By Emer C.M. Vaughn

Contributing Writer

We may not hear much about ageism in the media, but when we do, it will probably be in connection with Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a sixty-something Professor of Women’s Studies at Brandeis and a passionate ageism activist.

“I’m neither a journalist nor a gerontologist, but a writer and a cultural critic who studies age issues. I call myself an age critic, and I wish there were thousands more of us,” Gullette said. She spoke to the Lowell House Senior Common Room this past Friday about her most recent book, Aged by Culture.

Gullette is something of a one-woman social movement, working in the tradition of Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir to raise awareness of the negative effects of modern culture, specifically its attitudes toward aging. Her previous books, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife and Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel, both focus on popular misconceptions of aging.

“American culture is aging us, more of us, and more disastrously than it ever has before,” Gullette said. Significant changes have taken place over the last 30 years, accelerating during the boom of the 1990s. They include the widespread apprehension of aging past youth, job discrimination against the middle aged and elderly and equalized longevity. With regard to this last issue, Gullette pointed out that certain ethnic groups and class groups, particularly African American men and Native Americans, are more vulnerable to the effects of aging on employment.

Gullette’s work isn’t just about raising awareness, however; it’s also about changing the whole discourse of age. Gullette aims to broaden the popular conception of who is affected by ageism and whose problem it is, so that the discussion surrounding the issue reflects what is actually going on in today’s culture. “The American dream is becoming truncated,” Gullette said. “Aging past youth is becoming a decline.”

Four years ago, the Boston Museum of Science had an exhibit called “Face Aging,” in which anyone under 15 could go into a booth that would photograph him and then produce images supposedly reflecting what the child would look like as he aged into his 60s. Gullette, who attended the exhibit while in the process of writing Aged by Culture, summarized the children’s reactions as a mix of fear and disgust.

What she found most entertaining, however, was that the company that had designed the booth had taken a less than scientific approach. The company, which happened to be a special effects studio, had adjusted their aging algorithm by asking staff members whether the booth’s predictions seemed believable. The result was that Museum of Science booth reinforced an exaggerated and inaccurate idea of the personal changes that come with age.

“Belief in cultural mirrors has devastating consequence in our hyper-visual culture. Appearance and self-hood are stickily entwined,” Gullette said. “The exhibit was modeled on a dominant cultural assumption that the body declines as if with no cultural intervention.” Hence, the title of the book.

Rather than limiting her work to nebulous ethnographic inquiry, Gullette draws on statistics and specific American domestic policies as well. She stresses that she is concerned with the median, not positive aging literature which can be exaggeratedly upbeat in an effort to balance the myth that personal growth can’t continue into old age.

Statistically, according to Gullette’s year 2000 data, the employment rate of men between 50 and 55 has dropped from 95 percent to 77 percent over the past 20 years. Half of male workers lost ground economically during their 40s, 50s and 60s. “Those who are looking for a job at midlife will be out of work a month more than the average young adult,” she said. “So in a recession, the father or the mother will be out of work a month longer than their adult child.”

“I won’t say ‘age discrimination’ any more. I say ‘midlife discrimination.’ If you say ‘age discrimination,’ people think, ‘Oh, the elderly are seeking jobs,’” Gullette said. “There’s a way of just saying it isn’t relevant to anybody, that they’re not raising a family or whatnot. Well, these are people that are raising a family.”

Gullette pointed out the contradictions in American age culture. “We boast about longevity and health while the commerce of aging is backing down the life course, striking younger and younger people with the fear of aging past youth,” she said.