Kisebbségben… Idősek Magyarországon a demográfiai átmenet előtt és alatt
In the Minority… The Elderly in Hungary Before and During the Demographic Transition

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the situation of elderly people and various aspects of demographic aging before and during the demographic transition. The analysis is based on the macro-level data of mortality figures calculated from nineteenth- and twentieth-century censuses and vital statistics, as well as on a representative sample (the Mosaic database) of individual-level data from the 1869 Hungarian census. Following the disambiguation of the concepts of individual and demographic aging, the study examines the concept of the latter. In Hungary, the onset of this process can be traced to the late nineteenth century, although the elderly did not constitute a major demographic group until the mid-twentieth century. The elderly population in 1869 was predominantly male and skewed toward the younger age groups. Marital status showed sharp gender differences: more men were married, while widowhood was more typical among women. Few elderly people lived alone or shared a household with more than one married child. Men, especially landowners, often held onto their role as heads of household, and typically passed it on around age of 70, as their health declined. Widowed women usually became and remained heads of household, but more of them cohabited with relatives or even in unrelated households. As major epidemics subsided, mortality among the elderly began improving in the nineteenth century, with another wave of improvement between the two World Wars. While life expectancy increased only modestly, survival rates improved significantly, suggesting a major shift in the prospects of the elderly.

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