Retirement

The French retirer combined re (back) and tirer (to draw, pull). In sixteenth-century English, retire described the act of withdrawing from a situation, particularly a military engagement. A regiment retired from the field. A commander retired to a fortified position. The word implied a strategic decision to withdraw, not a permanent departure. One retired in order to regroup, not to stop.

The association of retirement with age and the end of working life emerged slowly. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wealthy individuals might retire from active business to a country estate, but this was a privilege of means, not a universal life stage. The concept of retirement as a standard phase of life available to ordinary workers did not exist until governments and employers created pension systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Otto von Bismarck's 1889 Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill in Germany established one of the first state pension systems, initially setting the eligibility age at seventy, later reduced to sixty-five in 1916. The U.S. Social Security Act of 1935, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, set sixty-five as the standard retirement age in America. These policies created a fixed boundary between working life and retirement that had not previously existed for most people.

The word "retirement" acquired its modern connotations, of leisure, rest, and freedom from obligation, only after pension systems made it financially possible for ordinary workers to stop working. The gold watch, the retirement party, and the concept of "enjoying your retirement" all belong to the twentieth century. For most of human history, people worked until they could not work anymore. The idea that work ends at a particular age, and that what follows is a distinct and nameable phase of life, is an invention of the industrial era.