“A View from Old Age’: Women’s Lives as Narrated Through Objects

ABSTRACT

This article uses interview data gathered during a collaborative cross-disciplinary project undertaken in 2016 to explore experiences of longevity in qualitative detail with a small cohort of Northern Irish participants. The project was inspired by Penelope Lively’s autobiography Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (2013, 4, 199), which documents the author’s feelings about her life through focused reflections on her own possessions. Lively chose objects which she felt “oddly identified” her life and proposed that “people’s possessions speak of them”. We devised a series of activities to be undertaken with participants over the age of 60, with the intention of using material things as a lens on longevity. In this article we use interview data with three female participants to analyse women’s narration of their own biographies. The aim of this article is to explore the role of the possessions in narrating women’s lives and to consider how themes of ageing, memory, relationships, and the self are articulated through objects. The theoretical context for this exploratory work refers to cultural gerontology, material culture studies, gender studies and scholarship on life history. We conclude that objects offer a useful, tangible means of articulating and communicating the complexity of women’s longevity.

KEYWORDS:

• Longevity
• ageing
• gender
• objects
• life history

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our collaborators on that project: Gemma Hodge, Lorraine Calderwood, the Arts Council Northern Ireland and the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast. Our greatest thanks go to the participants in the Lively project, who generously shared their lives and objects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian of early modern England and Ireland whose research focuses on gender, material culture, intellectual life and the household. Leonie has a professional background in museums and heritage and works to promote collaboration between universities and heritage. She is a Research Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics.

Gemma Carney is a social gerontologist and lecturer in Social Policy at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a member of the editorial board of Ageing & Society and a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology.

Paula Devine is coordinator of the ARK Ageing programme and Director of ARK at Queen’s University Belfast. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology.

Gemma Hodge is an artist and educator based in Waterford, Ireland. She studied Fine Art at Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork and Cyprus College of Art. She has a master’s degree in Art and Heritage Management from Waterford Institute of Technology. Gemma has been artist in residence at Waterford University Hospital and for the Artbridge project in association with Paintings in Hospitals London and at OBRAS, Portugal. She has worked as a community artist for several years in London and has exhibited widely in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Cyprus.

ORCID

Leonie Hannan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0779-0773

Notes

1 As a pilot project, the selection process prioritised participants who were able to commit to the project’s activities, the only criteria being that they were over 60 years old, 50% men and 50% women and that they lived within easy reaching distance of where the arts workshop and exhibition were to be held.

2 See https://gemmahodge.com/ [accessed 18 January 2018].

3 https://thelivelyproject.wordpress.com/ [accessed 8 August 2017].

4 Bernard et al. 2017, “The Ageing of British Gerontology” exhibition material, https://ageingofbritishgerontology.wordpress.com/ [accessed 17 September 2018].

5 By contrast, Ruth had experimented with Facebook but found that this medium could reveal her life to a very large audience. She preferred instead the more intimate practice of making photo collages that represented the people that really mattered in her life.

6 The evaluation included a reflective focus group with all six participants, who expressed surprise at the extent to which the objects helped them to talk about their past.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Wellcome Trust for a Small Grant that supported the research and public engagement activities upon which this article is based.