When Do We Become Old, and How Are Older People Silenced?

When do people become old? The article argues that the answer lies not only in physical aging or the formal threshold of 65, but also in the moment society begins to see and name them as elderly.

That question anchors a discussion of French writer and sociologist Didier Eribon’s A Woman of the People: Life, Old Age, Death. The book follows Eribon’s mother after she moves to a care facility in Fismes, a small town outside Reims. For Eribon, place reveals social class and exclusion. The move represents an uprooting from both past and present, made more painful because he was the son who placed his aging mother there.

Rather than offer a purely sentimental family story, Eribon gives his mother’s life a political and class meaning. She had lived as a domestic worker and factory laborer, outside the language of the dominant class, yet she also had her own pleasures, contradictions and prejudices. Her story becomes testimony to the lives of France’s lower working class in the 20th century.

The article emphasizes the tension in Eribon’s position as a “class defector.” He writes with the analytical language he acquired after leaving his original world, but also with shame and guilt over having left his family and placed his mother in an institution. His work therefore combines anger at a system that makes old age invisible with the confession of someone implicated in that system.

The central question is who gets to speak. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s writing on old age, Eribon argues that weakened older people are denied the collective “we” available to other marginalized groups. They become a “speechless class,” pushed outside both social systems and philosophical ideas centered on people who can plan and choose their futures. By recording his mother’s complicated life, Eribon restores the history and scale that institutions reduce to a simple category of management.