On her book Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain
Cover Interview of January 12, 2010
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“We inherited our obsession with being ‘over the hill’ from the nineteenth century.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain ‘young’ a decade longer.”
On the second:
“Older women had long been devalued in Britain, but Victorians added a new twist. With the rise of gynecology, female sexuality was considered delicate and pathological in comparison to the male norm.”
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“We inherited our obsession with being ‘over the hill’ from the nineteenth century.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain ‘young’ a decade longer.”
On the second:
“Older women had long been devalued in Britain, but Victorians added a new twist. With the rise of gynecology, female sexuality was considered delicate and pathological in comparison to the male norm.”