Overview

Mary Moore Free presents a new perspective on the literature of aging with her study of the rich, old, cognitively intact, powerful, formally retired, elite elders whose needs do not include nursing care. Living in a small private retirement home in urban Texas, the residents of The Hermitage continue to retain the power that they exercised in their active years by manipulating their environments, controlling inheritances, casting absentee ballots, and medicalizing their old age by forming partnerships with their doctors, thus relieving themselves of the personal responsibility of being old. In the expanding genre of retirement home ethnography, there is little on wealthy elders. Many who are able to give cogent life stories are unwilling to trade privacy for support of investigative studies. It is to Free's credit that she was able to win the residents' confidence and elicit another dimension of what institutionalized retirement can be like.

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Reviews

This ethnography of an institutionalized group of aged and wealthy Anglos gives us much information and insight into the behavior, treatment, and adaptive strategies of a rapidly growing, but understudied population. By including data from France, Dr. Free helps us to see the role of culture as related to the role of biology in the aging process. That broad scale view enhances our understanding of aging as a general process. - Edward I. Fry, Professor Emeritus Department of Anthropology Southern Methodist University

."" . . a first, and I congratulate you for your study which written, easy to read, and concerns a subject that has been too long neglected.""-William C. Roberts, M.D. Executive Director, Baylor Cardiovascular Institute Baylor University Medical Center ""The Private World of the Hermitage fills what has long been an unfortunate gap in studies of the institutionalized old. A first! An erudite and sensitive account of the world of the wealthy and powerful institutionalized American. The book enlarges the comparative base for our understanding of the relation between culture and aging.""- Barbara Gallatin Anderson, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Southern Methodist University ""This ethnography of an institutionalized group of aged and wealthy Anglos gives us much information and insight into the behavior, treatment, and adaptive strategies of a rapidly growing, but understudied population. By including data from France, Dr. Free helps us to see the role of culture as related to the role of biology in the aging process. That broad scale view enhances our understanding of aging as a general process.""- Edward I. Fry, Professor Emeritus Department of Anthropology Southern Methodist University .,.""Free provides an interesting glimpse of the lives of a group we do not hear much about--rich older adults....Readers with a specific interest in socioeconomic analysis will find this study of interest. It reaffirms the reality that it is highly unusual for socioeconomic status to change with age and that people who were rich and powerful in their younger years will remain so as older adults.""-Social Work ?...Free provides an interesting glimpse of the lives of a group we do not hear much about--rich older adults....Readers with a specific interest in socioeconomic analysis will find this study of interest. It reaffirms the reality that it is highly unusual for socioeconomic status to change with age and that people who were rich and powerful in their younger years will remain so as older adults.?-Social Work ...""Free provides an interesting glimpse of the lives of a group we do not hear much about--rich older adults....Readers with a specific interest in socioeconomic analysis will find this study of interest. It reaffirms the reality that it is highly unusual for socioeconomic status to change with age and that people who were rich and powerful in their younger years will remain so as older adults.""-Social Work

Author Information

MARY MOORE FREE is House Anthropologist and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Baylor Health Care System/Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. She has published over 20 articles in anthropological and medical journals and has made five educational films on what it means to be old and group dynamics.

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