Tarja Räisänen (Department of Economic and Social History. Universtiy of Helsinki. Finland)

"Life-course transitions into solitary old age:
Women in Finnish agricultural society".

It is a common belief in Finland (even among some sociologists) that in the past the elderly were respected members of their family and sheltered by it. However, in the middle of the 19th century one third of 70 years old women lived alone in Vihti, a rural parish in sourhern Finland. How can this be explained? What kind of life courses have brough them to a solitary old age?

Such questions can be answerred by an individual based life course data, where I have three cohorts of women, whose life course has been followed from 40 years of age until death. The data includes e.g. social and marital status, family size and form, and position in the family of each member of cohort, age, sex, and marital status of offspring, and when they have left parental home.

The three cohorts of the life course data have about 150 ageing women each. The members of the first cohort were born in 1735-47, the second in 1788-1797, and the last in 1830's, so the various patterns of ageing of rural women can be followed from the late 18th until the late 19th century. The life expectancy of women over 40 years in Vihti in the second cohort (40 years in the 1830's) was almost 30 years (mean age at death 69 years). I can perform comparative data in an other parish, Valkeala, in eastern Finland, in the middle of the 19th century. Valkeala was still an area of simple social stratification, and complex families.

The main explanation for the relatively high numper of old women living alone may be found in the advanced social stratification in Vihti: only one third of the population were landed farmers, and the share of gentry was unactual. Usually farmers had extended families or the retired farmer and his wife were supported by life annuity. Most of parishioners were crofters, landless cottagers, soldiers or inmates.

Nuptiality was high, only less than 10 percent of women over 40 years were unmarried. Male life expectancy at the age of 40 was not as long as female. Wives were usually few years younger than their husbands. All that indicates that most of the elderly women were widows.

The questions to be addressed are as follows:

1. Who were the women who lived alone in their old age? Were they widowed or unmarried? Were tehir relatives of farmers or landless population?
2. Were they sheltered by a retirement contrac? Or did they try to earn their living with different kind of fetches, or receive poor relief?
3. What kind of life courses have brought them in this situation?
4. What was the importance of the general family form in the parish? In which conditions did an extended or more complex family let an elderly woman alone?

The life course data base has been collected from parish registers and parish books, kept by Finnish Lutherian clergy since the late 17th century. Parish registers consist of lists on births, marriages, and deaths. Parish books inform on on the households, e.g. size, composition, and position of each member, and social status of the household head.