‘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 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).

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 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 …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 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 year-old, 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.

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 re-configuring 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) self-definition and the (external) definitions of oneself offered by others’ (2004:18). Younger people’s concern to defer later life through the avoidance of ‘old 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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