Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Margaret Morganroth Gullette
is an internationally known cultural critic, an essayist, anti-ageist activist, and prize-winning writer of nonfiction. Her writings are foundational in critical age studies, a cross-disciplinary field which she named in 1993.
Her latest book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It (2024) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Nonfiction. It won a MASS Cultural Council 2025 grant in Literature.
Ending Ageism, or How Not To Shoot Old People (2017) won the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars and the American Psychological Association’s Florence Denmark Award for Contributions to Women and Aging.
Aged by Culture, also nominated for a Pulitzer, was chosen a Notable Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor. Declining to Decline (1998) won the Emily Toth award for the best feminist book on American popular culture.
Her essays are frequently cited as notable in Best American Essays. “The Contagion of Euphoria,” won the Daniel Singer Millennial Prize 2008. Other essays have appeared in many literary and cultural quarterlies and in a variety of multi-disciplinary scholarly journals. Her essays and op-eds have appeared in New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Nation, Ms., womensenews.org, alternet.org, salon.com, American Prospect, American Scholar, among other venues. She can be heard on podcasts and radio and webinars, including those on “Brian Lehrer,” Callie Crossley, CultureShocks, “The Connection,” RadioNation, WBAI, “To the Best of Our Knowledge." Gullette has given keynotes in the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria. For a full list of publications and talks, see under Essays and Speeches and Interviews.
Gullette has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting Fellowships. Quotations from her books appear in The Quotable Woman: The First Five Thousand Years. She is a Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, through 2026. You can find her CV here.
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"We haven't done justice to age in the popular press. Margaret Gullette may change that. You can't read [her] without realizing that 'age could be different.' It will be a more mature country that takest note of so important a voice, giving hope that our culture may yet value wrinkles—the face's road map of experience—accumulated from smiles, tears, and the hard-won wisdom of the body."
--Bill Moyers
"As both a scholar and writer of exquisite essays for both mainstream and academic journals, Margaret is a provocative coiner of phrases, such as her resonant call for a 'MeToo movement against ageism’. . . . She is a vigilant fighter for social justice, and a visionary scholar and writer.”
--Anne Basting, MacArthur Fellow, author of
Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care
"Dubbed an ‘anti-ageism pioneer’ by the press, Gullette. . . has been America’s primary theorist and practitioner of age studies."
--The American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging
"Gullette's scholarship is sound and wide-ranging. She has a great command of the literature from history, social sciences research, political theory, economics, morality, religion, women's studies, psychology and psychiatry, cultural studies, American civilization, and literary works."
--Paula J. Caplan, author of The Myth of Women's Masochism
"Margaret Morganroth Gullette is 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 [and] defender of social constructionism. . . . In terms of breadth of vision, scholarly integrity, and the sheer exhilaration of her writing, Gullette's work is essential reading."
--Mike Hepworth, author of Stories of Ageing