From Status to Stigma: The Walking Cane in Aging America

Saturday, January 7, 2017
Grand Concourse (Colorado Convention Center)
Cara Kiernan Fallon, Harvard University
Between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy increased by three decades—from 47 to 77—a greater increase in one century than from the entire previous history of humankind. With dramatic changes in life expectancy came changing expectations for individual control of health and function in later life.

This poster analyzes changes in a material object—the cane—to explore broader transformations in attitudes and beliefs about aging in twentieth century America. In the late nineteenth century, a tremendous variety of canes accompanied the powerful, the fashionable, the wealthy, the old, the young, the lame, and the dignified. There were “at least 2000 different styles and handles,” according to the Boston Daily Globe (November 16, 1885), while fashion houses of Tiffany, Gorham, and Fabergé marketed sterling silver and diamond-encrusted “limited edition” canes to their well-heeled patrons.

Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, canes had transformed into medical devices resisted by the elderly and stigmatized by the broader public. Canes were now sold by medical supply shops and physicians grouped canes into the category of “mobility aids,” joined by crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs. From ubiquitous, customized, and frequently expensive items of fashion, canes re-emerged as devices primarily for the elderly disabled: increasingly standardized, medically oriented, and closely associated with chronic conditions in later life.

How, over the course of the twentieth century, did canes transform from an object with a multitude of meanings—wealth, power, and style, among others—into a stigmatized device used solely by the disabled, and primarily the disabled elderly? What does the transformation in the meanings of the cane reveal about broader changes in the medical and cultural values for aging and old age?

This poster provides a visual representation of my paper’s two central arguments: first, I argue that the cane emerged as primarily a medical instrument as the aging process itself came under scientific scrutiny and medical management during the mid-twentieth century. Second, I contend that even as canes enabled greater mobility and freedom, they also marked users as disabled, a process that became increasingly stigmatized as failing to achieve an emerging ideal of independent, functional “healthy aging.”

While attitudes toward the elderly have been debated, attitudes toward the things they use can provide insight into changing beliefs about the aging process, the medical management of old age, and the eventual emergence of health as a new symbol of status for the elderly. Although older adults make up the primary population of disabled Americans, scholars of disability studies have largely focused on disabilities in children and young adults. Historians of old age, on the other hand, have not examined the significant transformations in the expectations for aging despite important shifts in twentieth century medicine, culture, and demographics. By tracing the connections between aging and disability through the material object of the cane, this poster illuminates a critical and under-examined aspect of medical and cultural history: the disabilities of aging have largely been shaped by historical attitudes toward and expectations of the life cycle.

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