The Gerontologist 42:149-151 (2002)
© 2002 The Gerontological Society of America
In Memoriam
Bernice L. Neugarten
Robert H. Binstock, PhDa
a School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Correspondence: Robert H. Binstock, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine, Room WG-43, Cleveland, OH 44106. E-mail: rhb3{at}po.cwru.edu.
Last summer, Bernice L. Neugarten died. She was a premier intellectual and professional leader in the field of gerontology (as well as in the fields of human development and psychology) throughout most of the second half of the 20th century. Her major contributions spanned a number of subject areas, including age as a dimension of social organization; social and psychological perspectives on the life course; and aging, personality, and adaptation (see, e.g., D. A. Neugarten 1996
).
In this venue, The Gerontologist, it is most fitting to note and pay tribute to Bernice's accomplishments in the area of social policy and aging. She was extraordinarily prescient and influential in this realm. Through her work on aging and age relations, she identified and set forth innovative concepts and concerns about policy that have shaped the agendas of leaders in both the worlds of ideas and action.
 |
The Young-Old and the Old-Old
|
|---|
The foundation for Bernice's intellectual leadership in the arena of social policy issues was expressed in a 1974 article entitled "Age Groups in American Society and the Rise of the Young-Old" (B. L. Neugarten 1974). In this seminal article she began to question the soundness of public policies that provide benefits and protection to older people primarily on the basis of old-age criteria, without much reference to considerable diversity in the economic status, health status, and other characteristics of the older population. She did so by presenting data that illustrated substantial aggregate differences between the characteristics of Americans aged 55–74, whom she termed the "young-old," and those aged 75 and older, the "old-old." As part of the title suggested—"the rise of the young-old"—she was trying to show that on the whole, people in their early 70s were much like those in their late 50s.
Ironically, Bernice's attempt to break down stereotypes of older people became misused by others in the field of aging to engender an age-based stratification of old-age stereotypes, undoubtedly because she had used two age groupings to illustrate her basic point about the diversity of older people. It soon became a widespread practice to label persons aged 65–74 (not 55–74 as Bernice had grouped things) as the young-old, and to perceive all persons in this age group as healthy and/or capable of earning income or, if retired, a rich reservoir of resources to be drawn upon for providing unpaid social and health services and fulfilling a variety of other community roles. In contrast, persons aged 75 and older became commonly termed the old-old and stereotyped as poor and frail.
However, through her leadership as a member of the presidentially appointed Federal Council on Aging in the late 1970s, Bernice helped to rectify this distortion. As she pointed out in a paper she presented at the White House Conference on Aging of 1981 (B. L. Neugarten 1981), the work of the Federal Council expressed and emphasized her basic point, namely: Most older Americans are competent, yet many are frail and vulnerable and need a range of supportive and restorative services. She went on to observe that old age, itself, is not a parameter that defines a problem group in modern American society because it is increasingly a poor indicator of an older person's ability, behavior, and needs. She also set forth an extensive agenda of broad public policy goals giving attention both to the competent and to the frail and vulnerable within the older population.
|
Age or Need Entitlement?
|
|---|
Bernice's sharpest challenge to public policies that primarily use old age as a marker for determining a person's need for governmental assistance was expressed in "Policy for the 1980s: Age or Need Entitlement?" (B. L. Neugarten 1979). Originally delivered at a major conference in Washington, it built upon on her observations that societal age norms and characteristics were changing (e.g., see B. L. Neugarten and Hagestad 1976). She argued, "In a society in which age is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a predictor of lifestyle or as a predictor of need, policies and programs formulated on the basis of age are falling increasingly wide of the mark. Income and health care and housing and other goods and services should be provided, not according to age, but according to relative need" (B. L. Neugarten 1979, pp. 50–51).
Bernice recognized the political complexities of designing, administering, and politically sustaining massive public transfer programs based on the relative needs of individual citizens. So, in a subsequent book, Age or Need? Public Policies for Older People (B. L. Neugarten 1982), she assembled a number of policy analysts and scholars to address these complexities.
