THE IDEA OF being unhappy in a place as comfortable as Longwood House would have seemed laughable at one time. In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.
One woman, for instance, whom Nassau called Mrs. C., was a sixty-two-year-old widow who’d made just enough as a domestic servant to afford a small back room with an oil stove in a rooming house. Illness had recently ended her work, however, and she now had severe leg swelling with varicose veins that left her bedbound. Miss S. was “unusually sick” and had a seventy-two-year-old brother with diabetes who, in this era before insulin treatment, was fast becoming crippled and emaciated as the disease killed him. Mr. M. was a sixty-seven-year-old Irish former longshoreman who’d been left disabled by a paralytic stroke. A large number had become simply “feeble,” by which Nassau seemed to mean that they were too senile to manage for themselves.
Unless family could take such people in, they had virtually no options left except a poorhouse, or almshouse, as it was often called. These institutions went back centuries in Europe and the United States. If you were elderly and in need of help but did not have a child or independent wealth to fall back on, a poorhouse was your only source of shelter. Poorhouses were grim, odious places to be incarcerated—and that was the telling term used at the time. They housed poor of all types—elderly paupers, out-of-luck immigrants, young drunks, the mentally ill—and their function was to put the “inmates” to work for their presumed intemperance and moral turpitude. Supervisors usually treated elderly paupers leniently in work assignments, but they were inmates like the rest. Husbands and wives were separated. Basic physical care was lacking. Filth and dilapidation were the norm.
A 1912 report from the Illinois State Charities Commission described one county’s poorhouse as “unfit to decently house animals.” The men and women lived without any attempt at classification by age or needs in bare ten-by-twelve-foot rooms infested with bedbugs. “Rats and mice overrun the place.… Flies swarm [the] food.… There are no bathtubs.” A 1909 Virginia report described elderly people dying untended, receiving inadequate nutrition and care, and contracting tuberculosis from uncontrolled contagion. Funds were chronically inadequate for disabled care. In one case, the report noted, a warden, faced with a woman who tended to wander off and no staff to mind her, made her carry a twenty-eight-pound ball and chain.
Nothing provoked greater terror for the aged than the prospect of such institutions. Nonetheless, by the 1920s and 1930s, when Alice and Richmond Hobson were young, two-thirds of poorhouse residents were elderly. Gilded Age prosperity had sparked embarrassment about these conditions. Then the Great Depression sparked a nationwide protest movement. Elderly middle-class people who’d worked and saved all their lives found their savings wiped out. In 1935, with the passage of Social Security, the United States joined Europe in creating a system of national pensions. Suddenly a widow’s future was secure, and retirement, once the exclusive provenance of the rich, became a mass phenomenon.
In time, poorhouses passed from memory in the industrialized world, but they persist elsewhere. In developing countries, they have become common, because economic growth is breaking up the extended family without yet producing the affluence to protect the elderly from poverty and neglect. In India, I have noticed that the existence of such places is often unacknowledged, but on a recent visit to New Delhi I readily found examples. Their appearance seemed straight out of Dickens—or those old state reports.