Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Margaret Morganroth Gullette Image

Margaret Morganroth Gullette (born 1941), a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, is a cultural critic who calls herself an age critic and theorist. She is a prize-winning writer of nonfiction, an essayist, feminist, and activist. Her contributions to the field of cultural studies of age include four books, the latest of which is Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America (2011). Other books of Gullette’s that have been influential (in humanistic and cultural gerontology, history, literary and cultural criticism, sociology and anthropology, performance and film studies, life writing and narrative theory, fashion studies, and feminist health activism) include Aged by Culture (2004), Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (1997); and Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel (1988).

Early life and education

Margaret Morganroth was born in Brooklyn, NY, the first child of Betty Morganroth and Martin Morganroth. She was educated through high school at public schools and received scholarships to go to college and graduate school. Morganroth Gullette holds a B.A. magna cum laude Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College, a M.A. from University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Career

Before becoming a Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center in 1996, she had previously worked at the Harvard-Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning and had been a visiting scholar at Harvard; the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; Northeastern University; Wellesley Center for Research on Women. At the Danforth (now Bok) Center, she edited The Art and Craft of Teaching. She continues to publish in the field of pedagogy and education. [citation needed]

Working in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Gullette found a lost novel by the late nineteenth-century English feminist, Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus, and wrote an introduction for the Feminist Press reissue. Early in the feminist second wave, she published a feminist children’s book called The Lost Bellybutton (1976). [citation needed]

She was invited to be the George A. Miller Visiting Professor, at the Center for Advanced Studies, University of Illinois (Urbana/ Champaign), in the spring of 2000. She is an Advisory Editor to the new journal, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and on the book series, Aging Studies in Europe (LIT Verlag). She is on the Advisory Committee of the European Network on Aging (ENAS). She was on the Advisory Committee of the Journal of Aging, the Humanities, and the Arts, 2006 2010 and co editor, Age Studies Series, University Press of Virginia, 1993 1999.

Major ideas

Mike Hepworth, the late British cultural gerontologist (1957–2012), in a review of Gullette’s work through 1999, calls her “one of America’s foremost critics of the concept of ageing as a universal and comprehensive process of decline. She is a formidable critic of biological essentialism, defender of social constructionism, and opponent of ‘middle ageism’” (Hepworth 1999, Abstract), and the author of an “increasingly influential range of publications on the social construction of ageing” (Hepworth 1999, 139) and the life course in the United States. Gullette emerged during the 1990s and beyond as “the primary theorist and practitioner of what she called ‘age studies’” (Cole and Ray 2010, 17). Gullette named the field of “age studies” in 1993 (Gullette 1993, 45–46). The term is used by the Modern Language Association and in the humanities in preference to “aging studies.”

“Her principal thesis is that we are aged by culture. What she means is that much of what we experience as we get older is not the ineluctable consequence of biological ageing . . . but is socially and culturally contingent. American society, she contends, has become a rich terrain on which the social and cultural exclusion of people as they age can take place and where the ideology of ageing can flourish" (Tulle 2006: 127). Age studies tries to understand age and aging as complex, intersectional social and psychological constructions, and also as a set of mediated relationships among people located at different phases of the life course.

“Age studies sees ‘age’ and ‘aging’ in culture as resulting as much from ideologies as from biology” (Ball 2006, 214). Gullette has said that she offers a radical social constructionism that pushes “‘the natural’ out of context after context” (Gullette 1997 246 n42). “Neither Featherstone and Hepworth nor Gullette denied the existence of bodily ageing, although their work has at times been interpreted as coming near to doing so, with their emphasis on the cultural constitution of the body. . . . As a result, their work has been criticised by those who see it as endorsing a false dualism of the body and the self.” (Twigg, 2007)

“Cultural critics like Gullette (1997, 1999) and Featherstone and Hepworth (1991) have traced the ways in which culture imposes negative meanings on the bodies of older people, which are then read back as the source of those meanings. For Gullette, we are aged not by our bodies but by culture; and the response should be one of challenge and resistance, as the [sub]title of her [1997] book [Declining to Decline], Cultural Combat, makes clear” (Twigg, 2007, 298).

“Margaret Morganroth Gullette has documented ways in which the pervasive ageism of Western cultures is often coded into a narrative structure that associates old age with inevitable decline and decay. Although this ‘decline ideology’ might seem to work against the futurist assumption of redemptive hope, Gullette explains that we are trained to assume the decline of the old in order to make room for the more highly valued young. To counter this tendency, Gullette urges the proliferation of ‘progress narratives,’ which project ‘a moving image of the self through its past and onward to its better future’ (Port 2012, 5–6 ) One of her theoretical moves has been to undermine the binary between “progress narrative,” automatically applied to children and younger people; and “decline narrative,” automatically applied to people who have aged past midlife.

