Abstract:

A survey of various aspects of the female experience of old age in France in the nineteenth & twentieth centuries. Improved longevity rates are contrasted with a relatively unchanging, & unflattering, set of cultural attitudes toward older women, as well as to economic vulnerability (both the attitudes & the economics reflected in public policy toward older women by the twentieth century). Adaptability is suggested by older women's emphasis on dependence & on new networks of affection, both translated in phenomena such as new patterns of residence during the nineteenth century.