“Everyone will become disabled if they’re lucky enough. Aging is a privilege. Far too few of us get the opportunity to live to be a ripe old age. And if you do get the opportunity, you will likely become disabled.”
Maria Town, President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities (Masters 2020)
Artists today often use disability as a visual code for old age, equating the two. Recently, a political cartoon by Barry Blitt caused blowback on Twitter when it depicted prominent older U.S. politicians including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi racing to the polls using walkers. The clear conflation of old age with disability stirred outrage. Political activist Victor Shi tweeted “Hey, New Yorker: THIS is seriously your cover for next week’s magazine? Not only is it incredibly ageist but it’s ableist & a slap in the face to every person in America who needs a walker & who has a disability” (Shi 2023). And so it was.
Artists have used disability to code for old age both because it fits their mental framework of how aging works and because it provides a convenient visual shorthand. Artists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century used the same visual language that combined disability and old age. Consider the early nineteenth-century ceramic “Old Age” from Staffordshire, England.
The toll of old age is indicated with the use of crutches and the man’s slumped-over posture. Here disability is presented as an inevitable part of aging, inextricable from age itself. Old age’s disability is organic—part of the cycle of life.
Sixty-five-year-old Blitt seems to agree with the view of aging as an inevitable part of the privilege of a long life. In an interview with the New Yorker to accompany his cover, he reflected on how his parents’ aging offered him a window into what he might expect. “Well, my mother has a fancy walker, and I take it for a spin when I’m in Montreal. I have walked around the house with it, you know, preparing myself for the inevitable. It’s just a matter of time” (Mouly 2023). Maria Town, the CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, would concur. In her quote above, she repeated a common truism in the disability community, and one that comes straight from theory. Disability is seen as a universal part of the life course. If you are not disabled earlier in life, then you will inevitably be in later life. Unfortunately, this triumphalist view of universal disability clashes with a long-fought concern from the gerontology community and advocates for older adults. Many resent and dispute the equation of old age with disability.
To this day, gerontological conversations around old age tend to fall into two sets of narratives at war with each other. One, the “decline narrative,” embraces the possibility of disability in later life as inevitable. The other, the “successful aging” narrative, rejects disability as an inevitable, or even likely, outcome of getting older. In this model, positive aging attitudes include an avoidance of identifying as disabled. The World Health Organization and other governmental organizations and NGOs have embraced this model of positive aging and its outright rejection of disability as a part of old age (Leahy 2023).
Is old age inextricable from disability? Might we wish to be more careful in aligning these categories then and now? Eighteenth-century Americans struggled with the fear that old age was inevitably a time of disability, and they wrestled with the question using the same divergent models as today.
White eighteenth-century Americans and Western Europeans termed old age “the decline of life.” Chronological age was understood to mean a likelihood of physical limitations we would today call disability. Many eighteenth-century Americans also divided old age into two periods in the widespread model of the life cycle called the Ages of Man. “Green” old age was a healthy old age unlimited by physical changes. After that, the final period in life was “decrepit old age.” Disability was the inherent dividing line between a desired “green” or vigorous old age and a feared state of dependence. In this context, disability often meant physical changes, especially ones that limited mobility. White Americans and Europeans found mobility losses unnerving. Horace Walpole made fun of his own loss of mobility, being carried up and down stairs “dandled in the arms of two servants” (Walpole 1770; Turner 2012, 111). Disability also encompassed intellectual disability such as advanced dementia. Uniting these definitions of what disability looked like in old age was the loss of independence.
Decrepit often carried with it the meaning of being worn out, enfeebled, and infirm. It could also simply be a marker of physical changes in later life that led to changes in social status and reception but did not limit day-to-day independence, mobility, and life actions, such as bathing and toileting. Henriette L’Hardy, a French woman, used the term this way to a friend when she wrote “When I am decrepit I would like still to be found attractive” (Stewart 2010, 1).