Shortly thereafter, Congress began a process of implementing the types of changes that Bernice had been suggesting—changes that the conventional wisdom had previously thought to be politically unfeasible. Through a new legislative trend that has continued through today, policies on aging have been reformed to reflect the diverse economic and social characteristics of older persons (see Binstock 1994). The Social Security Reform Act of 1983 started this trend by taxing Social Security benefits of relatively wealthy beneficiaries to help finance the Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund. A number of measures throughout the 1980s and 1990s targeted benefits to low-income and minority older persons. And the most recent continuation of this trend was a 2000 amendment to the Older Americans Act: Wealthier participants in programs provided through the Act (for which all persons aged 60 and older are eligible) are now required to make sliding scale payments for some services, based on their income levels (Public Law 106- 501 2000). Many additional policy proposals for responding to the diverse economic situations of older persons—a challenge that Bernice made prominent on the public agenda—are under active consideration.
|
Age Divisiveness in Politics
|
|---|
Bernice's prescience was further manifested in a lecture she delivered in 1982 in which she anticipated the emergence of the so-called "intergenerational equity" construct (B. L. Neugarten 1996a). She observed, "The issue that underlies all the others and that will determine all the outcomes is how to maintain an age-integrated society and to guard against age divisiveness" (p. 374). She specifically observed that the political activities of aging advocacy groups may be contributing to a politics of age. Three years later an organization called Americans for Generational Equity was established in Washington, urging cutbacks in benefits to older persons so that they could be reallocated to other causes and to the private sector (see Quadagno 1989).
Shortly afterwards, the epithet "greedy geezers" was coined to describe older Americans and their political activities (Fairlie 1988), and it became commonly used in descriptions of budgetary politics (e.g., Salholz 1990). By the end of the decade the themes of age divisiveness and intergenerational equity had been adopted by the media, academics, and elite sectors of American society as routine perspectives for describing many social policy issues. As the president of the prestigious American Association of Universities asserted in a speech at the 1990 Annual Scientific Meeting of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), "The shape of the domestic federal budget inescapably pits programs for the retired against every other social purpose dependent on federal funds, in the present and the future" (Rosenzweig 1990).
|
Social Ethics in an Aging Society
|
|---|
Another area of social policy inquiry in which Bernice was a pioneer is aging and social ethics. In the mid-1970s she obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to explore a broad range of such issues through a working group at the University of Chicago. Based on these efforts she and her colleague Bob Havighurst published several important monographs (B. L. Neugarten and Havighurst 1976, B. L. Neugarten and Havighurst 1977), including an impressive agenda of ethical and societal challenges that are raised by two modes of life extension—through disease control, and through altering the biological clock—an agenda of issues that is actively pursued today by biomedical ethicists. Bernice's interest in this area evolved over the next several decades to include a thoughtful exploration, with colleague Christine Cassel, of "The Goals of Medicine in an Aging Society" (Cassel and B. L. Neugarten 1991).
|
Public Policy and the GSA
|
|---|
It is also worth noting that Bernice made a contribution to the social policy arena when she was president of GSA in 1969. She established the organization's first public policy committee. A few years later it played an active role, if not a decisive one, in the establishment of the National Institute on Aging (see Lockett 1983). She also obtained foundation funds for GSA's first special project on "Aging and Social Policy."
|
A Personal Perspective
|
|---|
I first met Bernice Neugarten on a public street in Vienna, Austria, at the 1966 International Congress of Gerontology. I had only been involved with the field of aging for about 30 months, through a research project at Brandeis University. But, characteristic of her magnificent intellectual curiosity and generativity, she almost immediately drew out of me my observations regarding the field of aging in which I was essentially a neophyte. I told her that the two most striking features to me, a political scientist, were: (a) stereotyping—the then-widespread tendency to talk about, write about, and treat older persons, "the elderly," as if they were all the same; and (b) the failure of most public policies on aging to target older persons who were most in need of government help. I was totally unaware of Bernice's work at that time (ignoramus that I was). But she immediately responded by informing me that my observations happened to be in harmony with some of her basic ideas that, as indicated above, structured her outstanding contributions to the arena of aging and social policy.
Our connection on these themes was extremely fortunate for me. It led to a marvelous colleagueship and friendship that lasted 40 years, greatly enriching both my professional life and my personal life. The friendship extended to include her family—her husband Fritz, her daughter Dail, and her son Jerry. And then I enabled my Chicago family, my dad and mom, as well as my wife and daughter, to become friends with Bernice and Fritz, so that they, too, could enjoy the intellectual stimulation, humor, charm, class, and warmth of the Neugartens.
