This article examines the career of activist Frances Kellor (1873–1952), as an important figure among a small group of female pioneers who, prior to 1920, chose to forgo the segregated women’s political cultures of settlement houses, reform organizations, and the suffrage movement, to compete head-on with men in government and party politics. It describes the mixed success of Kellor’s early career efforts to acquire political power, then examines in detail her most visible institutional appointment as Chief of the Progressive Service, in Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party (1913–1914). The article argues that earlier accounts of the Service have depicted Kellor as an unempathetic taskmaster and negative force, ignoring some primary source evidence that she operated in the face of a hostile campaign by male subordinates to unseat her. It suggests there are grounds to reappraise her performance in this groundbreaking role. It discusses Kellor’s own, later reflections on the masculine realm of public affairs, and how early pioneers in the long, slow process to integrate men and women in political and government institutions were (inevitably) unable to replicate the legislative successes of Progressive Era female pressure group politics.

Grandparenthood is widely understood as a valued identity in later life, associated with treasured grandparent–grandchild relationships. Although scholars highlight the importance of mutuality and bidirectional flows in these relationships, there is a need for qualitative research exploring grandparents’ experiences of receiving care from their grandchildren. Material goods and services are often bound up with practices of intergenerational care, although this has rarely been the focus of research on grandparent–grandchild relationships. Informed by theories of care and consumption practices, and in-depth interviews, this article addresses two questions: how did grandparents experience receiving care from grandchildren during the pandemic, and how were consumption practices bound up with those experiences? Participants described experiencing various kinds of care from grandchildren (toddlers to young adults), suggesting that they experienced grandchildren’s care – and caring consumption practices – as autonomous or embedded within parental caring practices. Both types of care appeared to foster grandparental wellbeing, by highlighting that grandparents matter to younger generations: even small acts of care were experienced in this way. This was a particularly powerful message during the pandemic, when many older people felt physically and emotionally vulnerable and othered by media discourse about their expendability. Beyond offering further insights into the experiences of older people during the pandemic, these findings contribute to understanding of intergenerational care between grandparents and grandchildren. They demonstrate how the complex and multi-directional circulation of care within families is bound up with material practices, and how experiencing even small acts of care from grandchildren can foster grandparents’ wellbeing.

Against the calls for the development of ‘a more than human’ gerontology, this article challenges the assumptions behind this move by positing that its dependence on post-humanist epistemologies and ontologies risks making age a matter more of the imagination than of human mattering, of assemblage more than of meaning. The ‘decentring’ involved in such approaches of what is distinctly human about ageing has led to an imaginary ontology of flattened ‘assemblages’ of age. While these post-humanist developments might seem to offer an imaginative leap into a ‘more than human’ world, the radicalism implied can equally be understood as being largely rhetorical, designed to impress rather than inform our thinking. If the distinctly human experience of age and finitude is absented from our thinking, the mattering of ageing risks being reduced to no more than the universal flux of an impersonal vitalism. We would conclude that it is still critically important for gerontology to maintain its privileging of the human and more generally of humanism in thinking about and researching the tasks it sets itself.