In Our Prime

by Patricia Cohen

  The next generation of midlifers will be molded by disparate circumstances. They have grown up in a faster and more connected world, where one in five Americans speaks a foreign language at home, television channels number in the hundreds, and texting is preferred to phoning. Young women who want children are more conscious of their biological clocks and more willing to remain single. College graduates, chastened by the harsh recession, bypass exhortations to “follow your passion,” and look for vocational jobs with benefits. Despite enormous medical breakthroughs, if the epidemic of obesity persists, physical problems may make them feel middle-aged sooner even if they live longer. Their midlife is likely to be overshadowed by the seismic growth of the elderly population.

  If there is one lesson that the history of middle age offers, it is just how malleable this cultural fiction can be. The definition has been stretched and massaged over the last century and a half, and bears the fingerprints of every generation through which it has passed. Today, longer life spans provide additional opportunities to switch directions and to shape the world our children and parents occupy. The passage of years bestows the experience and skills to ride out unexpected, even crushing setbacks, and to accomplish goals previously considered out of reach. Middle age can bring undiscovered passions, profound satisfactions, and newfound creativity. It is a time of extravagant possibilities.

  Acknowledgments

  I have many people to thank, but three deserve special mention: my friend Susan Lehman, my agent Scott Moyers, and my husband, Eddie Sutton. Susan helped me come up with the idea for the book and gave advice and assistance all the way through. Scott wrote me a fan letter after reading my work to say I had a book in me, and then he made it happen. He guided and encouraged me, and introduced me to one of the truly great editors. Eddie offered unstinting love, childcare, and ice cream.

  I am extraordinarily lucky to work at the New York Times, where the reporters and editors inspire and amaze me every day with their dedication and talent. Particular thanks to Jon Landman, Chip McGrath, Scott Heller, Bill Carter, the brilliant lunch table, and the colleagues whose work is frequently cited in these pages. I am forever indebted to Jeff Roth. If it weren’t for him, there would be no pictures in this book. Mary Hardiman has frequently lent me her creative gifts. Thanks to Fred Conrad. I am very grateful to friends who offered to read drafts and engage in lengthy discussions, including Jennifer Gordon, Phoebe Hoban, Christina Malle, Michael Massing, Celia McGee, Esther Perel, Tina Rosenberg, David Serlin, Dinitia Smith, and Chuck Sabel, who also doubled as a dedicated researcher.

  I am indebted to the people who took time from their own work to help me do mine, particularly Bert Brim, Margie Lachman, Richard Davidson, Nikki Rute, Susan Jensen, Abbe Raven, David Poltrack, and Richie Jackson. I received research help early on from the smart and enthusiastic Natasha Degen.

  I have benefited from the intelligence and hard work of many other scholars and authors who have written about aging, culture, and related subjects, including Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Howard Chudacoff, Thomas Cole, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Robert Kanigel, David and Sheila Rothman, Sander Gilman, Roland Marchand, Warren Susman, Glen Elder, and Anne Hollander.

  Nan Graham was a demanding and wise editor, and this is a better book because of her. I am grateful to many people at Scribner who worked on my manuscript, including Daniel Burgess, Paul Whitlatch, Katie Hanson, Katie Monaghan, Katie Rizzo, Susan Moldow, Rex Bonomelli, Roz Lippel, and Kara Watson. Mindy Werner helped me work through difficult organizational problems. Andrew Wylie and his wonderful staff thankfully picked up where Scott left off.

  The MacDowell Colony was a heaven-sent haven where I got an enormous amount of work done in a very short time. I also love the New York Public Library.

  I am fortunate to have a surrogate family, a dear circle of close friends who were understanding when I dropped out of sight for months, and who offer love and support whether or not I am writing a book. I also want to thank my son, Alex, for putting up with my long evenings and weekends at the computer and my absence from so many of his soccer games.

  Most of all, I owe an immeasurable debt to my mother and my late father, who always showered me with love and believed I could do anything.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: The Prime Meridian

  4 “The hero of our 20th century”: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. by Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 30.

  4 Yet if this is the best possible moment: For example, Daphne Merkin, “Reinventing Middle Age,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007; William Safire, “The Way We Live Now: Halfway Humanity,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007; Winifred Gallagher, “Midlife Myths,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1993, 51.

  6 But only in the last 150 years: Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), x, 10–11.

  6 Middle age is a “cultural fiction”: Bradd Shore, “Status Reversed,” in Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions), Richard Shweder, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiv–xv, 109.

  7 Despite a freighter’s worth of books: Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of the few scholars who have written about the history of middle age.

  8 The task of improving our midlife: Alfred Kazin, “The Freudian Revolution Analyzed,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1956.

