Afterword: Homes in the Context of the Third and Fourth Ages

Reflecting on the theme of this special issue it is useful to not only to be aware about how older people have often been forgotten about in thinking about the topic of home, but also that there has been a transformation of what old age means and how these changes have impacted on how societies see the older population. It is useful to remind ourselves that the generalised experience of later life through the institutionalisation of retirement is a relatively modern phenomenon (Phillipson 2013). It is not that the lower life expectancies of earlier centuries meant that there were no older people; there obviously were but not in sufficient numbers for there to be a normative expectation of old age (Thane 2007). It was only during the 20th century that the introduction of state retirement pensions, first for men and then for women, made the expectation of an old age defined by retirement a mass phenomenon. This did not mean that later life was transformed into a positive category of entitlement. Rather, the emergence D O I: 10 .1 08 0/ 17 40 63 15 .2 01 8. 16 90 29 7 HOME CULTURES VOLUME 15, ISSUE 3 PP 309–316 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © 2019 INFORMA UK LIMITED, TRADING AS TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP.