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"Women's time": women, age, and intergenerational relations in Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers.

Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.--Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age (543)

In Western society, obsessed with youth and youthfulness, old age is Other--but it is also that which we must become. In this it differs radically from gender, race, and even class as categories of otherness. Old age is, in Simone de Beauvoir's phrase, a "forbidden subject" in Western culture. "Society," she writes in her monumental study Old Age, "looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention" (1). As her language suggests, in the twentieth century old age and mortality replaced sexuality as that which cannot be spoken about. Indeed, Old Age ...

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