Margaret Morganroth Gullette

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).

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.

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.

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.”

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