What exactly has age got to do with it? My life in critical age studies

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Journal of Aging Studies 22 (2008) 189 – 195 www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging

What exactly has age got to do with it? My life in critical age studies Margaret Morganroth Gullette Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, MS079, Epstein, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02454, United States Received 8 August 2007; received in revised form 11 October 2007; accepted 12 December 2007

Abstract By sidesteps and accidents, by reading in too many genres and fields at the same time, by being irritable about certain tics of theory, by trying as a freelance independent scholar to overcome my lack of training as a gerontologist or a historian or an anthropologist, I slowly moved beyond literary criticism toward a more satisfying literary-cultural criticism and inter-disciplinarity. The article describes my move from analyzing the midlife alone to a more inclusive age studies, from naive devotee of the progress narrative to a critic of both positive aging and decline ideology, from wielding a high style to a more personal voice appropriate for a broader audience. Becoming more political has been an important aspect of this development. The arc of my age critique has been toward a greater sense of urgency in combating the forces that produce contemporary ageism. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Age as performance; Age anxiety; Age autobiography; Age classes; Age hierarchy; Cultural studies; Age as narrative; Feminism; Feminist gerontology; Age studies; Aging as a decline; Aging as a progress narrative

I think of myself now as an age critic — a writer and cultural critic who focuses on age issues. But it wasn't always so. I slid into age studies sideways from comparative literature, on paths that were odd and serendipitous — even at first ridiculous. Shuffles and skips and a leap or two led finally, I like to think, to firmer holds on the terrain. With each piece of written work, I began to ask harder questions about American age culture. Like the character in Molière, surprised that he had always been speaking “prose,” the name for what I was doing came to me quite late. It's slightly embarrassing to remember the first tug drawing me into the field of age. I was thirty-seven, and on top of my day job as an administrator at Harvard, and angling to teach a course at the Radcliffe Seminars. Like

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many adjunct-run programs, it paid a teacher only if enough students were allured to the topic. The students were well-educated, middle-class, midlife women. A course on the midlife was a novelty in the late 1970's, but I decided to offer “The Literature of the Middle Years of Life” to bait their interest. With my Ph. D. in comparative literature in the modern period, literary fiction was the inevitable source of texts for me. At that time I had faith that serious literature “mirrored” culture. I avoided pop culture and was scantily theoretical, having done my graduate work at Harvard in such a backward moment that the words “French theory” were titillating and frightening. It wasn't until I taught at Berkeley in 1975 that someone told me reading Roland Barthes was fun. I didn't go into midlife studies for the money. Or for the concepts. There were no concepts. There was no field. It was the students: women older than those whom

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I had taught at Harvard and Berkeley. Some of them were ten, twenty, or more years from having received their prestigious B.A.s. I had a bias in their favor: I thought they would bring more life experience and reading to the table than undergraduates. The participants, as I preferred to call them, kept reminding me that I was “too young” to be giving such a course (This was actually not flattering, as I wanted some authority as a teacher. In the 1970's being older still conferred, at least for students trained as we had been, some modest hierarchical power.). I treated that comment as a nonsequitur. “Perhaps it makes sense for all of us to say ‘Yes, I'm in my middle years, earlier rather than later in life,” I said, to set an example. This now seems naive. “What's age got to do with it?” is what I could have retorted. “Should teaching coming-of-age novels be limited to twenty-somethings? Age is a field in which anyone who can do appropriate work in the right spirit has enough credentials.” I like experience in an age critic, but any of us is limited at any age by having our heads filled with imaginary prospective narratives and the detritus of America's decline-oriented culture. To overcome such hindrances, we had better try to be self-conscious critics at any and every age – observing the culture with intensity, becoming ever more vigilant in sniffing out the sources of decline, and suspecting that there is plenty of personal de-internalizing left to do. In any case, the midlife bait that I had thrown out caught me. The courses that followed were stimulating. A debate about whether the novel Lolita was “immoral” led to me write about it. Pointing out Humbert Humbert's poignant belated repentance, I found myself thinking how blatant the donnée is. The age difference between the two characters – a “stage” difference of at least two stages – is not just grossly exploitative, it's a temporal abyss. But why? My essay (published in Novel) focused not on pedophilia per se but on why Nabokov had chosen as his protagonist a midlife man who felt himself to be an “exile from adulthood.” It was the first time I had tried to understand the subjective experience of life-course decline. Aging was awful for Nabokov, not because of what might accompany it (ill health, memory loss, etc.), but because of the inexorable loss of childhood. This was odd, but now I see that subsequent readers probably read Lolita or any decline novel allegorically, through their own historical experiences of simultaneously losing and aging. “The Exile of Adulthood” was actually my second published essay in age studies. The first was an essayreview of a volume of Virginia Woolf's letters, which was published under a clever title conferred by the editor:

“Who's Afraid of the Middle Years?”1 In her midlife, Woolf had bravely decided to outface her illness, live where she wanted to live, write what she wanted to write. These decisions brought riches of all sorts. And that was the first time I tried to understand the subjective experience of life-course progress. The two essays – one on decline, one on progress, one on a man, one on a woman – didn't refer to each other. Until today, I didn't see the connection. Perhaps intellectual luck is just having an unconscious more thoughtful than you are. I spent a good part of the next thirty years being personally and professionally attentive to the culture's primary age binary, between progress narratives and decline narratives. That difference at first seemed so simple and obvious that having noticed it was sufficient, but elaborating it led to much else, including autobiographical theory and closer observation of “cultural combat” on the churnedup battlefield of age. It was a binary that was important to me psychologically, but it took me a long time and much autobiographical writing to discover this.2 I started out rather obsessed with progress. Exhilarated by the novelty of finding so many “midlife progress novels” in the 1980's and by my own new-found ability to “grow” – this was a feminist banner – I was convinced that the proliferation of positive representations signaled a new paradigm. Reading each of my novelists (John Updike, Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler) chronologically, I noted that their protagonists got older book by book. Some found even the earlier stages of the life course difficult. I found I needed new terms, like “aging into adulthood,” to convey this. The insight that something happened to the writers between the novels, which they then treated as aging for their characters, is one I found intuitively right, although it seemed bizarre. As far as I know, no literary critics were looking at fiction in such longitudinal ways. The expressive formula – that “aging is a narrative” – was years away. But based on the radical narrative psychoanalysts I was reading, I already thought that stories told over a life course became our “truth.” The title I chose for my first book, Safe at Last in the Middle Years (1988), was meant to be a description of the paradigm being constructed by my four writers, not a big jolly thumbs-up to midlife reality as it is lived. (Nevertheless, some people responded by telling me 1 The Exile of Adulthood: Pedophilia and the Decline Novel,” Novel 17, #3 (Spring l984), pp. 215–232.” “Who's Afraid of the Middle Years?” North American Review, (Fall 1979), 56–61. 2 Much of the material in this essay comes from earlier publications. Putting it together here has given it more coherence.

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with a frown that they were losing friends to death and becoming arthritic.). I believed that the taboo against writing about “older” characters was ending, and – a non-sequitur of my own – that having more fullbodied, likeable midlife characters in fiction would be transformative for the culture. A “Hers” article I published in the New York Times Magazine, called “Midlife Exhilaration,” records that heady moment. Still, my optimism was not so willful, even at its height. While writing Safe at Last, I had realized that “decline” as a strain in culture was what these four writers were striving against. But in the innocence of my training in literature, I thought the sources of decline were the high-art melancholics like Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and the Evelyn Waugh of Brideshead Revisited. I thought they had a sad psychological bent of the kind Nabokov had defined: exile from being young. Many elite male writers had this nostalgia, and some women too. I thought decline's power over readers came from their cumulative prestige. I thought decline was a private disposition, or at most an esthetic genre. Long before my next book, Declining to Decline (1997), I had changed my mind. I had learned the word “ideology.” In the late 1980's, I started my long march (as I see it in hindsight) through the disciplines. A Harvard friend writing on American and ethnic literature showed he knew what problems I was struggling with when he suggested that I read Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Social theory, especially feminist social theory, enabled me to get beneath the intra-psychic and the literary to the collective. Age is not only personal and certainly not merely biological. The meanings we give it do not come solely, if at all, from literature (Some people never read fiction!). In our culture, realizing that we are aged by our culture is still the mental step that is the hardest to take. Most people never do. This was the first step of teaching myself to look at Americans aging as members of differentiated groups living in particular historical circumstances – “the embodied psyche, in culture, over time” – as I eventually call it in Aged by Culture. I was on my way to becoming a cultural critic. It was so new a term that I remember the first time I declared myself one, at a party around 1990. I started to say, “A cultural critic is…” when my interlocutor said eagerly, “I know what it is.” It was a greeting of the spirit. “Decline” was my new name for the enemy. If decline was a “disposition,” it depended on an ideology that sank its nails deep in ordinary people. Fiercely supported by institutions and dollar signs, it affected unconscious habits, every sub-identity, ways of seeing bodies, explanations of history. It distorted visual culture. If you

