‘Nana couldn’t be seen dead in any of these shoes’: Ageing, identity and
footwear
Pauline, in her 60s, described how her mother, Ellen changed from someone
who hated ‘old age’, worried about her appearance, was obsessively busy
with housework, to someone inactive and disconnected from life. Ellen had
continued ballroom dancing into her late 70s, managing high-heels with style.
But falls and deteriorating mobility forced her into ‘sensible’ shoes. Pauline
said, ‘when she died Susie, my daughter, and I … chose clothes for the coffin
and the outfit … was smart – but still glamorous. We looked at [her] shoes
and agreed that Nana could not be seen dead in them! In a … department
store, we found just the right ones – … extremely elegant, not too high, looked
expensive (indeed they were) and something she could wear to a dance. ...
Buying the shoes gave us a real sense of achievement … something really
important … we knew she would have loved.
In terms of footwear, Pauline’s account shows how a predictable life course
trajectory - from the ‘sensible’ shoes of childhood into the fashionable heels
associated with transitions to adulthood, on into the ‘sensible’ shoes of later
life - was disrupted. In surrogate form, Ellen’s dancing shoes made a final
appearance, complicating her identity as someone ‘disconnected from life’.
These data derive from a 3 year ESRC-funded project on shoes, identity and
transition. It extends our work on embodied identity, here using footwear to
explore identity as a lived, shifting process rather than a thing.
Shoes recollected from earlier years, as we show, can provide oblique
insights into someone’s life history, while visual and textual records of what
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people are wearing now allows insights into their everyday experiences,
preoccupations and dilemmas. And shoes are historical and biographical
objects which demonstrate the inextricable meshing of social and personal
identity.
What Ellen wore towards the end provides only a snapshot of who she was –
one type within her assemblage of footwear. So in addressing the embodied
dimensions of ageing we’re setting the off-stage shoes that people once
desired or wore alongside their contemporary footwear ‘wardrobe’, examining
how the entire ensemble contributes to someone’s identity. Medical research
has asked how shoes worn in earlier life might produce later life foot
problems. Social scientists interested in the social and biological dimensions
of ageing might well adopt a similar if less causal life course perspective.
Footwear provides a lens which helps us understand how different layers of
social, embodied experience coalesce in someone’s contemporary sense of
themselves.
Returning to Ellen’s burial shoes, we can set them alongside another
transitional object, the items displaced people take when they leave home.
Anthropologist, David Parkin, calls these ‘mementoes of sentiment and
cultural knowledge’ , arguing that to understand how they operate we must
extend the post-Cartesian notion of the composite mind-body, treating it as
‘enmeshed in social trails created by the movement of objects’ (303,
emphasis added).
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So we’re viewing 70 or 85 as one locus within an extensive terrain of previous
or projected embodiments. And we’re including footwear as one example of
what Parkin calls people’s ‘ “attached” material-object imprints, a kind of
socio-material prosthesis’ (304).
PP Our project has involved 12 focus groups with people of different ages and
backgrounds plus ongoing case studies with a similarly mixed sample of 15
people. These include repeat interviews, a log of shoes owned and worn, a
shoe scrapbook, a filmed activity and a shopping trip.
We now consider data gathered in this way, focussing on our older
participants. 78 year-old Martha Tilsbury’s relationship with shoes derived
partly from her grandfather, a self-taught cobbler, and her access to his
leather and tools. It included her memories of industrial footwear in the steel
industry, plus the strategies people once employed to appear well shod
despite poverty. PP. Her interview revealed a much broader landscape:
so when I got married I had a white dress, and white sandals … and I put my
[lucky] silver sixpence in my shoes and that was 56 years ago, so it did work
even though my husband had to die three years ago … it was still happy [her
marriage].
INT
And you said you had your shoes upstairs in the loft.
Yes, they're in the loft. In a suitcase … [it] will have those shoes in and my
wedding album, wearing the shoes … but they've been put away for a long
time … when you have a family, shoes sort of get hidden away and forgotten
and it's only when the purse is a little bit thin that you go looking to see if
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there's shoes with a decent sole … I've always liked shoes and, I always think
that they finish an outfit off …I'm sure I've not thrown the … leather black
stilettos which I had in 1960 … that I bought from Saxone and they’re not …
just leather shoes, they're leather lined … a … four and a half inch heel stiletto
… the only ones that I ever had with a metal tip on and those are the ones
that I carried my baby in because I had trapped nerves and this was the only
way I could get any comfort. … everybody used to say that I'd do damage,
which I did … damage to my knees but, I couldn't wear a flat shoe because
they hurt so much, flat shoes are not always comfortable, you do need a little
bit of heel, think we can say that about the Queen Mother, she never gave her
heels up, she always wore that little heel
63 year-old Bob Fisher is retired. He provided a similarly distinctive and
detailed map of his shoe landscape, one he lived via the concepts of town and
country, terms he used frequently. So many outdoor activities were
undertaken in non-‘townie’ footwear. And several times he referred to ‘country
shoes’. PP. Like Martha, his landscape had a strong temporal dimension, with
‘traditional’ and preferably British shoes being important. He said:
these are handmade Reynolds cycling shoes … they are basically traditional
cycling shoes, they're the sort of thing everybody would have worn thirty years
ago. But now virtually nobody does except sort of odd balls like me.
