Australian Cultural History.

Studies of the history of aging promise to add a new dimension to our understanding of human life in the past. They are particularly important for our understanding of social and cultural history - the personal, social, and familial experiences of people in the past as well as their perceptions of themselves, their place in society, and their conceptions of the lifespan's timeframe. The nine essays in this collection address a number of these issues, often challenging historians to rethink our perceptions of the life course in historical societies. The authors explore the concept of aging mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subject matter, although concentrating on old age, reaches beyond it to address questions on the process of aging itself. Ultimately, the essays ask us to consider the way in which culture defines the passage of time on human life.

The opening essay, written by Barbara Kamler and Susan Feldman, recounts the expressions of female participants of a workshop dealing with aging and the body. This essay opens one of the major themes of the collection by demonstrating the diversity of the experience of old age. Sometimes with humor and sometimes with rage, the women voiced the difficulties of dealing with the contradictions they felt between their personal experience and aspirations and the confines of …