In Our Prime

by Patricia Cohen

  44 Failure to conform to these: http://ngram.googlelabs.com chart, author search; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 478–95.

  44 As assorted experts displaced religious authorities: Not that the two are necessarily contradictory.

  45 In the health field: John Harvey Kellogg, The Battle Creek Sanitarium System (Battle Creek, MI: Gage Printing Co., 1908), 1.

  45 Also in the domestic arena: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 161–62.

  45 The following year, Christine Frederick: Ibid., 163; Christine Frederick, “The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management,” Ladies’ Home Journal, September–December 1912, excerpted by the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC, 2005, http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/; http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/dtchrist.html (accessed June 12, 2011).

  45 In 1913, Life magazine: Kanigel, One Best Way, 514.

  46 After Principles appeared, Samuel Gompers: Ibid., 504.

  46 “Here’s the specifications”: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1444770 (accessed June 12, 2011).

  46 Pauline Manford, the wealthy modern: Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (New York: Scribner, 1997), 98.

  47 Christine Frederick explained the: Frederick, “The New Housekeeping.”

  47 John D. Rockefeller established: Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 207–8.

  47 If an inhabitant of 1890: Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 153–78; Norman F. Cantor, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997).

  Chapter 4: The Renaissance of the Middle-Aged

  49 In a 1701 sermon: Cotton Mather, A Father’s Resolutions, http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/mather/resolvd.htm (accessed June 10, 2011).

  50 On this spiritual journey: Wilbur Hervey, The Monitor, vol. 2 (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Co., 1824), 174.

  50 G. Stanley Hall claimed youth symbolized purity: Cole, Journey of Life, 214.

  51 “It is a tarnished, travestied youth that”: Randolph Silliman Bourne, Youth and Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 14.

  51 “Middle age has the prestige”: Ibid., 90.

  51 Resources and expertise: George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: E. B. Treat, 1880), 80.

  51 The revered Harvard psychologist: Michael Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently (New York: New Press, 2010), 276.

  51 Beard believed nervous breakdowns: Edward M. Brown, “An American Treatment for the ‘American Nervousness’: George Miller Beard and General Electrization,” presented to the American Association of the History of Medicine, Boston, 1980.

  52 Middle-class Victorian women were: Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 132–38; Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); “Hysteria or Insanity,” New York Times, October 13, 1883; Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), ix, 103–4, 301–2; Alice James, The Diary of Alice James (New York: Penguin, 1964), 206–7.

  52 He investigated how long: George Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1881), 193–230.

  53 This idea of a limited number of constructive: Anthony Trollope, The Fixed Period (London: Penguin 1882, 1993); Cole, Journey of Life.

  53 After deciding to leave the: Sir William Osler, Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine (London: H. K. Lewis, 1906), 391; Cole, Journey of Life; G. Stanley Hall, Senescence: The Last Half of Life (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1922), 4.

  54 Reports of Osler’s joking references: Jonathan B. Imber, “Twilight of the Prosthetic Gods: Medical Technology and Trust,” Hedgehog Review (Fall 2002).

  54 In eighteenth-century America: Fischer, Growing Old in America, 82–86.

  54 A 1904 article in the New York Times: “Youth Crowding Out Even Middle Age,” New York Times, October 10, 1904.

  55 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who disdained contemporaries: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 338.

  55 In a revealing study of: Martin U. Martel, “Age-Sex Roles in Magazine Fiction,” in Middle Age and Aging, Bernice Neugarten, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 56.

  55 In 1905, the same year Osler: “Middle Aged Folks,” Gainesville Daily Sun, May 3, 1905, 3.

  56 Those who became active: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 87, 173–75.

  56 A number of these reformers: Banner, In Full Flower, 332.

  56 “The needs of the world”: “Middle Age: When the Children Marry,” Harper’s Bazar, October 25, 1889.

  57 Whether they worked in a factory or an office: Neugarten, Middle Age and Aging, 11.

  57 In 1900, about a fifth: Fact Sheet 2006, Professional Women: Vital Statistics, AFL-CIO, Department for Professional Employees.

  57 As the writer Gertrude Atherton: Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (New York: Liveright Inc., 1932).

  57 A 45-year-old who: “Middle Age—Freedom of Movement,” Harper’s Bazar, August 8, 1899, 32, 37.

  57 Martin Martel, the sociologist: Martel, “Age-Sex Roles in Magazine Fiction,” 56.

  57 Between 1890 and 1920: Banner, In Full Flower, 276.

  57 Those thirty years: A.M.B., Letters to the Editor, “The Woman of Middle Age,” New York Times, October 11, 1922.

  58 In 1906, a British writer: Mary Mortimer-Maxwell, “An Englishwoman in New York: The Bachelor Girl,” New York Times, May 20, 1906.

  58 The Gainesville Daily Sun: “Middle Aged Folks,” Gainesville Daily Sun.

  58 Whether or not mammas were thrown: Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 176.

  58 “Today the most influential”: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, “Youth Crowding Out Even Middle Age,” Cosmopolitan, October 10, 1904.

  58 Edith Wharton, after suffering through a sexless: Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Live from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 77.

  58 She pronounced menopause: Banner, In Full Flower, 274.

  58 Successive generations of New: Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 34.

  Chapter 5: The Middle-Aged Body

  60 “The building up”: Bernarr Macfadden, Vitality Supreme, Project Gutenberg ebook, 12, http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1515612 (accessed June 11, 2011).

  61 Health reformers spoke: Cole, Journey of Life, 93–101.

  61 During one of Physical Culture’s: http://www.bernarrmacfadden.com/macfadden2.html (accessed June 14, 2011).

  61 success depended on “developing the”: Macfadden, Vitality Supreme, 14.

  61 Physical fitness could work: Mark Adams, Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 98–99.

  61 Even Randolph Bourne, whose body: Bourne, Youth and Life, 14.

  62 The use of the word “hygiene”: http://ngram.googlelabs.com, author search of “hygiene.”

  62 Science had transformed the body: Herbert Tucker, ed., A Companion to Literature & Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 105.

  62 John Henry Kellogg wrote: Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium System, 1.

  62 McFadden also ran a sanitarium: http://www.bernarrmacfadden.com/macfadden2.html (accessed June 14, 2011).

  62 A healthy body was seen as: Cole, Journey of Life, 173–74.

  62 Cesare Lombroso, the Italian doctor: Herman, Idea of Decline in Western Civilization, 109–30.

  63 Elie Metchnikoff, who won the Nobel Prize: Clarfield, “Dr. Ignatz Nascher and the Birth of Geriatrics.”

  63 The flush of spending and display:
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1953), 60.

  64 “All, with hardly an exception”: Hall, Sensescence, 101.

  64 America had turned into what the poet: Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Art-Of-The-Moving-Picture1.html, 37 (accessed June 12, 2011).

  64 D. W. Griffith invented the close-up: Gay, Modernism, 369.

  64 “Is Your Skin Younger or Older Than You Are?”: Ad*Access, Duke University Libraries, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/images/eaa/P/P01/P0160/P0160-lrg.jpeg (accessed June 10, 2011).

  65 Films reinforced expectations about: Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 344–47.

  65 Gibson Girl drawings, created: Ibid., 23.

  65 “When it came to age”: Ad*Access, Duke University Libraries, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/images/eaa/P/P01/P0160/P0160-lrg.jpeg (accessed June 10, 2011).

  65 On occasion, customers even: William Ewing, “The Shock of Photography,” in 100,000 Years of Beauty: Modernity/Globalisation, Elizabeth Azoulay, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 22–28.

  66 This heightened degree of: Kirk Curnutt, Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, http://www.scribd.com/doc/25371235/F-Scott-Fitzgerald, 31 (accessed June 10, 2011).

  66 As photographs and film images: Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes.

  66 At the turn of the century: “Forty and Still Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 14, 1886, 17; Banner, In Full Flower, 281.

  66 “Until this century, and until the movies”: Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 137; Fischer, Growing Old in America, 223.

  66 Mrs. Woodrow explained the: Wilson, “Youth Crowding Out Even Middle Age.”

  66 Harper’s Bazar noted in 1912: “Old Women’s Gowns,” Harper’s Bazar, April 1912, 46, 4, APS online, 192.

  67 By 1925, the 20-year-old: Hollander, Sex and Suits, 137–38.

  67 Abstract graphic design incorporating: Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes.

  67 For the first time, young: Ibid., 329–44.

  67 A 1927 ad for Ivory Soap: Ad*Access, Duke University Libraries, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess.BH0800/pg.1/ (accessed June 10, 2011).

  67 In Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep: Wharton, Twilight Sleep, 231.

  68 Thomas Edison was described: Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 193.

  68 Revolutionary-era physicians: Cole, Journey of Life, 101.

  68 “There seemed to be a more”: Hall, Senescence, xv.

  68 Fevered talk of “an elixir of youth”: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Broadway, 2011), 61.

  68 In 1918, Leo L. Stanley: Carole Haber, “Anti-Aging Medicine: The History,” Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 59 (2004): B515–B522.

  69 During a visit to the: “Voronoff Hooted by French Doctors,” New York Times, October 6, 1922, 21; Floyd Gibbons, “Monkey Gland Men on Exhibit,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1922.

  69 In October 1922, the French Academy: Floyd Gibbons, “Crowds Attend Voronoff Story of Renewed Men,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 6, 1922, 5.

  69 The French press threw: “Voronoff’s New Tests Gain Press Support,” New York Times, October 9, 1922, 4.

  69 Popular sentiment may have accounted: “Paris Doctors Life Ban on Voronoff,” New York Times, January 11, 1923, 44.

  70 “Dr. Voronoff’s triumph was”: Henry Wales, “Voronoff Wins Paris Cynics to Monkey Glands,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 13, 1923.

