My friend Jan was witty and resourceful. She could dash off a sonnet at a moment’s notice, though she would have to type it out very slowly. Her mobility and dexterity were limited by rheumatoid arthritis, so she came up with her own ways to get things done: she used a wooden spoon to apply pain-relief gel to the back of her neck. She was a music teacher and wrote songs for children: if you’ve ever chanted ‘Popocatépetl is a BIG vol-ca-no’, you know her work. She was born in 1941, so when I knew her, she was in her 70s and I was in my 20s.
Intergenerational friendships have been an important part of my adult life. These friendships have repeatedly shown me that you can’t tell much about a person from their age. We desperately need to learn this, because in the Global North we live in ageing societies. 19% of people in England are 65+, and by 2065 that will likely be 26%. So ageing and old age should be normalised, right? But our brains are slower to catch up than our demographics. Ageism is deeply engrained in how we think, including self-directed ageism rooted in fear about our own ageing. It’s not surprising that it’s sometimes called the last socially acceptable prejudice.
The crucial first step to ending ageism is to understand what baggage we carry when we say ‘old’. It’s hard to shake it off because we’ve been saddled with it for nearly 200 years. One of the eventual knock-on effects of the industrial revolution was improvement to sanitation and public health. This led to longer life expectancy, making old age more common, and created the first social panic about how all these older people would be supported. This changed mainstream ideas about ageing, away from the ‘seven ages of man‘ model where the prime of life was mid-life, and where ageing was an inevitable part of life’s journey. Instead, as Andrea Charise has argued, a new model of ageing took root, in which ageing’s effects were optional and not welcome. ‘In your prime’ was no longer midlife but youth, and ‘old’ became a poisonous catch-all category. The new model helped younger people feel empowered, and inspired creativity – not least in the cosmetics industry! – but it continues its pernicious effects today.
‘Too old’ is an ideological power move, which – like sexism, racism or ableism – blames your failings on a single characteristic that you can’t control. ‘You don’t know how to do X?! It must be because you’re old!’ It’s also a tool of conformity: it says that you haven’t adapted sufficiently to keep up with the times, so you should either be brought up to speed, or ditched.
We can’t break out of the ageist paradigm on our own. Age UK and the Centre for Ageing Better are doing great work, as is US anti-ageism campaigner Ashton Applewhite, but the dial isn’t shifting fast enough. That’s because ageism has been rooting itself in our psyches ever since the nineteenth century. One of the best people to help us understand and fight this is a pioneering, resilient, amazingly prolific Victorian writer you’ve probably never heard of.
In her lifetime, Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) was compared to Jane Austen and read by Queen Victoria. She was a single mother who kept her household afloat with her writing – and eventually, all her children died before her. Her novels (100 of them!) were largely forgotten in the twentieth century, but are now being celebrated by scholars and fellow-novelists. She wrote astutely and sometimes bitterly about society’s failure to recognise women’s capabilities. And she had surprisingly prescient views on ageing, which can offer valuable tools for contemporary campaigners.
Her novel Hester (1883; set in the 1860s) tells the story of a young woman who’s bursting with life and creativity, frustrated at her limited life choices. It also tells the story of her aunt, Catherine Vernon, who as a young woman in the 1820s did get to do something brave and spectacular, by saving the town bank from collapse. Ever since, she has overseen the business, and become a matriarch, stately and imposing. She is now 65. Is she ‘old’? Our narrator shows us what a slippery and limiting term that is. When Catherine goes to visit her fond godparents, now in their mid-eighties, ‘It still gave her a certain amusement to think that she was old like these old people’, ‘and yet it was true; for though sixty-five and eighty-five are very different, nobody can doubt that sixty-five is old. It was still strange, almost ludicrous, to Catherine, that it should be so.’
Both of these two distinct generations are now labelled ‘old’ by their neighbours, even though one pair are godparents to the other. This small commentary forces us to wonder whether ‘old’ is even a serviceable category, since it unhelpfully groups together people from very different life-stages. When the first UK state pensions were established after 1908, only people over 70 (and with desperately low incomes, plus various other criteria) were eligible. This would have put Catherine and her godparents firmly in distinct age brackets. The same will soon be true again, as the state pension age rises back above 65.
