Matilda White Riley

Matilda White Riley (née White, April 19, 1911 – November 14, 2004) was an American sociologist, known for her research and writing on sociological aspects of gerontology. She was elected in 1977 a Fellow of the American Associaton for the Advancement of Science, in 1987 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1994 a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She served as the president of the American Sociological Association for one academic year from 1985 to 1986.

Quotes

Because of unprecedented increases in longevity, the kinship structure has been transformed. Linkages among family members have been prolonged, and the surviving generations in a family have increased in number and complexity. Today's kinship structure (which has no parallel in history) can be viewed in a new way: as a latent web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close family relationships. These relationships are no longer prescribed as strict obligations, but must be earned—created and recreated by family members over their lives. Such changes in the structure and dynamics of family relationships raise many questions and issues for students of the family including the development of special research approaches needed to understand the complexity of these relationships and the nature of older people's family relationships in the future.
- (September 1983) "The Family in an Aging Society: A Matrix of Latent Relationships". Journal of Family Issues 4 (3): 439–454. DOI:10.1177/019251383004003002.

Today's social structures and norms are the vestigial remains of the nineteenth-century, when most people died before their work was finished or their last child had left home. Age 65 was established as the criterion for insurance eligibility in Germany back in the late 1870s—yet age 65 is still used in many countries under today's utterly changed conditions of longevity.
- (January 1993) "Aging in the Twenty-First Century". Sociological Practice 11 (1, Article 6): 40–52. (quote from p. 45)

Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career.
- Sociological Research: A Case Approach. vol. 1 of 2. Harcourt, Brace & World. 1963. p. 281. ISBN 9780155823129. (777 pages)

... one seems forced to conclude that a disproportionally large number of the nation's "pockets of poverty" are found in rural-farm areas.
- p. 319

Remember that, as a sociologist, your focus is on social interaction—i.e., not on the biological or psychological processes of the actors, but on their social behavior and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes.
- Sociological Research: Exercises and Manual. Vol. 2 of 2. Harcourt, Brace & World. 1963. p. 14.

Interviewing individual group members separately affords privacy and encourages all members to answer. Respondents may be more frank if that others in the group will not hear what they say (thereby removing the possibility of group sanctions). This may be the best way of obtaining responses from individuals with lower positions (younger, lower socioeconomic status, e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation.
- p. 18, 1st part of quote; p. 18, 2nd part of quote

In 1979 at the age of 68, Matilda embarked on a 20-year career at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIA’s founding director, Robert N. Butler, and the NIH Director, Donald Fredrickson, invited Matilda to establish the NIA’s granting program on Social and Behavioral Research (SBR) as well as to guide the expansion and integration of these disciplines throughout the NIH. During her first year at the NIA, she and Kathleen Bond (one of her former graduate students) developed and implemented a multidisciplinary vision for research on aging that integrated the aging of individuals into societal structures. This program emphasized the influence of social structures on the lives of individuals (Matilda exclaimed often, “People don’t grow up and grow old in laboratories—they grow up and grow old in changing societies.”) and the lives of individuals on social structures. This vision extended to the biological sciences, for Matilda recognized the need for a biopsychosocial understanding. The publication of this blueprint as a NIH program announcement set the course of NIA’s program and influences its direction even to this day.
- Ronald P. Abeles, Obituary. 1986 ASA President, Matilda White Riley. American Sociological Association (2005).

Possibly overshadowed by Matilda’s many public accomplishments is her service as a teacher and mentor at Rutgers and New York University, and the dedication and accomplishments of some of her students and menses to the study of aging and the life course, especially Anne Foner, Marilyn Johnson, and Kathleen Bond. She built a modern sociology-anthropology department at Bowdoin College and was named the Daniel B. Fayerweather Professor of Political Economy and Sociology in 1975; in 1996 the building housing the department was named in her honor, and she received honorary doctoral degrees from Bowdoin (1972), Rutgers (1983), Radcliffe (1994), and the State University of New York at Albany (1997).
- David Mechanic, (2018) . "Matilda W. Riley 1911–2004". Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences: 1–12. (quote from p. 7)