Activist Gullette Decries Society's Ageism

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.

Perhaps even more terrifying are the increasing restrictions on social security at a time when older workers are having trouble finding jobs. For persons born after 1959, the minimum age for full social security benefits has been raised from 65 to 67. “Raising the age of retirement when the economy is losing millions of jobs, and the youth cult is growing, and midlife discrimination is growing, is a refinement of cruelty,” said Gullette.

Diminishing benefits for older workers make it likely more people will feel the effects of such changes. “Seniority, broadly understood, is the basis for the good life course, the reason any of us can still acquire life course benefits, intangible ones included, as we age into the middle years and beyond. Now seniority is under attack in unions,” Gullette said.

All of this means that more older workers will end up unemployed. And if they experience discrimination while looking for a new job, according to Gullette, they will have restricted options for legal recourse.

In Kimmel v. Florida Board of Regents, resolved in 2000, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor formally upheld the state’s right to discriminate on the basis of age. In brief, Gullette said, “A state may rely on age as a proxy for other qualities or abilities that are relevant to the state’s legitimate interests. Midlife discrimination in state employment became more legal and harder to fight.”

When they finally do retire, workers may not be adequately provided for. Gullette noted that in a study of investors, “a third of people aged 50 to 59 cash in their 401K’s when they leave work, which is a sure sign that they don’t have enough to live on.”

Gullette observed that the battle to maintain Social Security poses an immediate challenge for political activists. “There is enough money in the Social Security reserve, if the Republicans honor the reserve, until 2042. That’s just a fact,” she said. “How is it that Greenspan could still be terrifying people with the thought that it’s going to end earlier? That of course makes it likelier that the republicans will be able to diminish its effectiveness for greater numbers of people.”