Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 by Lynn Botelho Pat Thane

Author:Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane [Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781317881155
Google: 78MeBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-30T01:23:58+00:00

Old women’s homes in the eighteenth-century listings

Eighteen household listings from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century contain adequate information for the purposes of this study. These censuses indicate whether a woman was living in her own home – as a head of household or as the spouse of a household head – or if she was living as a subordinate member of someone else’s home. Thus they help us to gain insight into the degree to which elderly women maintained their autonomy.

Eighteenth-century census-makers almost always made a clear distinction between the head of a household (or ‘householder’) and the other members of a family: heads of family were either placed in a separate column or listed first within the household. Not only does this indicate that enumerators recognised the importance of the role of a head of household,28 but it also means that household ‘headship’ is one of the least ambiguous aspects of pre-modern censuses.29

The collection of listings indicates that the majority of the elderly women in the listings (64–66 per cent) either headed their own household or were married to a household head (see Table 6.1, p. 118).30 Still, older women were less likely to have an autonomous household position than elderly men. About 20 per cent fewer women than men were a household head (or a spouse of a head), and elderly women were more often found in positions of dependence than were men. In most places, about twice as many women as men lived in households that were headed by neither themselves nor their spouse.31 Older women also lived alone more often than men: one in ten women compared with one in twenty men. Still, it was not common for aged individuals to live in isolation, and no more than 5 per cent of the elderly women in any of the listings lived in a workhouse.

Figure 6.1 shows that women’s ability to head their own household declined with age, but a sharp decline did not occur until advanced old age. Women aged 65 to 74 headed households at a rate slightly lower than those 45 to 54 years old. Women aged 75 and more were far less likely to be a household head than their younger cohorts. The seventeenth-century urban and nineteenth-century rural populations had headship rates of 50 per cent or less for the oldest women; the other three areas showed headship rates of 60 to 70 per cent for this age group. Figure 6.1 shows that all of the listings used here displayed similar trends in the household position of elderly women, with all showing a sharp decline in residential independence only after women had reached advanced old age.

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