  70 By 1926, an article in the: Van Buren Thorne, “Voronoff’s Dramatic Experiments in Rejuvenation,” New York Times, May 30, 1926.

  70 Voronoff kept at it: “Famous Surgeon Arrives to See the World’s Fair,” New York Times, May 16, 1939, 11.

  70 World War I’s heedless: Pope Brock, Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (New York: Crown, 2008), 32; Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 150, mentions views of “seminal liquor.”

  70 In his 1920 tract, Life: Gay, Schnitzler’s Century, 38.

  70 Celebrated physicians with impressive: Brock, Charlatan, 20–21.

  71 Medical diploma mills and fraud: Ibid., 88.

  71 As David and Sheila Rothman: Sheila M. Rothman and David J. Rothman, The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 139.

  71 The book tells the story: Gertrude Atherton, Black Oxen (New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1923).

  71 Atherton—an arresting beauty with: Emily Wortis Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 14, 28, 43, 102, 298; Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist.

  72 Like Brown-Séquard before him: Rothman and Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, 138.

  72 In the 1950s, he counseled: Jan Morris, Conundrum (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006), 49.

  73 Some of Steinach’s critics: Hall, Senescence, 302.

  73 After examining a handful: “Gland Operation to Retard Senility,” New York Times, November 20, 1921.

  73 As soon as Atherton read it: Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, 14.

  73 “Poor Dr. Benjamin! I nearly ruined him”: Ibid., 560, 562.

  73 Here, two scientists discover: Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontier of Biomedicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 159–60.

  74 Steinach believed his treatments: Rothman and Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, 140.

  74 Hormone therapy could claim: Ibid.

  75 Reviewing the history of: Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 16–21.

  75 After Darwin, the nineteenth-century: David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12–13.

  75 Lombroso, who treated crime: Herman, Idea of Decline in Western Civilization; Bellesiles, 1877, 211–12.

  75 Later Alexis Carrel, who gained fame: Skloot, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

  75 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1846 story: Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 45–46.

  76 “Keep in mind the great”: Harvey Newcomb, How to Be a Lady: A Book for Girls, Containing Useful Hints on the Formation of Character (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1850), 15, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AJF2301.0001.001 (accessed June 16, 2011).

  76 William Mathews, an English professor: William Mathews, Getting On in the World: Or, Hints on Success in Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1878), 187.

  76 Orison Swett Marden, an unflagging: Orison Swett Marden, Character: The Grandest Thing in the World, http://orisonswettmarden.wwwhubs.com/ctgtitw.html (accessed June 10, 2011).

  76 Hundreds of self-help books: Susman, Culture as History, 275–76, 280.

  77 Later social scientists like Erving Goffman: Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959); David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 46–47; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  77 That is why in the early years of the twentieth century: Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 104.

  77 The first plastic surgery specifically: Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Rothman and Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, xi; Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 104.

  78 Jonathan Edwards, the New England: Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 11.

  78 What makes aesthetic surgery: Sander Gilman, “Operation Happiness,” in 100,000 Years of Beauty, Azoulay,
ed., 68.

  78 The analyst serves as the mostly silent: Peter Gay makes this observation about the analyst in Schnitzler’s Century, 277.

  79 In 1924, the New York Daily Mirror: Haiken, Venus Envy, 98.

  79 Many surgeons considered the: Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 295–319.

  Chapter 6: Middle Age Enters the Modern Age

  80 “The large national advertisers fix”: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: bartleby.com, 1997), chapter 7, section 3, paragraph 32.

  81 He poured his reflections: Hall, Senescence, vii; Cole, Journey of Life, 212–26.

  81 A few years later: Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 30–35.

  82 “Even in the professions such”: Ibid., 35–36.

  82 Periodicals more broadly echoed: Chudacoff, How Old Are You?

  82 It was widely believed, said Stanley Burnshaw: Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 46.

  82 Elmer Rice’s 1923 play: Gullette, “Midlife Discourses,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 23.

  83 In Senescence, Hall: Hall, Senescence, 2.

  83 This fever, which can strike: In Cole, Journey of Life, 220. Cole argues it is the first academic discussion of this phenomenon.

  83 In Hall’s view, passing as: Cole, Journey of Life, 217, 220.

  83 The venerable psychologist turned: Hall, Senescence, 29.

  84 Writing from the front: Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York: Viking, 2007), 199.

  84 “Young students try to”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 200.

  84 In 1924, the critic Edmund: A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

  84 Modernism reversed the baleful eighteenth century: Gay, Modernism, 2.

  85 Novelists of all stripes: Gullette, “Midlife Discourses,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 20.

  85 They “proudly proclaimed”: Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, xxi.

  85 Born in 1886, he grew up: Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005); Susman, History as Culture.