| The study of aging has escaped the attentions of most social historians. Stimulated by the social-consciousness movements of the 1960s and the attention accorded the aged by social scientists, a small group of social historians began examining aging. Most of these studies focused on the material position older people held in society. Few examined the history of retirement. Historians, countering the claims of social scientists who touted the influence of modernization theory as a major dynamic explaining the elderly's position in society, argued that human agency played a greater role than previously assumed.;Following U.S. victory in World War Two, America's elderly enjoyed growing financial benefits from subsequent amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935. Improved social security legislation, along with the institutionalization of retirement pensions, enabled older people to retire early. Healthy, mobile, and increasingly affluent, retirees left the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest for retirement destinations in the Sunbelt. Florida, by 1995, had drawn large numbers of these retirees into its southern counties of Palm Beach and Broward.;In the late 1960s, real estate developer, H. Irwin Levy, started the marketing of a retirement lifestyle, aiming to alter stereotypical views of retirement. Levy's Century Village "lifestyle" proved enormously successful with the approximately 75,000 predominantly-Jewish retirees who moved into Levy's four Century Villages in West Palm Beach, Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, and Pembroke Pines, Florida, from the Greater New York area. With Florida's aged population approaching one-fourth the state's population by the mid-nineties, the state, reflecting future national demographic trends, serves as an important area for the study of retirement. Throughout two decades, residents of the four Century Villages effected important changes in Florida. Century Villagers pursued an active and highly social-oriented lifestyle that reflected the significance of generational and cultural identities established long before migration to the Villages. Organizing themselves into condominium owners umbrella associations, Century Villagers managed to exercise significant control over the daily maintenance and operation of the their respective communities. Residents of the Villages altered the course of subsequent condominium law in Florida, and transformed the frontiers of aging. |