The ‘old age’ label can artificially diminish people, especially with the extra baggage of sexism. Oliphant shows how gendered age-definitions have been used to patronise and homogenise. Catherine is an ‘adopted grandmother’ to many, and much admired. But the flipside is that she’s often aloof, even contemptuous – and stirs up resentment and envy from others who don’t have her freedom or power. Several of her relatives are financially dependent on her benevolence. When Catherine talks about these impoverished relatives, she disparagingly calls them ‘the dear old ladies’, even though they ‘were all younger than Catherine, and one of them a man.’ It’s a shock to see just how long this diminutive phrase has wilfully ignored the differences between people.
Ageism is particularly potent because it is intersectional: because it’s more harmful to be treated as an ‘old lady’ than an ‘old man’. That’s partly due to centuries-old fears of the post-menopausal and witch-like ‘crone’. But it’s also because of the scarcity of work for older women: census-data studies of 1851-1911 show that among people aged 60+, 80%+ of men were still doing paid work, compared to only 15-30% of women. The male dependant in Hester is emasculated by not being gainfully employed. Ironically, he and the female dependants are catty and unpleasant towards Catherine, not even ‘dear’ after all.
Later in the novel, the two ‘old ladies’ get their own back. When they come across Catherine out walking, they seize their chance to exclaim patronisingly, ‘isn’t this long walk too much for you’? Our narrator comments: ‘It was true that the Miss Vernon-Ridgways were under fifty, and Catherine was sixty-five; but she was far more vigorous than they were’. She ‘kept her arms close by her side, and refused any support.’ The oft-patronised Vernon-Ridgways can’t resist the opportunity to turn the tables, and of course Catherine herself resists being pigeonholed in turn.
This fraught dynamic isn’t really about age. Instead, it stems from an imbalance of power, encapsulated in that word ‘vigorous’. The dependants are resentful at their state of dependency, and Catherine behaves badly because of it. Ageist discrimination is a way for those in power to exclude others. But it can also be wielded as a surprisingly sharp weapon against those in power, as Oliphant shows through those Miss Vernon-Ridgways, and as has been used against politicians from William Ewart Gladstone in 1892 to Joe Biden in 2024.
The flipside of feeling power, of course, is fear. Much of ageism stems from fear of death or incapacity. In the 1880s, incapacity meant destitution: ‘outdoor relief’ for the lucky ones, the dreaded workhouse for others. Ageism is ultimately rooted in fear of becoming powerless ourselves.
What solutions to ageism, then, can we access by reading Victorian fiction? Oliphant herself doesn’t offer simple answers. She was a committed conservative, so she did not call for structural upheaval, even when the 1880s saw calls for state pension provision from reformers including Joseph Chamberlain, Charles Booth, Samuel Barnett, Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury. What Oliphant offers us are unexpected ways of thinking, a kernel from which to grow our own thought and action.
In Hester, the most important alternative is intergenerational friendship outside family ties. Hester and those 85-year-old godparents develop a friendship of mutual joy and support, including daily walks together. Through this friendship, Oliphant makes readers think about the relative weight that should be accorded to familial or social intergenerational responsibility. Should our most important intergenerational relationships always be with those in our own family, or (as faced by children of parents with dementia) might non-family sometimes be less-painfully placed to provide care? Although bio-family matters, it is often not sufficient alone. We need a society of community ties that reach across and beyond individual families.
The biggest downside of the ‘old’ label in these novels, just like today, is its baggage. ‘Old’ implies ‘needs looking after’ (don’t we all?), ‘out-of-touch’ (with what?), or even ‘should be ready to be superseded’. This forgets that age can give us gifts that youth might lack. As I have found in working with intergenerational charity InCommon, who run programmes bringing together older and younger people in London neighbourhoods, both age groups learn from each another.
My friend Jan died in 2017. I miss her acerbic commentary and her supportive presence. My closest intergenerational friend now is Mike, a retired doctor, who is 83 and always working to change the world. His energy for learning new things reminds me that, as Age UK’s Caroline Abrahams puts it, ‘chronological age is rarely a good proxy for anything’.