  8 Forty has long been: Robert Kastenbaum, ed. Encyclopedia of Adult Development (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1993), 32–34; Stanley Brandes, Forty: The Age and the Symbol (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

  9 Extensive surveys reveal that the: Subjective Aging, MIDUS newsletter, http://www.midus.wisc.edu/newsletter/ (accessed June 11, 2011).

  9 In 2009, Pew asked: Pew Research Center staff, Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality, Pew Research Center (June 2009), http://pew socialtrends.org/2009/06/29/growing-old-in-america-expectations-vs-reality/ (accessed June 30, 2009).

  9 The mammoth ongoing study: Midlife in the United States was originally funded by the MacArthur Foundation and called the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Midlife Development. When the federal government took it over in 2002, the name changed.

  9 We are like the tourists: ID: 122649, published in New Yorker, July 10, 2006.

  9 As Bernice Neugarten, a pioneer: Bernice Neugarten, “The Awareness of Middle Age,” in Middle Age and Aging: A Reader in Social Psychology, Bernice Neugarten, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 97.

  11 It is a “missing category”: Katherine S. Newman, “Place and Race: Midlife Experience in Harlem,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 283; Katherine S. Newman, A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City (New York: New Press, 2003).

  12 Middle age was an unavoidable: Gail Sheehy, Passages (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 17.

  12 As researchers attempted to redefine: Margie Lachman, “Development in Midlife,” Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 305–31.

  Chapter 2: Now and Then

  15 “Surprisingly little attention has been”: Orville Gilbert Brim, Carol D. Ryff, and Ronald C. Kessler, How Healthy Are We? A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.

  19 “People in midlife raise”: MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Midlife Development, ICPSR Bulletin XX, no. 4 (Summer 2000).

  20 As Brim declared: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 1–2; Orville Gilbert Brim interview with author, June 8, 2008.

  21 “Considering the major studies”: Laurel Lippert, “Women at Midlife: Implications for Theories of Women’s Adult Development,” Journal of Counseling & Development 76, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 16–22.

  21 MacArthur recruited nearly 7,200 men: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 2–22.

  21 Middle age begins: Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Midlife Discourses,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 17.

  22 “Sometimes things that really”: Shirley S.
Wang, “Is Happiness Overrated?,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2011.

  22 Are you sad, nervous, restless: MIDUS website, http://www.midus.wisc.edu/midus1/ (accessed June 11, 2011).

  23 In the early 1990s: Deborah Carr interview with author, 2008.

  23 All in all, respondents answered: MIDMAC website, http://midmac.med.harvard.edu/ (accessed June 12, 2011).

  23 The National Institutes of Health: MIDUS website, http://www.midus.wisc.edu/midus2/ (accessed June 14, 2011); Brim interview with author, 2008.

  24 Midlife was a “watershed period”: Alice S. Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” in Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 556.

  24 Freud rejected patients: Eda Goldstein, When the Bubble Bursts: Clinical Perspectives on Midlife Issues (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2005), 10.

  25 When researchers asked people: David Almeida and Melanie C. Horn, “Is Daily Life More Stressful During Middle Adulthood?,” in Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 445.

  25 “From many points of view”: Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” 581.

  25 In 2010, Carol Ryff and her colleagues: J. A. Morozink et al., “Socioeconomic and Psychosocial Predictors of Interleukin-6 in the MIDUS National Sample,” Health Psychology 29, no. 6 (November 2010): 626–35.

  26 you can travel to: Another version of the series (1842) is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

  26 The young have “vigor and firmness”: Andrew W. Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 9.

  26 “It appears, in fact, that”: John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 117.

  26 Popular illustrations sold: Cole, Journey of Life, xxix.

  27 In the seventeenth and eighteenth: David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 86–87.

  27 As the historian Howard Chudacoff: Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 107.

  27 The word “midlife” first appeared: Lachman, “Development in Midlife.”

  27 References to the various: Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 20–32.

  28 Prior to 1850, age was rarely used to measure status: Demos, Past, Present, and Personal, 98, 127; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  28 Thomas Cole’s eulogist: William Cullen Bryant, On the Life of Thomas Cole, a funeral oration delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848, http://www.catskillarchive.com/cole/wcb.htm (accessed June 11, 2011).

  28 The term “happy birthday”: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/, author search.

  28 The practice of sending cards: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 133.

  28 Mothers gave birth: Fischer, Growing Old in America; Carole Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  28 A prolapsed uterus was: Mabel Collins Donnelly, The American Victorian Woman: The Myth and the Reality (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968).

  29 And the soulful encounter: Fischer, Growing Old in America, 53–56; Demos, Past, Present, and Personal.

  29 Adults worked nearly eighty hours: Robert Fogel et al., The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  29 Sunday church services: W. B. Irwin, monograph, George Irwin and His Family (1794–1846), New York Public Library.