He also retains and wears his father’s shoes:
these are good, these are my dad's shoes, these are K's shoes … I should
mention that [my]
better quality shoes are … nearly always made in …
England … my dad died in 1989 … they'd hardly been worn I'm sure, and they
just happened to fit me exactly … they're beautifully comfortable … I only
wear them when it's a wedding or a funeral …So these are my dad's shoes
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…he would have worn them for best … going to some do or other ….might
have worn them on a bank holiday to go to Llandudno with my mother … I
love them.
Bob’s reanimation of his father, literally stepping back into his shoes for those
life course transitions of weddings and funerals, echoes the elegant burial
shoes through which Pauline imaginatively set her mother dancing again. For
75-year old Nellie Goddard, another widow, footwear from the past belonging
to her husband also figured within today’s landscape. She described:
a pair of slippers that most of the time lived at side of the fireplace instead of
on his feet and are still at the side of the fireplace hoovered every … time I
hoover, and will remain so … they just live there.
63 year-old Valerie Driver had heard that widows should leave a man’s
clothing on show:
’ so my husband's shoes are still in the hall’, she said.
The unworn shoes that feature within these women’s footwear landscapes
show the relational as well as embodied dimensions of identity; they reveal
the composite mind-body ‘enmeshed in social trails created by the movement
of objects’, as Parkin says. Called into the present, then, particular shoes
provided a touchstone that enabled participants to explain the complex spatial
and temporal footwear landscapes they had navigated, sometimes on behalf
of other people, sometimes using other people’s shoes. These data help us
attend to ‘how identity “works” or “is worked”, to process and reflexivity’, as
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Jenkins says (2004:5). As we found, thinking about one’s shoes often involves
using shoes as landmarks that enable the creation of ‘biographical continuity’
(Giddens, 1991: 54).
A sense of biographical continuity, and the ontological security Giddens
associates with it, might derive from recalling memories, but it also involves
imagining the future. When younger participants ‘thought through their shoes’,
age, particularly chronological age, provided a navigational resource. 59 yearold, David said:
as I get older I understand the semiotics of fashion less and less, so I don't
know what's significant and how it's significant, so actually sort of finding stuff
that I'm comfortable about wearing that doesn't send out old blokes signals, is
quite important.
A similarly ageist association between growing older and undesirable shoes
was evident among people with foot problems who prioritised comfort. They
would avoid what 29 year-old Luna called ‘grandma-ish’ shoes. So shoes
became associated with the notion of later life as a pathological condition,
rather than a period of the life course. This fear, that ageing might undermine
one’s personhood and femininity, could be felt particularly at birthdays that
marked transition to a new decade: When interviewed, Luna was concerned
to avoid shoes that might damage her feet. Previously, as a teacher, she’d
chosen flat, supportive footwear. Yet whilst shopping with Rachel just before
turning 30 it was heels she wanted, something most of her friends wore.
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A woman in a focus group of self-defined ‘shoe lovers’ had also worn flat
shoes as a young parent but wanted to recover the femininity represented by
high heels when turning 40.
I think I've got to 40 and I thought well might start wearing high heels again …
I adore my heels and my partner's like you've never worn them for years,
what's got into you woman? I say age, it must be something because I wore
them from … 16 right up to the age of 30, had my son and I wouldn't wear
them for like, 12 … then … something went to my head when I got to 40, I
need high heels … and I bought forty pairs of shoes in … I think it were four
weeks.
Just as for Ellen, then, a life course transition becomes an opportunity for reconfiguring the sequencing of the lifecourse, re-animating these participants’
previous embodiments. 59 year-old Catherine also attempted this. With
multiple foot problems, she associates her shoes with undesirable ageing,
something she deflects by attributing aspects of her persona and subjectivity
with different ages. She thereby reworks her identity to separate out her life’s
pleasureable and the painful dimensions. She describes this in her scrapbook:
the stage of life I am not at, 60 in six months; most happy days, 20s, 30s; age
I want to look 35; age I feel, 40 going on 17; age I look, 55; age I dress, 50s,
40s… age of my feet, 70s, pain, bunion, although I do have nice toenails.
So embodied identity in later life is not simply the endpoint of accumulated
experience. Jenkins describes identity as a ‘synthesis of (internal) selfdefinition and the (external) definitions of oneself offered by others’ (2004:18).
Younger people’s concern to defer later life through the avoidance of ‘old
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blokes shoes’, certainly works to undermine the personhood and status of
older adults. Yet the creative reflexivity evident in people’s mapping of their
shoe landscapes underscores the agency and scope for self definition that our
participants discovered.
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