86 “Two out of three parlors”: Lewis, Babbitt, chapter 7, section 1, paragraph 5.
86 In 1900, approximately: Ellen Mazur Thomson, The Origins of Graphic Design in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 27.
86 Purchasing a car that was: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 158–59.
87 “The American citizen’s first”: Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 87.
87 Throughout the twenties: Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 20.
87 When American Telephone and Telegraph: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 117–18, 156–58.
87 Jesus “picked up twelve men from the bottom”: Fried, The Man Everybody Knew, 4, 66; Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: The Discovery of the Real Jesus (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2000), 37–40.
88 In “Creed of the Advertising Man”: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 8–9, 128.
88 Calvin Coolidge offered: Susman, Culture as History, xxvi; Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 158–59.
88 “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with”: Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, chapter 1, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm (accessed June 16, 2011).
89 After World War II, mass: Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
89 President George W. Bush, in: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911addresstothenation.htm (accessed June 11, 2011).
89 A month later, New York mayor: Guy Trebay, “For a Shopping Spree, the Closet’s the Place,” New York Times, November 20, 2001.
89 Then as now, young people: Susman, Culture as History, 39.
89 Helen Woodward, a consumer: Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 147.
90 In 1928, Paul Nystrom, a marketing: Stanley C. Hollander, Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It? Youth-Based Segmentation in Marketing (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1992), 24.
90 Roland Marchand summed up the: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 191.
90 William Esty, an account representative: Ibid., 13; Susman, Culture as History; Lears, Fables of Abundance.
90 The Laundry Owners Association inflamed: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 194.
91 A 1920s ad for Gillette blue blades: Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream, 216, 354.
91 Alfred Adler’s term even: Susman, Culture as History, 200.
91 In the teens and twenties, she: Hollander, Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It?, 73.
91 An internal newsletter circulated in 1924: Ad*Access, Duke University Libraries, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/ (accessed on June 12, 2011).
91 Pollsters soon joined the cadres: Susman, Culture as History, 212–13.
91 Replacing God and Nature, the: Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 124, 287–88.
92 Nicky and his fiancée, Bunty: Savage, Teenage, 234.
92 By consistently using the body: Hall, Senescence, viii.
92 “In Europe, a woman at forty”: Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth.
92 In 1932, a letter writer to: Edward C. