Anne Karpf turns to Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People to explore the ageist roots of the Tory government’s opposition to social care.
“Is this how the Conservatives dump their grannies?”
In western countries the “burden” discourse has become increasingly inescapable. In her stirring new book, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, the pioneering US writer Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that the meaning of the word burden has shifted from referring to the demanding work of care-giving (expressing empathy with the carer) on to the recipient of care. No wonder so many older people worry that they’ll become burdensome, and elder abuse is becoming so common.