Richard Smith

It is commonplace to assume that, traditionally, care for older adults has been the responsibility of family members, and was provided within the extended family – implying that elderly persons spent their declining years under the same roof as their married children. But work at Campop has shown that this residential arrangement was not actually the norm in the British past. 

Humans and other primates

Humans are considered distinctive in the scale of the care they provide for older individuals. While other primates are dependent only in infancy, humans provide often very extensive support to those in later life, contributing to their unusual longevity.  

However, the arrangements for elder care have varied widely over time in terms of who older adults lived with, how much they were expected to contribute to their household, and how the burden of their support was distributed across society.  

The myth of the three-generational pre-industrial household  

Over 60 years ago, Campop co-founder Peter Laslett famously discovered that the two-generational nuclear family of married couple and unmarried children was dominant as far back as the 17th century – much earlier than had previously been assumed. Although almost 50 percent of men and nearly 40 percent of women who were 65 and over did live with their children, in most cases those children were unmarried, and many were still quite young.  Only six percent of households at any one time contained three generations, leading Laslett to conclude that the ‘large extended household in the English past’ was, in fact, a myth.

Demographic factors

In the pre-industrial past, 10 percent of those over 65 (c.6 percent of males and c.14 percent of females) lived alone, in many cases because they had no surviving offspring. Demographic factors (marriage ages, fertility, and mortality) affected the number of available kin and placed limits on residential arrangements. In fact, they are still important and have driven changes over time. Today far more older people live alone: overall just over 30 percent of the elderly population (36 percent of women and 23 percent of men). 

In addition, a higher proportion of couples over the age of 65 (more than 80 percent) now live in an ‘empty nest’ with no children at home. Paradoxically this is not the result of rising life expectancy, but is due to a fall in fertility that began in the late 19th century, along with an altered pattern of birth spacing within marriage.

There have also been changes in the age at which children have left home. Over the late 18th and 19th centuries there was an increase in the number of agricultural and general labourers who, when starting work, still continued to live with their parents. Simultaneously, there was a large growth in urban-based industrial workers who, while working daily away from home, still lived in the natal hearth, and secured earnings that were an important contribution to the two-generational family economy.  

Sons, on average, left home later than daughters, and that age of departure rose (as did marriage ages and proportions unmarried) of both sexes from the mid- 19^th century until the early inter-war years. As a result of all these factors, many parents reaching the age of 65 in Victorian and Edwardian England still had unmarried working children living at home. 

Who did older men and women live with?

A rise in life expectancy in the 20th century has served, perhaps counter intuitively, to lower the proportion of elderly women who live with a spouse. This is because there has been a greater improvement in the life expectancy of elderly females than males. Although that difference has narrowed in recent decades, the net effect has been an extension of the period women spend as widows, while ensuring that proportionately more men than in the past now have a co-residing spouse to provide care and companionship in old age. 

In the pre-industrial past, older men were also most likely to live with their wives (60 percent). The next highest frequency was co-residence with non-relatives, followed by never–married children, and least of all by married children.

Fewer elderly females than males lived with a spouse, which is to be expected because after childbirth women outlived men and generally married a few years younger than their husband. Widowed women were less likely to remarry than widowed males, a tendency that intensified over the 18th and early 19th centuries.  

Older women were less likely than older men to live with their unmarried children, since the death of a husband was often accompanied by a change in living arrangements involving the departure and/or marriage of the couple’s children. In these circumstances, sometimes widowed females moved into the households of their married offspring, especially their daughters and sons–in–law. Between one and two of every 20 women aged over 65 at any one point in time were doing so – twice as many as men of the same age.  

However, this reincorporation of the widow into a married child’s household was less common than her living with servants, lodgers, boarders or other unrelated persons.  

By the mid to late 19th century, only 10 to 11 percent of older women lived alone, but they were still twice as likely to do so than elderly males, of whom only 5 to 6 per cent lived alone. It was not until the inter-war decades that solitary living among the elderly expanded dramatically.  

Who headed the households?

