of Lady Sarah Cowper (1644--1720)	66	(23)
Anne Kugler
Old maids: the lifecycle of single women in early modern England	89	(22)
Amy M. Froide
The old woman's home in eighteenth-century England	111	(28)
Susannah Ottaway
The residence patterns of elderly English women in comparative perspective	139	(27)
Richard Wall
Old and incapable? Louisa Twining and elderly women in Victorian Britain	166	(20)
Theresa Deane
'An inheritance of fear': older women in the twentieth-century countryside	186	(21)
Stephen Hussey
Old women in twentieth-century Britain	207	(25)
Pat Thane
Bibliographica essay: Older women in Britain since 1500	232	(7)
Lynn Botelho
Pat Thane
Index	239