Author James Chappel unravels the idea of retirement | Canada Voices

Whether it’s the plucky independence of The Golden Girls or the “boomers with zip” (also known as ‘Zoomers’ here in Canada), our popular notions of retirement and old age are relatively modern conceptions.

In his book Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, author James Chappel unravels the idea of retirement, and examines how ideals around old age have evolved in the U.S. over the past century. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Prof. Chappel, who teaches history at Duke University, laid out his argument for why understanding the past might help policy-makers make better decisions for the future.

Where did our modern conception of ‘retirement’ first come from?

A hundred years ago, there was very little concept of old age or retirement. People basically worked until they dropped in a factory, or on a farm. Sometimes people would leave the labour market for reasons of disability. But very few people retired in the sense we mean now, of like, getting some kind of pension, or social security.

And then, from about 1930 to 1970, a couple things happened in the U.S. There was a sense that America faced vast social and economic challenges, and that the state was the solution to those challenges. So we started to see big new social programs as the way to address the woes of American society.

This became the era of “the senior citizen.” The idea was that older people were claiming citizenship, and identifying as a particular generational cohort that needs particular things from the state. So this was the era of Social Security and Medicare – the period where you first saw retirement, when millions of people, for the first time, could actually look forward to 10, 15 or 20 years after the labour market with some kind of income support.

Now, at the time, you did not yet have this kind of ‘old people can do anything young people can do’ attitude. Because the whole point at this period was to say older people are different. So the development of retirement is tied to a kind of ageist set of presuppositions of what old age is.

It’s also the period – the 1950s and 1960s – where you started to see retirement communities and senior centres. Beginning around the 1960s, especially, is where you started to see the ideals of retirement, and leisure – that old age was supposed to be relaxing and full of leisure. And so in this period, leisure was often linked with, like the sun, good climate and golf.

You also write about the impacts of the Cold War

Americans were very afraid of anything that sounded like socialism. So one of the beauties of old age policy is that it can be very generous, but it never looks socialist because it doesn’t really touch the labour market.

And in the U.S., the way that these policies are created are not egalitarian or universalist. What they do is reproduce the inequities of the labour market for old age. So the more you make in your working life, the more you receive in Social Security. They don’t require an attack on the American system. They don’t require an attack on inequality.

And now, you argue, we’re in a new stage of thinking when it comes to old age

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon expanded social security benefits. What he did was he indexed them to inflation, and now that means that they’ll go up every year. But a couple years later, there was massive inflation, and social security and medicare becomes extremely expensive. So the question became: how can we restrain costs? And so I think it’s no surprise that retirement as a phase of life since then has been challenged in all kinds of ways.

So in this new kind of austerity mindset of the 1980s, older people are urged to solve problems for themselves. If you look at a show like The Golden Girls [which debuted in 1985], the whole point of that show was that these women are independent. They don’t need help from anybody.

And culturally, I think retirement has lost a lot of its cache. It seems boring. There’s been a cultural shift to say ‘Older people are just like younger one. They should be active.’ And that’s led to a lot of focus on what older people can do, which, on the one hand, has been great, right? There was the Senior Olympics, and culture of old age sports, and sexuality – which has been especially liberating for older women.

On the other side, there’s hasn’t been as much development in the space of old age policy, especially when it comes in this country to elder care. And, at least in America, a real neglect of the population of older people that actually is disabled and does need help. So the solution we’ve arrived at here is that almost all that work has to be done for free by middle-aged women, because the state is not stepping up.

So what is your prediction for the next generation of retirees?

There’s a difference between a prediction and a hope. I think that we should take advantage of the fact that there’s so much automation and AI that we can still honour that 20th-century promise, and give dignified retirements to all American citizens. And that this will be possible because we will turn caregiving jobs into good, well-paying jobs, and make this a part of the 21st-century American economy. That is my hope.

What do I actually think will happen? Do I look at the American political system and think, ‘Oh, this is a system that’s going to be able to resolve these problems?’ No, in fact, I feel quite pessimistic. I think that population aging is a huge problem, but it doesn’t have to be a problem. I think it can be resolved, if there’s political energy to do so. But it’s not there right now.

This interview has been condensed and edited.