Bernice's former students report that she often wrote in the margins of their papers, "Don't state the obvious." Nonetheless, I will state the obvious. She was brilliant!
What may not be obvious to those who did not directly experience it is that she was extraordinarily generative. For example, I saw her take a former doctoral student of mine under her wing when he served on a national committee with her and do far more to bring him along than I ever did or could.
And she sure did a lot for me, though I was never her formal student. Over the years she would call me up to try out nascent ideas, seek my criticism, or put a bee in my bonnet about one thing or another. Or we would have plenty of time to discuss such matters while traveling abroad to some meeting or while on an NIH site visit, always accompanied by Bernice's royal blue suitcase with its yellow piping. Through this process I learned and gained more from her than I ever did from any of my nominal professors. She was certainly the most generative person I've ever known—through her contributions to individuals, to institutions, and to society. And, by the way, I believe she was the first person to coin the term "The Aging Society," in a paper she presented at the 1978 International Congress of Gerontology in Tokyo, Japan (see B. L. Neugarten 1996b).
In summary, Bernice Neugarten was a great woman. And she was a giant in the field of gerontology.
The Forum
Book Reviews
Practice Concepts
|
Acknowledgments
|
|---|
This memorial article is adapted from a presentation in a symposium entitled "Tributes Celebrating the Life and Scholarly Vision of Bernice Neugarten" at the 54th Annual Scientific Meeting of The Gerontological Society of America, November 17, 2001, Chicago, IL. It also draws on "The prescience and influence of Bernice Neugarten," by Robert H. Binstock, in Dail A. Neugarten (Ed.), The meanings of age: Selected papers of Bernice L. Neugarten, pp. 335–338 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
|
References
|
|---|
- Binstock R. H., 1994. Changing criteria in old-age programs: The introduction of economic status and need for services. The Gerontologist 34:726-730. [Abstract]
- Cassel C. K., Neugarten B. L., 1991. The goals of medicine in an aging society. Binstock R. H., Post S. G., , ed.Too old for health care? Controversies in medicine, law, economics, and ethics 75-91. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
- Fairlie H., 1988. Talkin' bout my generation. New Republic 198: (13) 19-22.
- Lockett B., 1983. Aging, politics, and research: Setting the federal agenda for research on aging Springer Publishing Company, New York.
- Neugarten B. L., 1974. Age groups in American society and the rise of the young-old. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 415:187-198.
- Neugarten B. L., 1979. Policy for the 1980s: Age or need entitlement?. Hubbard J. P., , ed.Aging: Agenda for the eighties, a national journal issues book 48-52. Government Research Corporation, Washington, DC.
- Neugarten, B. L. (1981, November). Family and community support systems. Paper presented to Committee #7, White House Conference on Aging of 1981, Washington, DC.
- Neugarten B. L., , ed.Age or need? Public policies for older people 1982Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.
- Neugarten B. L., 1996a. New perspectives on aging and social policy. Neugarten D. A., , ed.The meanings of age: Selected papers of Bernice L. Neugarten 366-376. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Neugarten B. L., 1996b. Social implications of life extension. Neugarten D. A., , ed.The meanings of age: Selected papers of Bernice L. Neugarten 339-345. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Neugarten B. L., Hagestad G. O., 1976. Age and the life course. Binstock R. H., Shanas E., , ed.Handbook of aging and the social sciences 35-55. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York.
- Neugarten B. L., Havighurst R. J., 1976. Social policy, social ethics, and the aging society U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
- Neugarten B. L., Havighurst R. J., 1977. Extending the human life span: Social policy and social ethics U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
- Neugarten D. A., 1996. The meanings of age: Selected papers of Bernice L. Neugarten University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
- Public Law 106–5012000. The Older Americans Act of 2000 signed: (into law November 13)
- Quadagno J., 1989. Generational equity and the politics of the welfare state. Politics and Society 17:353-376.
- Rosenzweig, R. M. (1990, November). Address to the President's opening session. Presented at the 43rd Annual Scientific Meeting of The Gerontological Society of America, Boston, MA.
- Salholz, E. (1990). Blaming the voters: Hapless budgeters single out "greedy geezers." Newsweek, Oct. 29, p. 36.
TOP
The Young-Old and the...
Age or Need Entitlement?
