Population aging is one of the most important trends in modern history. The world is getting grayer, every year. This has enormous consequences for twenty-first century societies. These questions are drawing increasing attention from policymakers and, indeed, from historians. The history of old age is a growing subfield in modern global history, as the papers on this panel attest.

The specific focus of the panel is the gendered experience of old age. Most of the historical literature on old age, along with most of the medical and political discourse on the subject, has focused, explicitly or not, on men. Nonetheless, it has long been true, in the United States and elsewhere, that the older population is predominantly female, and that many of those women are widowed or divorced. Women, who have different relationships with economic and social reproduction, have also different relationships with old age. The papers on this panel show how the history of aging might be enlivened by an incorporation of gender history.

The panel is designed to provide a temporally and geographically capacious approach to the history of older women—one paper each on the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries; and one paper each on the Caribbean, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The first paper describes the role of older, enslaved women in Jamaica around 1800, showing how they were invested, by enslavers and enslaved alike, with all manner of mystical and medical authority. The second paper moves to the Civil War-era United States, where Harriet Jacobs, a Black abolitionist, established an “Old Women’s Home” that linked free citizenship with an intergenerational ethic of care. A recuperation of Jacobs’s story illuminates a path not taken in the American history of institutionalized eldercare. The last paper moves to the Soviet Union, a century later. That state, as is well known, tried to push millions of women into the workforce. The paper asks what happened to those older women once they retired, and how the lives and bodies of older women fit, or did not fit, into the ideology of twentieth-century socialism.

Together, these papers show that older women have been central to the economic, political, and ideological structures of societies in very different times and places. The comment, from a historian who has just completed a book on twentieth-century America, will bring these papers into conversation with one another, and pose the question of what historians and citizens in twenty-first century America should learn from these stories.