The Promised Years: A History of Retirement in America

An acclaimed historian tells the story of how America invented the ideal of retirement we take for granted as a distinct phase of life: how did the years between work and true old age become a chance to reinvent ourselves one last time?

From our first paycheck, Americans are taught to begin saving for retirement. We look forward with anxious anticipation to the moment when the obligations of career and family have been fulfilled and we are free to lead new lives that feel most authentically ours. A vast industry cultivates this belief that, by age sixty-five, we ought to have earned a snowbirder’s condo in the Sun Belt or cruises around the world or leisurely time on the golf course. But this notion is a peculiarly American phenomenon. How did we come to believe that retirement offers us the chance—or, indeed, imposes the necessity—of shedding the adult lives we’ve led and starting anew?

Renowned historian Ernest Freeberg reveals how the American ideal of a leisurely stage of life after sacrifice came to be. In the context of postwar prosperity, the combination of rapid industrialization and increased lifespans meant that millions of Americans would be leaving the workforce before infirmity required them to. In a culture devoted to the work ethic and the nuclear family, this new period of obsolescence gave rise to a crisis of meaning for millions: who are we when we are no longer contributing value to society in the recognized forms of labor or child-rearing?

In The Promised Years, Freeberg takes us on an enlightening, entertaining, and poignant trip through the invention of retirement as we know it —from the eccentric early experiments in Florida retirement communities to the charlatanic heroes of the movement to establish pension funds, from the unlikely political alliance of Yippies and Gray Panthers in the 1970s to the new flourishing of the humanities in adult education programs even as conventional university educations narrow. With profound historical and human insight, Freeberg helps us understand the American ideal of retirement in a world where that dream feels increasingly out of reach for so many, and fraught even for those for whom it’s financially possible. In telling that story, The Promised Years asks us to reconsider the question: what do we want our lives to mean?