Headship rates provide a measure of the extent to which the elderly retained the various responsibilities associated with the running of a household.  

An elderly person’s ability and perhaps social acceptability to head a household did decline sharply with age in the past. Women aged 75 and over in pre-industrial England were far less likely to head their household than those aged 45 to 54 years. While men also experienced a decline in their propensity to head a household as they aged, their loss of independence was far more muted.  

Headship rates varied with economic status. Old people of either sex from lower down the social scale were less likely to head households than those from the upper echelons. For instance, 80 percent of pauper males were not heading households, but all those listed as gentry, farmers, or traders did so. It is therefore evident that economic conditions could influence residential arrangements independently of life-cycle stage.  

Women, the poor, and the very old were markedly less likely to retain residential autonomy than men, the economically secure, and those still in their 60s. Some elderly women lived as subordinate members within their children’s homes, although elderly men nearly always lived as heads of nuclear family units.  

It appears that around 20 percent of individuals aged over 60 co-resided with grandchildren. Some grandchildren were present with aged grandparents without their own parents, especially those who had been born out of wedlock, and they provided care or income when employed. However, in many cases the direction of assistance more likely flowed from the grandparent to the grandchild.  

Institutions

With the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 it was intended that workhouses would acquire greater prominence in welfare provision, yet the share of the elderly residing in workhouses in the late 19th century differed only minimally from pre-industrial levels. There was a modest rise from 3 to 5 percent of all elderly who were workhouse residents between 1851 and 1911. Nevertheless, the elderly formed a large percentage of all workhouse residents: 52 percent in 1911, when the elderly formed only 7 percent of the total population.  

The increase in elderly living in workhouses was largely caused by a significant rise in male residents, who were then predominant. This pattern was reversed after age 85, because of greater female survivorship at the very highest ages which led to them outnumbering males. 

Over the same period there was no measurable change in the proportions of the elderly residing as solitaries in the total population, although some historians have argued they became financially more attractive as co-residents with their married children with the arrival of the Old Age Pension in 1908.  

In the present-day, UK care homes contain roughly 3 percent of the elderly population, a level very close to the proportion in the Victorian workhouse. However, unlike the gender balance in the late 19th century, there are now 23 elderly females for every 10 males in institutions. By age 90 there are four times as many women who are care home residents than men. 

Conclusion

Although it is very clear that parents and unmarried children were the dominant form of the co-resident group from the 17th century, a far from inconsequential minority of elderly persons, especially women, co-resided in extended households with married children or other relatives. In fact, that household type grew over the course of the 19th century to reach an historically high level in the early 20th century during the pinnacle of industrialisation and urbanisation.  

It remains uncertain how many of the co-residential arrangements we have discussed were brought into existence for the particular benefit of old people. These patterns do not contradict the general principle that the elderly headed their own households for as long as humanly possible. When the elderly are found to be co-residing with kin, we cannot tell how far it was the preferred relationship or had been imposed on them by necessitous conditions or – in the case of the extremely impoverished – by poor law officers.  

Of course, household listings tell us nothing about the affective and economic bonds among family members, while statistics on household composition reveal a varied array of experiences among these families. There is one conclusion that we can draw: it is necessary to take account of gender, class, capacity to work and earn a living, demography, welfare practices, and possibly contrasts between regional economies, when interpreting evidence revealing those with whom the elderly resided.  

Further reading 

• Heritage, T., Hinde, A., and Gifford, D., ‘Household living arrangements and old age pauperism in late Victorian England’, Genealogy 55 (2020), 1-13. 
• Laslett, P., A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (2nd ed., Macmillan, 1996), especially chapter 8. 
• Ottaway, S. R., The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapters 3 and 4. 
• Profile of the Older Population living in England and Wales in 2021 and changes since 2011 (Office for National Statistics, London, 2023).  
• Wall, R., ‘Elderly Persons and Members of Their Households in England and Wales from Preindustrial Times to the Present’ in David Kertzer and Peter Laslett (eds.), Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age (University of California Press, 1995), pp. 81-106.  

Tags: demography, extended family, family size, households, old age, old people

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