Special Issue: Volume 2, Issue 3-4, 2008
Issue Editors: Ruth E. Ray and Toni Calasanti
Special Issue Rate: US$45

What was it like to be aging and poor in the 1920s and 1930s? How did older women, especially, living in one of the most impoverished cities in the United States, survive the Great Depression? What kinds of daily struggles and negotiations did they engage in to meet their needs? These are the questions addressed in this special double issue of the Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts.

Contributors to this issue are members of a women's studies research collective studying an archive of social work files from the Great Depression. The researchers represent the fields of anthropology, communications, English studies, gerontology, political science, social work, and sociology. Articles explore the meanings of 'power' and power relations among the female clients represented in the files, their female case workers, and the private organization that granted, denied, and sometimes rescinded old-age pensions.

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLES

Relations of Power: Issues of Gender and Class in the Struggle for 'Security' in Old Age, 1927-1933, Ruth E. Ray

Establishing a Clientele: Cases of Acceptance and Denial for Pensions in Old Age, Mary Durocher and Gillian Gray

Otherwise Destined for Eloise: Dread, Contentment, and the Public Alternative to Private 'Relief' in Old Age, Janet Langlois, Thomas B. Jankowski, Mary Durocher, and Elizabeth Chapleski

What Price Accommodation? An Exploration of One Woman's Struggle to Sustain Privilege While Receiving an Old Age Pension, Heather Dillaway, Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury

Identity and Empowerment: Resistance to Institutional Discourse in a Human Service Organization, Donyale R. Griffin, Katrice C. Townsend, and Shu-hui Sophy Cheng

An Old Woman and her Case Worker: Accommodation and Resistance in the Face of Serious Illness, Faith Pratt Hopp and Nancy Thornton

Gender and Class Relations in the Struggle for Old-Age Security, Toni Calasanti

The Development of Federal Old-Age Policy in the Era of the Great Depression: Pensions, Policies, and Politics, 1920-1940, Robert H. Zieger

Plato's Theory of Late Life Reminiscence, Patrick Mckee