IS GERONTOLOGY THE CHESHIRE CAT?

Abstract

Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life, edited by Richard A. Settersten, Jr. Baywood Publishing Company, Amityville, NY, 2003, 355 pp., $54.95 (cloth). The Evolution of the Aging Self: The Societal Impact on the Aging Process, edited by K. Warner Schaie and Jon Hendricks. Springer Publishing Company, New York, 2000, 368 pp., $54.00. When asked about the future of gerontology, one of the scholars who did so much to advance the field said that she was tempted to predict “that the field of gerontology is going to disappear over the next couple of decades” (Neugarten, 1996, p. 402). Bernice Neugarten said this out of her conviction that the only way to understand aging was to see it as the outcome of a lifelong process; any attempt to disentangle later life from earlier life would inevitably fail. She was equally emphatic about the absolute importance of understanding the biological underpinnings of changes throughout the life span, the social contexts that shape development and change, the modifications in psychological processes that produce and reflect both biogenetic and sociocultural influences—and the need to check all our models across cultures and across historical periods. The study of human development was, thus, inherently interdisciplinary. She was also convinced, in her later years at Northwestern University, of the need to apply such understandings to the arenas of social policy.

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