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fought it alone, that fight warped your eyesight and sapped your energy. It was what had to be explained. Insofar as these were intellectual discoveries rather than introspective ones, I came to them often by adapting cultural theories of various kinds to contemporary conditions of aging. Age was still an impoverished concept in most of the theorizing that was making American intellectual life so exciting. I had started reading the developments in theory I most admired: feminist first and always, and then whiteness studies, critical-race and queer theories. The Grossberg–Nelson–Treichler tome, Cultural Studies (1992), dazzled me with its myriad approaches and its assertion that they composed a field. Without that daring book, I might never have decided that age needed to be thought of as a cohesive field with its own name. I had been reading like a professor, to understand the authors, not, as a writer must, to wrestle with the ideas, tinker with them, force them to answer my own questions and thus serve the ends of age studies. So much of theory was static that adapting concepts so they made sense of age and aging was wrenching. Still, I was determined to appropriate whatever could be useful if reconceived with sufficient single-mindedness. My vague ideal was to become the Stuart Hall or the Raymond Williams of age studies. I also wanted to recreate the urgency of, say, early feminist theory: I liked sectarianism for its juicy arguments. Ambition is good as you inch your way forward. Mike Brown, a friend who taught in Sociology at Northeastern when I was a visiting scholar there, eased me of theory-terror by showing in everyday conversation how much theory meant to him. I found other excellent mediators. Foucault was interesting but not useful until I read Sandra Bartky's feminist explanation of female subjection. Then I could think through the construction of age-related emotions, as well as gendered ones. “Age anxiety,” the midlife feeling I confessed on the first page of Declining to Decline (and that characterizes the children under fifteen at the beginning of Aged by Culture) came from that line of thought. The fields of the social construction and history of the emotions were taking shape. Kathy Woodward, a doyenne of gerontology who had seen the value of midlife studies in Safe at Last, was part of this development. Men's studies didn't concern itself with age, but reading in that field inclined me to add chapters on midlife men. I hypothesized that living in the feminist country of later life provided women with resistances that men, lacking a movement, didn't have. The anti-positivism I was consolidating meant that I didn't have to answer the silly question, “When do the

