In “The Rest of Life,” I narrate major changes in the history of American eldercare fromthe postwar era to the eve of the Reagan presidency. I argue that the story of American eldercare in the twentieth century is best understood as a debate over privatization, or the extent to which care of older Americans should take place outside of state supervision. My research shows that even as old age entitled Americans to state benefits, ideas aboutprivate care and private responsibility did not go away. Privately run eldercare facilities continued to operate according to their own parameters with little state intervention. Meanwhile, discourse on elder empowerment flourished, encouraging older people to take responsibility for their own care and urging younger generations to show proper veneration for their seniors. By tracking these continuities in several distinct case studies, this project shows that the privatization of eldercare did not go away after the creation of the American welfare state, but flourished in a range of discursive and structural venues, from local retirement homes and ethnic neighborhood associations to national conferences on aging. The consequences of this continued privatization were threefold. First, privatizationreinforced privilege, particularly the white privilege of early eldercare operators. Second, privatization of eldercare promoted a sense of personal responsibility in both older people and their surrounding communities. And finally, the privatization of eldercare bred dissent. Such dissent came from many directions. Eldercare activists, drawing rhetoric and personnel from the civil rights movement, protested the unequal distribution of care engendered by a privatized eldercare infrastructure. Meanwhile, the lifting of long-standing immigration bans by the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act brought thousands of migrants from Asia, whose traditional practices of eldercare transformed as they both countered and assimilated prevailing norms. By telling this story, I complicate existing narratives about privatization in the late twentiethcentury United States, which depict privatization either as a proxy for the decline of religion (i.e. secularization), or as a shared idiom that permitted Christian leaders, political conservatives, and neoliberal economists to align in the 1970s and 1980s.