  29 Women outside cities: Christiane Fischer, Let Them Speak for Themselves, Women in the American West 1849–1900 (New York: Archon Books, 1977).

  30 Today, a 50-something reader: Christopher Buckley, Boomsday: A Novel (New York: Twelve, 2007).

  31 “Just as they neared the”: Fischer, Let Them Speak for Themselves, 85–86.

  Chapter 3: The Tick of the Time Clock

  32 “Taylor seems to have”: Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 12.

  32 At a memorial at the National: Bryant, On the Life of Thomas Cole.

  33 “Thirty is the age of the gods”: Cincinnati, Methodist Episcopal Church, The Ladies’ Repository: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion 1, no. 3 (March 1868), 172–75, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/acg2248.3-01.003 (accessed June 12, 2011); “Holidays for Middle-Age,” Scribner’s Monthly 9, no. 2 (December 1874); “Middle Age,” Harper’s Bazar, October 26, 1889.

  33 In 1881, the New York Times declared: “In the Middle Age,” New York Times, November 6, 1881.

  34 the introduction of new novelistic: James Wood, The Art of Fiction (New York: Picador, 2009), 87: “One of the obvious reasons for the rise of this kind of significantly insignificant detail is that it is needed to evoke the passage of time, and fiction has a new and unique project in literature—the management of temporality.”

  34 In 1878, the year Bryant died: Kanigel, One Best Way.

  35 Whether or not Taylor: Jill Lepore, “Not So Fast,” New Yorker, October 12, 2009.

  35 In 1913, Ford’s workers: Harold Evans, The American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 113.

  35 One management scholar judged: Kanigel, One Best Way, 18.

  35 Clocks began adorning walls in the 1830s: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 49–50.

  36 Laying out his ideas: Kanigel, One Best Way, 123, 439.

  37 He was born in 1856: Ibid., 44, 49–51, 104–5; Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).

  37 There he witnessed: Kanigel, One Best Way, 215.

  38 Complaints of bad eyesight: Ibid., 13, 123; Kakar, Frederick Taylor.

  38 Robert Kanigel, Taylor’s biographer, compares: Kanigel, One Best Way, 13.

  38 Even modernist artists were: Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

  38 Growing government bureaucracies: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 65.

  39 Women’s clubs became: Ibid., 105–7.

  39 In 1900, the Swedish writer: Watson, Modern Mind, 77; Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909).

  39 Arguing the aged should: Louis Bishop, “The Relation of Old Age to Disease with Illustrative Cases,” American Journal of Nursing (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1904), 679.

  40 Five years later: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 53, 114; A. M. Clarfield, “Dr. Ignatz Nascher and the Birth of Geriatrics,” CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal 143, no. 9 (November 1, 1990): 944–48.

  40 Hall defined the stage: G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904); Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 67; Cole, Journey of Life, 195.

  40 A look at early life expectancy charts can: Fischer, Growing Old in America, 107; Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five; “Table 12: Estimated Life Expectancy at Birth in Years, by Race and Sex: Death-Registration States, 1900–1928, and United States, 1929–2004—Con.,” National Vital Statistics Reports 56, no. 9 (December 28, 2007): 35.

  41 With fewer babies and more time and money: Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 40.

  41 who counseled families on the logistics of: Ibid., 53–54.

  41 The invention of vulcanized: H. Youssef, “The History of the Condom,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 84, no. 4 (April 1993): 226–28, PMCID: PMC1293956.

  41 By 1900, the typical mother: Fischer, Growing Old in America, 144–45.

  42 As historians note, societies are governed by: Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 27.

  42 The number o
f urban residents: U.S. Census, http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt (accessed June 11, 2011).

  42 Divisions were not as: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?; Fischer, Growing Old in America.

  42 Age consciousness was most: Watson, Modern Mind, 50.

  42 Dire economic conditions: Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1997), 166.

  42 In 1900, fewer than a fifth: Claude Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 48.

  43 The cable lines and periodicals: Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989); Evans, American Century, xx; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), 479, 491.

  43 Residents from coast to coast: Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 349–50; Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003).

  43 By the end of the century: “Old Ladies’ Fashions,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1895, 22.

  43 Mrs. Wilson Woodrow: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, “The Woman of Fifty,” Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine, March 1903, 344, 5, APS Online, 505–12; Harper’s Bazar, October 26, 1889.

  43 “The New Styles That”: “The New Styles That Are Designed for the Young, Old and Middle Aged Men,” San Francisco Call, June 5, 1904.

  44 James Foster Scott, a: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 54.

  44 According to John Henry Kellogg: Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 278.

  44 “The haste and impetuosity”: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 59.