Teenagers, Generation X, Baby Boomers, Middle Age, Young Old, Old Old─some of these names for groups of people at various stages in life have become household words in America. They have come to seem natural and almost obvious categories for indicating the phases that everyone who lives long enough passes through.

And yet, most of these catch phrases were not known before the latter part of the twentieth century. They are inventions of modern society, concocted to describe the life course now extended further for so many people. But at least one writer regrets the effects of these terms: among other things, they have made us think of our lives as made up of pieces instead of being seamless webs.

Margaret Gullette, an independent scholar based in Newton, considers these age categories as arbitrary and artificial. They harden the stereotypes and make it look “as if age classes were utterly separate from one another and age were separable from any other identities.”

Worse still, she sees them as creations of political and economic forces that divide people, all the better to manipulate workers, to market products, and to make people know the limitations of their place in society.

In her most recent book, Aged By Culture, my friend Margaret argues, eloquently and often passionately, the case for rejecting this approach and forming differently focused kinds of age studies. She judges the current trend toward life segmentation as harmful to individuals and ultimately damaging to our society.

The author began her critical examination of age theory some two decades ago with a study of the middle years. By now, she has extended her analysis to include all the stages of life and she finds notable similarities in what is happening to each of them.

The fear of aging that runs rampant in the United States and the stereotypes foisted upon women and men of a certain age are social ills long recognized. What most people do not realize, however, is how these attitudes work their way down to groups of middle-aged and younger Americans.

Even children have been infected with negative views of growing older. Margaret Gullette begins her book with a critical look at the Boston Museum of Science exhibit about aging. Five years ago, this museum made it possible for children to enter a booth where they could see pictures of themselves as they would look at various ages. Predictably, some kids were revulsed at what they saw and came out disgusted and scared.

Critical of what capitalism does to groups of people, Margaret judges age groupings as an effective tool of social injustice. By isolating people in this way, dominant economic interests manipulate us and keep us docile. The way men and women in mid-life have been losing income over the past few decades and made fearful about losing their jobs is an obvious example.

People of every age, she says, need to band together and work for integration across the artificial barriers erected by monied interests. In my experience, the person who saw this mission most clearly and then rallied forces to support it was Maggie Kuhn.

I had the privilege of getting acquainted with this dynamic woman in her later years when I became associated with her organization, the Gray Panthers. Her distinctive vision was not of a group of old people who would advocate by themselves for their own interests. Rather, she envisioned a broad-based social movement made up of young and old. This movement would focus on social change to benefit people of every sort in this nation.

Unfortunately, this movement lost momentum with the physical decline and death of Maggie. But her vision deserves continued attention because it highlights the need for coalitions of older and younger in the cause of desperately needed change.

In her book Margaret Gullette endorses this approach, but her main emphasis falls on the need for scholars in the field of aging studies to examine critically how unrecognized biases in our culture distort our view of human growth and development. “We are aged more by culture than by chromosomes,” she writes. In her view, we are too easily taken in by the ideas foisted upon us by forces that are largely interested in making profits.

Her analysis is both radical and subtle. Most of us do not stop to examine the prevailing ideas by which we live. It does not occur to us that these concepts do not arise naturally but rather are imposed by mass media and other social forces. The commonly held view, for instance, that decline begins early in life and continues unabated till the end never receives the critical evaluation it needs.

Margaret, however, entitles another of her books “Declining to Decline” to indicate her response to this social stereotype. She feels committed to exposing the often subtle social manipulation worked upon Americans. For her, this analysis has become the main focus of a distinguished and productive scholarly career.

Richard Griffin