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Photos in Obituaries Tell a Different Story.

MAY 14, 2009        TAGS: OBITS, NEWSPAPERS, AGE, SEXISM         COMMENTS (2)

A new study in the journal Omega examined pictures that ran alongside obituaries in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1967, 1977, 1987 and 1997. The researchers claim that based on the “age appropriateness” of the pictures, Americans (or Ohioans) were less accepting of the appearance of old age in 1997 than they were decades earlier.


From Redorbit.com

The study found that the number of obituary photographs showing the deceased at a much younger age than when he or she died more than doubled between 1967 and 1997.

Researchers found women were more than twice as likely as men to have an obituary photo from when they were much younger.

Keith Anderson of Ohio State University co-authored the study:

"Obituaries and their photographs are one reflection of our society at a particular moment in time. In this case, we can get hints about our views on aging and appearance from the photographs chosen for obituaries. Our findings suggest that we were less accepting of aging in the 1990s than we were back in the 60s."

That’s surprising, right? Old age is now a time of bucket-listing and Golden Girls-ing, Weren’t people in the late 90s in tune with the ever-increasing frontier of looking good and kicking ass well past 70? A look at the (ahem) wrinkles in this study suggest a lot more than just an increasing repulsion to looking old.

The researchers define age appropriate as within 15 years of the age of death. One shortcoming of this study is that the researchers had to guess how old the person was in the picture. Perhaps people, especially women, got better at looking younger. If that is the case, the study’s main point remains the same: if people want to look younger, then they have a low regard for looking older. But a lot more than cosmetics has changed since 1967.

On average, people were older when they died in 1997 than they were in 1967. The life expectancy for Americans was 77 years in 1997 and 70.5 years in 1967, according to the World Bank. So if 15 years is the threshold of acceptability, it is conceivable that a picture of a woman at 56 years old who died at the national average would be “acceptable” in 1967 and not in 1997. But those averages might not matter given the limited scope of the study.

Researchers only looked at 100 obits in each examined year, for a total of 400 obituaries, not enough to pronounce sweeping claims about ageism. But sadly, within the logic of the study, the fact that women were twice as likely to be depicted younger speaks more to an intractable gender divide.

These are obits of local Clevelanders. The photos were probably chosen by the family of the deceased not by an editorial board. So the behavior noted, and the gendered difference, lay in the hands of those who loved the people who died the most. For many of the deceased, this is the first and only time they will appear in a newspaper, so the actions of their family seems sad in aggregate, but understandable on a case by case level. Wouldn't you want dad to look good in his obit, unperturbed by a societal evaluation that says dad looked dignified at 65 but mom's looks had fallen off too drastically to print.

It would be interesting to see a wider net cast, but this study is a fascinating start. What about celebrity obits, I wonder?

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