“That Younger, Fresher Woman”: Old Wives for New (1918) and Hollywood’s Cult of Youth

Abstract

Age studies scholar Margaret Gullette argues that aging is a culturally constructed rather than a strictly biological process. “The basic idea we need to absorb,” says Gullette, “is that whatever happens in the body, human beings are aged by culture first of all” (3). Our current understanding of growing older as a process of decline and potentially debilitating loss may be traced to a specific constellation of historical forces that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forces that, as I will argue in this chapter, had an impact upon the representation of aging in Old Wives for New (1918), a popular silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille.