ABSTRACT
While age is often treated as an individual signifier or a purely biological marker, the nineteenth-century U.S. literature reveals instead that aging must be considered from an intersectional perspective that takes into account how race, gender, and socioeconomic class constitute its terms and circumscribe its possibilities. This chapter charts the rise of age as a meaningful social and political metric, but it also locates a counter-history of resistance to dominant notions of what growing old means, especially in the work and writings by white women and people of color. Ultimately, the nineteenth-century U.S. literature exposes age as a contested category, an always politicized site that marginalized individuals have long sought to redefine and revise.