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middle years begin?” with a chronological number, which many social scientists eagerly supplied. I joked, “I'm not a sociologist, what would conferring an age on the phenomenon net me? Who has the right to say when ‘the middle years' begin? And is it the same age for women? Blacks? Gays?” I hadn't understood “deconstruction” abstractly, but my own needs got me practicing it. Slowly my mind, like a muscle getting stronger from going outside and taking longer walks, felt freer to borrow and change. But the idea that we learn aging by discarding clothes – a point I discuss in a chapter called, “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle” in Declining to Decline – is not borrowed (“Discarding,” which happens over and over, teaches obsolescence and supports the cult of the new that slides into the cult of youth.). I cannot answer the question, “Where did that idea come from!” I have had two or three bizarre ideas in the course of my writing on age; they're my best. What is most original about this concept of discarding is that it has no particular age attached. It is a practice and a metaphor for the slide that “aging” has become. It counters stage theory by suggesting that a profound weight of decline may start dropping on the heart early, accumulating like gravel dribbling down a collapsing hillside. The main reason I could see decline more plainly as time went by was that I had controlled my tic of looking primarily for signs of progress. I did this partly through writing fragments of autobiography. Feminism had encouraged women to press memoir hard for its potential social insights. I took advantage of the genre-crossing. Writing the chapter titled, “The Good Girl” in Declining to Decline – about re-reading favorite Bildungsromans like Jane Eyre and The Count of Monte Cristo and Black Boy – taught me that by adolescence my need to believe in a progress narrative was already formed. By the time I wrote Aged by Culture, I saw that this was a cultural tropism coming to me via the nurturing childhood and legends that my mother had provided. At first, it was psychologically uncomfortable, but liberating, to block my tic. I clung too long to the belief that life-course progress would not only strengthen you against blows (I still advocate this) but would have magical power to shape your destiny. This fantasy is probably what privileged positive-aging writers believe. Some write cheerfully because they are too fragile to handle news as bad as ageism, or because they want to attract readers who are similarly vulnerable. I can't be too satiric. I probably postponed some work because I was afraid of succumbing to decline elements in my own nature. I had to grow stronger to look decline more steadily in the face. Positive aging, taking up so much

mainstream space, prevents us from staring back more belligerently. If here, in a piece about theory-development, I write a fair amount about autobiography, it's because the mental place where a self confronts huge social forces – the dark closet under the front-hall stairs where learning, internalization, and resistance occur – is an exciting, scary intersection. Feminists, cultural anthropologists, social psychologists, and historical auto/biographers clump together at that crowded site. Age critics need to work there, too. We cannot get far if we don't plumb the full range of our age-related assumptions. Over time, my increasing sense of the powers at work on us helped me de-internalize more of my age-related biases. At age 32 – a letter to a friend has come to light – I was already just like everyone else, ready to be stupid about aging. I complained to Marsha that “I don't look so youthful… It's an esthetic letdown, if you know what I mean, nothing else, nothing related to the world” (I meant that the world didn't notice, but I didn't juxtapose this with an earlier sentence in the same letter: “My winter was full of rejected applications for jobs and long afternoons when I couldn't write a page.” I was making a wrinkle the scapegoat for that “world.”). The anti-decline work I did in my forties and fifties was a lot like the feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s, except (a sorry difference) without a movement. As an independent scholar who spent a decade moving around campuses before being invited to join Brandeis' Women's Studies Research Center, I could be a loner. Inter-disciplinarity can mean you overlap with everybody or nobody. Gradually I found a small, dispersed company of like-minded feminists and gerontologists, here and abroad, or, more accurately – since they had institutional resources – they found me. They are progressives; I think humanistic and social gerontologists are all at least implicitly progressive; some are plainly socialists or Marxists. My age posse is made up of people I admire. Aged by Culture is dedicated to some of them. Finally having a network of people who understood what I was up to, who wrote well on similar themes and provided savvy advice, has been one of the pleasures of my recent professional life. It made me braver, which helps both theory-building and stylistic innovation. I trained myself not only as a kind of American-based cultural anthropologist, but also (intensely for six or seven years) as a historian of the middle years of life. Again, the beginning was serendipitous. I needed a collegial space after my year at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe, and the Schlesinger Library gave me two years as a visiting scholar. I had a grand scheme for a

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series of books I would write called Midlife Fictions. 3 With unbelievable hubris, I had originally intended to start with the midlife protagonists in the Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible. But I sensibly focused on the19th century, because my reading of fiction made me think that the concept of “the middle years” didn't yet exist. I wanted to catch it emerging. (Historians at the Schlesinger didn't seem to doubt that a literary and cultural critic could become a historian.) The shorter, more recent focus I started with was fortunate, in itself and by grounding my future studies in “the history of the present.” In two periods of the twentieth century, I discovered, the midlife suffered great alterations. Between about 1880 and 1935, the term middle years was invented. In the second period, starting around 1980, comparably great changes went on, initially behind a diversionary label, “midlife crisis” (nothing to do with red convertibles). Later crises were fomented by means of the contradictory title, “Baby Boomers.” Economic as well as discursive and political forces were reducing the power of many people in their prime, despite the flattery of Boomer-power, despite the longevity revolution. I needed a term to convey that aging-as-decline was starting younger in the life course, and (borrowing “ageism” from Robert Butler) devised “middle ageism.” The shocking and counter-intuitive discovery of middle ageism gave me a historical frame. This was the core of my next book, Declining to Decline. Following current trends forced me to back down the life course, to younger ages. The personal irritation I felt as the term “slackers” was being invented just as my son joined the workforce after college, led to something of 3 Safe at Last and Declining to Decline count as the first two. The third is tentatively called “The Invention of the Middle Years of Life” (to include a chapter on “The Invention of Male Midlife Sexual Decline”) and the fourth will be “The Postmaternal Phenomenon.” I gave many talks and published on sexuality, post-maternity, remarriage, and creativity during that early period in England and the United States. The historical essays can be found in “Midlife Discourses in the Twentieth-Century United States: An Essay on the Sexuality, Ideology, and Politics of ‘Middle Ageism,’ “Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions), ed. Richard A Shweder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: 3–44; “Inventing the ‘Postmaternal’ Woman, 1898–1927: Idle, Unwanted, and Out of a Job,” Feminist Studies 21 #3 (Summer 1995), pp. 221–253; “Male Midlife Sexuality in a Gerontocratic Economy: The Privileged Stage of the Long Midlife in Ninetenth-Century Age Ideology” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 #1 (July 1994): 58–89; and “Creativity, Aging, Gender: A Study of Their Intersections, 1910–1935,” Aging and Gender in Literature. Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne WyattBrown and Janice Rossen. University of Virginia Press, 1993:19–48. They were preceded by “The Puzzling Case of the Deceased Wife's Sister. Nineteenth-Century England Deals with a Second-Chance Plot,” Representations 31, Summer 1990.

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a breakthrough. I had had no prior professional interest in young adults. But analyzing the ideology misrepresenting “the Boomers” and “the Xers,” meant studying not only the midlife but other age classes. Putting “slackers” and “aging Boomers” together as cocreations of the 1990s demonstrated the contingent nature of “aging.” Cohorts of different generations – age classes – are aged differentially by their culture. It was a Glen Elder kind of history, with gender, race, and class stirred into the mix as well as age. I emphasized the media-based side of the co-creations and the political consequences of framing them as rivals rather than, say, parents and adult children. I call this age criticism. Others call it sociology. Whatever the name, the article I wrote on The Xers' versus the Boomers has probably been the most reprinted of all my work. For many reasons, “the midlife” gradually became less interesting to me. I have been working since 1995 toward a book countering “empty nest” discourse, on feminist women living through post-maternity, growing into new relationships with their adult children. But “The Postmaternal Phenomenon” is also historical and doesn't reify the midlife. Declining to Decline, reviewed by the New York Times and awarded a prize as the best feminist book on American popular culture, led kindred spirits to write to me and use my work, but it didn't make a dent in Boomer boosterism or stereotyping. My university press had expected that the same people who made pop sellers out of titles like Getting Over Getting Older or I Feel Bad About My Neck would buy my book. It didn't happen. (The N. Y. Times turned down my op-ed on how the media construct the “aging Boomers,” because the editor said they'd “just had a piece about the aging of the Boomers.” That hints at the obstacles to age critique — the reign of the positivist cliché, institutional interests.) Allies? Some feminist writers were too buffaloed to fight their own internalized middle ageism. “High theory” was indifferent to age (in an era that prided itself on deconstructing all categories). Some cultural gerontologists seemed stiff with proving they did theory. The genuflection of cultural studies to young people as a vanguard class was stunning. Aged by Culture resulted not only from wanting to think through issues that might entice theorists and graduate students into the field and attract enlightened common readers, but from some conceptual breakthroughs. I realized that midlife studies were another division of the whole life into bits and that what the world needed was age studies. Gender studies came out of feminism via men's studies, queer theory, and sexuality studies. Age studies, rising out of interdisciplinarity, would include the whole life course. Just