Gullette’s term “age autobiography” is a call for individual authors to write more knowledgeably and critically about the mediated forces that insinuate themselves into our sense of “aging.” “And once we begin to think age, a more mysterious and intangible project emerges: to discover what our own culture is serving up for us, and what each of us has consumed or resisted” (Gullette 1993, 46). “The term itself [“the master narrative of aging”] was coined by Margaret Morganroth Gullette and is designed to identify a recognizable ensemble of cultural practices. . . “ (Kunow 2011, 26). The “master narrative of decline” requires a single self going through a linear trajectory, while “the portmanteau self” is “an active concept of aging as self narrated experience, the conscious, ongoing story of one's age identity” (Gullette 1997: 220). Fragments of Gullette’s own age autobiography appear in many of her nonfiction works. Cynthia Port singles out “one powerful essay [in which] Gullette argues that the fashion system teaches us to detach ourselves from and then discard clothes and other no longer fashionable commodities as a means of training ourselves for our own obsolescence in old age”: “The Other End of the Fashion Cycle: Practicing Loss, Learning Decline” (Port 2012, n26).

Gullette has been called “one of gerontology’s few public intellectuals,” who demonstrates "how a scholar works to change the minds of general readers about aging and ageism" (Ray and Cole 2010: 8). “The whole point, as Gullette (1988, 1993, 1997) has vividly shown in her analyses of fictional representations of ageing, is to discover how our personal ideas about ageing (positive/ negative/ ambiguous) are shaped by our culture and are therefore open to the possibility of change” (Hepworth 2000, 3). Convinced that our terminology about age is impoverished, she encourages the use of terms like “aging-past-youth,” aging-into-the-middle years,” and “aging-into-old age” (Gullette 1998, 3–44). She argues in several books (1997, 2004, 2011) that collective sociopolitical changes are necessary.

Staging Age, edited by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Leni Marshall, gives credit to Gullette’s work in establishing the field of age studies, and advancing concepts about how age can be considered a performance (Lipscomb and Marshall 2010, 1–3). She invented the term “middle ageism” (Gullette 1998, 3–44) to name the cluster of discriminations suffered by people in their middle years, from job discrimination to “Boomer-bashing” and decline discourse about sexuality, looks, and intellectual and cognitive competence. Other concepts developed by Gullette--such as “age ideology,” "being aged by culture,” and the use of “progress narrative” as a way out of the binary between “positive aging” and "decline narrative"--have been adopted by scholars in a range of disciplines.

Gullette’s concepts and formulations have been disseminated through a number of chapters and essays or excerpts that have appeared in anthologies, including A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging (2010), Narratives of Life: Mediating Age (Munich 2009), Opposing Viewpoints: The Aging Population (2009), Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. Readings (2008), Coming of Age: First-Generation Critics Reflect on Age, Aging and the Making of Critical Gerontology (2008), There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (2006), Our Bodies Ourselves: Menopause (2006); Inequalities: Readings in Diversity and Social Life (2005), Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (2004), Handbook on the Humanities and Aging (2000), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999), Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) (1998); Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity (1993).

Working as a freelance writer in parallel to her scholarly career, Gullette also publishes in mainstream, feminist, and progressive newspapers, magazines, and blogs. These include New York Times (Week in Review, Magazine, Arts), Nation, Ms., Dissent, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune; American Prospect, American Scholar; and www.womensenews; www.salon.com, www.theforward.com; www.nextavenue.com, www.ontheissuesmagazine.com She has been interviewed on “Brian Lehrer,” “The Callie Crossley Show,” CultureShocks, “The Connection,” RadioNation, WBAI, “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”

Critical praise

“In breadth of vision, scholarly integrity, and the sheer exhilaration of her writing, Gullette’s work is essential reading for all who wish to understand the origins of the transformation of midlife in our times and the possibility of real changes in attitudes to ageing--personal and social--under postmodern global capitalism” (Hepworth 1999, p. 143). “Gullette’s gift for storytelling enthralls readers” (Achenbaum, 2011, 723). Gullette's chapter, 'Overcoming the Terror of Forgetfulness,' in Agewise was called “the best essay on memory loss that I have read. Based partly on the author's experiences with her mother, it reveals her deep compassion and insight” (Cruikshank 2011, 26).

Honors and awards

Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America (2011) won a 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Prize. Aged by Culture (2004), was chosen as a Noteworthy Book of the year by the Christian Science Monitor. It was nominated for a Pulitzer and received an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (1997) won the Emily Toth award in 1998 for the best feminist book on American popular culture.

Gullette has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She held a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute in 1986–87 while finishing Safe at Last in the Middle Years.

Her essay, "The Contagion of Euphoria," won the Daniel Singer Millennial Prize in 2008. Other essays, frequently cited as notable in Best American Essays, have appeared in many literary and cultural quarterlyes, including Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Scholar, and Yale Review; and in scholarly journals like Feminist Studies, Representations, New Political Science, Profession, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Quotations from her books appear in The Quotable Woman: The First Five Thousand Years (2010). She is a long-term member of PEN-America, to which she was nominated by Carolyn Heilbrun and Alix Kates Shulman. In 2005 she won the Virginia Liebeler Biennial Grant for Mature Women in Letters from the National League of American Pen Women.

In 2012 Gullette won the Marigold “Ideas for Good” Prize, which carries an award of $5000, for her work as the co-founder and director of development for The Free High School for Adults, San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, the sister city of Newton, MA, where she lives. She has been visiting Nicaragua since 1989, finding funding for adult education programs there.

Personal life

She married David Gullette, a college classmate, in 1964. They have one child, Sean Leland Sebastian Gullette (born 1968), an actor, screen-writer, and film-director.

Books

Interviews

References

External links