“Senior” “Citizens”
Why do we use the term senior citizen to refer to older adults?
The word senior is not exclusive to any particular age group. High schoolers are seniors. Girl Scouts are seniors. It’s not even exclusive to age. It’s used broadly to describe high ranks, status, and authority.
According to Kate de Medeiros, a researcher and Professor of Gerontology at Concordia University in Montreal, the term first came to be used in the 1930’s. In context, the politics and culture of the time were putting pressure on older adults to retire from the workforce to give those jobs to younger people. This may come as no surprise to the older adults of today who are being forced out of the workplace, under the rosy guise of the Great Post-COVID Retirement.
Dr. de Medeiros notes that the first appearance of this term in text is believed to be from a Time Magazine article from 1938. You can feel the early intent of this usage when the author writes explicitly about use of the term for campaign purposes.
Maybe the term senior itself had a neutral or even positive connotation 100 years ago. Today, the reasearch-backed age-inclusive communication style guide from Changing the Narrative notes the negative connotation of the term and recommends avoiding its use to describe older adults, suggesting instead older adult or older person. But why is it so negative today? It certainly didn’t start out that way if it was used in persuasive political campaigns in the 1930's.
And what about the other half of this term, what is a citizen? A citizen is just a member of a community. So when you’re a good citizen, you play by the rules of that community — you abide by the laws and the culture and you don’t rock the boat. In a meritocracy, a citizen’s value depends then, at least in part, on the citizen’s contribution to the labor force. So why retire? How does one convince a good citizen leave the labor force under these contexts?
We can’t go back in time to gain insight into the motivation of those who first forced the pairing of the words senior and citizen. Looking back on the long-term impact of the pairing, I do wonder two things:
I wonder whether the pairing was first used to intentionally counteract the value judgement that Americans placed on being a working citizen, and thereby a good citizen. We had a generation of reluctant retirees in a time when the powers that be wanted to oust older workers from a struggling labor market. As a senior citizen, you could in fact now leave the workforce yet ostensibly remain a valuable member of the meritocracy. No need to continue pulling yourself up by your bootstraps after a certain age. We clearly couldn’t create a disconnect between work and citizen value for all citizens because that would be cultural chaos, so someone had to find a way to create a boundary around the working class. There weren’t enough jobs, social security was a new construct created to serve older adults, and combined with an ageist lens on the workforce I can see how the leaders of the time would argue that it should be older citizens who would give up working in exchange for this new esteemed title of senior citizen. It also may have behooved the argument to advance the narrative that senior citizens, in accepting this title, were admitting that they were infirm or incompetent or just generally undesirable in the workforce. What a powerful story to sell someone who values the meritocracy — that you are in fact now a bad citizen for refusing to give up labor when you are so clearly an invaluable worker after a certain age. Help us all out, yourself included, and go sit down, right?
I wonder if the term senior is held in negative context now, not because it is inherently negative, but because of nearly a century of forced cultural association with a particular age group — the one in particular that has concurrently been steeping in negative ageist biases all this time. No one shrugs off the title senior in the high school context — there it is a badge of honor. So why would it be any different at any other age?
We create the systems we live in. We create the culture. We choose the words and we give them power. I’m not saying that simply because we create it that it is easy to change, but I believe it is possible. I don’t think citizen is bad, I don’t think senior is bad, and I don’t think senior citizen is inherently bad. I recognize the negative association as it exists today and I respectfully and intentionally choose my words to land with kindness. I also challenge all of us to dip into our own reactions and understand why we might have a negative response to being called a senior, or a senior citizen. The negative context of any word comes from somewhere. In this case, I believe it is an excellent example of the powerful impact of ageism on the systems and culture that we have lived in for at least 100 years.