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as Declining to Decline had a chapter about my adolescent reading that taught me progress, the next book began with children being taught decline in Boston's own Museum of Science. But my kind of age studies would not be linear: childhood + adulthood, etc. The oddest chapter in that book has sections on actors playing older, playing younger, and playing their own age and asks, which task was hardest, and why? (I was struggling to understand what made me unhappy with performance theory.). Even off stage any of us performs age, but not one single age: rather, an amalgam of behaviors with age-related meanings attached. I tried to break the binary of young-old, that depressing social dichotomy that we internalize to our harm, by deploying “same age” and the spectrum around it, younger-older, which is a less rigid subjective dimension. 4 Intellectually and spiritually, doing this new comprehensive kind of age-work made me feel less like Cassandra amid the joggers. “What exactly has age got to do with it?” became the question. It has a different intonation now. It implies that age (or aging) might have nothing to do with “it,” that age might be a red herring, that age or aging might be a proxy for other factors, or that some aspects of age (to be determined) were in fact the crucial ones. I pick at clichés the way I pick at peeling paint on my porch. I have to scrape it off now, even if I can't replace it until later. In this I identify with THE WOMAN WHO IS EASILY IRRITATED in the Nicole Hollander cartoon Sylvia. Theory seems to be a shorthand for what we can finally conclude once we understand something after long puzzlement. The title Aged by Culture – the whole concept crammed into a nutshell – suggested the need to explain the avalanche of the phenomena instead of assuming that natural forces rule. After “middle ageism,” I was supercharged by the need for providing concepts: “Critical age autobiography,” “Age anxiety,” “Prospective narrative.” “Premium for experience” came from economics. Since writers are warned not to use field-specific jargon, I justify my inventions by arguing that age culture is inadequately described: Those terms fill gaps. I'm proud of the Index to Keywords in Aged by Culture. Nobody reads indices, but I stubbornly thought the one for this book could be a cognitive tool. I like to imagine a graduate student ten years hence, assuming age studies thrives, saying, “She had four and a half pages just about ‘age’ and ‘aging’ in 2004!” If others learn a new concept and can't help but use the keyword to transfer the idea, “Acting Age on Stage” was reprinted in Journal of Theater and Dramatic Criticism, Dec. 2003. 4

or if they dislike it and propose a better one — that's useful either way. I can no longer help being an age critic, so my turn to gerontology, albeit late, was inevitable. Some feminist gerontologists appreciated my work, even though it seemed limited to the midlife, but a few well-worded complaints made me feel that I was letting them down. I'll never have an exclusive focus on any one age class. I have trained myself to ask, as if instinctively, “How does age-driven verbiage, and its material accompaniments, affect not only the direct victims but also people of other age classes, who are overhearing it without understanding its sources?” But I'm working now on the deaths of older people in Katrina (78% of those who died were over 50), and on the scurrilous rhetoric of “population aging” and the “duty-to-die” — the mortal injunctions of an ageist culture rendered sadistic by having so many old people who are so vulnerable. The right-wing movement to end the welfare state has been proliferating at the same time that the “Boomers” are creeping toward old age. It is up to age critics to explain, as Tom Cole says, how our moral imagination is being hijacked from a very young age. All this is converging in my work-in progress, The Hidden Coercions of Ageism. It has probably become plain, even in an essay supposedly on theory, that I learn first from what I am feeling or what people say feelingly to me. The shock of seeing the children in the Boston Museum of Science fleeing from the “Face Aging” booth was what galvanized Aged by Culture. Only later, as I grope for language, do relevant texts – novels, cartoons, theory, poems, history, economic statistics, radical social psychology – become indispensable. I've moved from humanism to a more inclusive social criticism and inter-disciplinarity; from the midlife alone to age studies; from a higher style to the voice appropriate for writing online for www.WomensENews. org. Becoming more political was another major step of my development. One arc of my kind of age critique has been toward a greater sense of urgency. Over the course of the 1990s, I became an activist in my Nicaraguan sister city; I write grant proposals for adult education projects (I'm writing a family political memoir about this, to be called There is a World Elsewhere. 5). More than anything, my work with Nicaragua's pauperized 5 Some chapters will be based on published essays: “Florcita la Suerte,” Indiana Review, 2000 (cited as notable in Best American Essays 2001); “Nicaragua 1991: Going On,” North American Review, September 1991; “Letter from Nicaragua: How Not to Be a Tourist,” Yale Review Vol. 79, #1: 93–116.

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people undid my allegiance to believing that progress rolls forward. Yet I still believe in the longing to tell progress narrative and feel strongly that people – including the Nicaraguan villagers I know as students in the Free High School for Adults – need to be able to tell it. Unless something goes terribly wrong, “we” want to go on telling it lifelong. 6 Moving left in age politics means not just being empathetic with suffering. For a progressive, it means rooting out the sources of decline wherever they come from. These powers to construct our everyday reality and then mis-describe or ignore it — how do they operate? Describing the enemies correctly is a cause. Like gender and racial studies, age studies have a mission, but despite AARP's millions of members, gerontology's dedicated field workers, we acutely lack an anti-decline movement. At the end of Declining to Decline, I left a little utopian space for envisioning intergenerational action. In Aged by Culture (2004), finished under the Bush administration, the call for a movement is dryer, more sardonic. Resistance means confronting America's forms of patriarchy and atomistic capitalism in the unsuspected as well as the inevitable places. The Index I like didn't have enough entries about ageism. I'm not so much afraid of aging, but the new regimes of ageism ought to be terrifying us all. References Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression New York: Routledge. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Anchor. Grossberg, L. Nelson, C. & Treichler, P. A. (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies New York: Routledge. Gullette, M. M. (1984). The exile of adulthood: Pedophilia and the decline novel. Novel, 17(3), 215−232 Spring. Gullette, M. M. (1979). Who's Afraid of the middle years. North American Review, 56−61 Fall. Gullette , M. M. (1988). Safe at last in the middle years : U of California Press.

6 One part of this has been published in “The Sartre-De Beauvoir ‘Conversations’ of 1974: From Life Storytelling to Age Autobiography,” Writing Old Age, ed. Julia Johnson. London: Centre for Policy on Ageing, Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies, of the Open University, January 2004 (The Representation of Older People in Ageing Research Series, No 3: 64–79.). Eventually I wrote an essay, “Our Best and Longest-Running Story”(about why progress narrative is no necessary, and so difficult) that carries this childhood yearning through the life course – across cultures – to the very end of narrative in later life.

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Gullette , M. M. (1989). Midlife exhilaration, “Hers" column. New York Times Magazine January 29. Gullette , M. M. (1990). The puzzling case of the deceased wife's sister. Nineteenth-Century England Deals with a Second-Chance Plot Representations, 31. (pp. ) (Summer). Gullette, M. M. N.d. “Letter from Nicaragua: How Not to Be a Tourist," Yale Review Vol. 79, 1: 93–116. Gullette, M. M. (1991). Nicaragua 1991: Going on.North American Review September. Gullette, M. M. (1993). Creativity, aging, gender: A study of their intersections, 1910–1935. In Anne Wyatt-Brown. & Janice Rossen (Eds.), Aging and Gender in Literature. Studies in Creativity (pp. 19−48). U of Virginia. Gullette, M. M. (1994). Male midlife sexuality in a gerontocratic economy: The Privileged stage of the long midlife in nineteenthcentury age ideology. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5(1), 58−89 (July). Gullette, M. M. (1995). Inventing the ‘postmaternal’ woman, 1898– 1927: Idle, unwanted, and out of a job. Feminist Studies, 21(3), 221−253 (Summer). Gullette, M. M. (1997). Declining to decline: Cultural combat and the politics of the midlife Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P. Gullette, M. M. (1998). Midlife discourses in the twentieth-century United States: An essay on the sexuality, ideology, and politics of 'middle ageism. In Richard A. Shweder (Ed.), Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) (pp. 3−44). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gullette, M. M. (2000). Florcita la Suerte. Indiana Review, 22(1), 61−71. Gullette, M. M. (2004). The Sartre-De Beauvoir ‘conversations’ of 1974: From life storytelling to age autobiography. In Julia Johnson (Ed.), Writing Old Age London: Centre for Policy on Ageing, Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies, of the Open University January.