Yet eighteenth-century British and British Americans also embraced a countervailing model of healthy aging without disability. For them, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the power of humans to control their lives included the power to manage their own health outcomes. Eighteenth-century people’s belief in human ability to overcome biological and mental changes, coupled with their fear of disability, led to an increased emphasis on exercise and control of diet as a means to live longer and avoid disability in later life. Even older people were encouraged to maintain an exercise program. The form that exercise took could vary, but the prescription for it was universal (Kennaway and Knoeff 2020; Knoeff 2017). In short, eighteenth-century British people and British Americans embraced today’s idea of a healthspan—how long one could live without disability—as separate from chronological lifespan.
Many elite and middling white men and women imbibed these ideas and engaged in exercise programs that they believed might extend their healthspan. Benjamin Franklin, for one, embraced the obligation to exercise throughout his life. In his last few years, he continued this devotion to exercise despite his growing discomfort with all movement due to a very painful kidney stone. His stone got so bad that at one point he wrote about rolling over in bed feeling the stone move from side to side within him. Nonetheless, he continued weight training and walking. This belief in exercise was sincere—but it was also performative. Just as his Poor Richard had once counseled young men that it was important to work hard as young artisans but it was also important for people to see you working hard, the elder Franklin made sure he exercised to prove to others that he was doing everything he could to enhance his lifespan and avoid being disabled. Younger people interpreted his devotion to exercise positively. The Scottish lawyer and novelist Henry Mackenzie attributed Franklin’s “green old Age” at seventy-eight to his habitual exercise, noting that he “Walks every Day for about 2 Hours” (Mackenzie 1784). Franklin passed on his concern for exercise to his younger sister, who made a point of walking every day to maintain health.
Many eighteenth-century British Americans believed avoiding disability was within the grasp of every man and woman—one more thing that was your own personal responsibility. So, was old age inextricable from disability in the eighteenth century? People then struggled with the same disconnect that still animates debates today. The decline model of old age which posits that old age and disability were inextricable was sometimes ascendant. But should we grab hold of the successful aging model which holds, and even demands, that disability might be avoided through human action? Human dignity depends on embracing both disability and aging as a part of the human experience.
References
Kennaway, James Gordon and Rina Knoeff. 2020. Lifestyle and Medicine in the Enlightenment: The Six Non-Naturals in the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge.
Knoeff, Rina, ed. 2017. Gelukkig Gezond! Histories of Healthy Ageing. Groningen, Netherlands: University Museum of Groningen.
Leahy, Ann. 2023. “Disability Identity in Older Age? Exploring Social Processes that Influence Disability Identification with Ageing,” Disability Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3-4. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i3-4.7780.
Mackenzie, Henry. Journal, April 29-May 2, 1784. In The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 44 vols, edited by Leonard W. Labaree et al., 42: 202. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
Masters, J. 2020. “Maria Town: “Everyone Will Become Disabled If They’re Lucky Enough.” Advocate. July 13, 2020. https://www.advocate.com/politics/2020/7/13/disabled-advocate-everyone-will-become-disabled-if-theyre-lucky.
Mouly, Françoise. 2023. “Cover Story.” New Yorker. September 25, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2023-10-02.
Shi, Victor (@Victorshi2020). 2023. “Hey, New Yorker: THIS is seriously your cover for next week’s magazine?” Twitter post, September 25, 2023. https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1706329713617109054.
Stewart, Joan Hinde. 2010. The Enlightenment of Age: Women, Letters and Growing Old in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
Turner, David M. 2012. Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment. New York: Routledge.
Walpole, Horace to the Countess of Upper Ossory. October 4, 1770. In The Letters of Horace Walpole: 1766-1771, edited by Paget Toynbee, 410. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904. https://books.google.com/books?id=IVcrAQAAIAAJ.
Rebecca Brannon is professor of History at James Madison University. She published From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists with the University of South Carolina Press in 2016. Her co-edited A Cultural History of Old Age in the Era of Enlightenment and Revolution (1650-1800) is due out from Bloomsbury in 2025. She is finishing a book on the experience(s) of getting old in the wake of the American Revolution. Her work on the Founding Fathers and aging has appeared in The Hill, the Washington Post, and Time.
