ABSTRACT
A gendered description of the stages of life is necessary to understand adequately the implications of Callahan's new role for the last stage of life. Daniel Callahan proposes that the elderly, who he believes have a unique capacity to link past, present, and future, strive to become "moral conservators." Callahan's proposal requires extending values heretofore associated with domesticity and femaleness into the public realm. Callahan criticizes the modernizers of aging, who aggressively resist the physical process of aging, viewing it as a new "frontier" to conquer. Callahan insists that many medical "needs" of the elderly reflect only social expectations and the quest for individual happiness; fulfilling them does not necessarily contribute to the common good. Feminists are unlikely to have a stake in the kind of death-denying technological "progress" that Callahan wants medicine to forego, and they have a significant stake in a health-care system focused on human caring, as Callahan advocates.
