Matilda White Riley

"Because of unprecedented increases in , the 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."

"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 —yet age 65 is still used in many countries under today's utterly changed conditions of longevity."

"Parents who believed in the value of "getting ahead" started to apply pressure from the beginning of the school career."

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

"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 and expression to each other of their underlying orientation, feelings, and attitudes."

"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 , e.g.) in the group, who might be intimidated by a group interview situation."

"In 1979 at the age of 68, Matilda embarked on a 20-year career at the (NIA) of the (NIH). The NIA’s founding director, , and the NIH Director, , 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."

"Possibly overshadowed by Matilda’s many public accomplishments is her service as a teacher and mentor at and , 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 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 (1972), Rutgers (1983), (1994), and the (1997)."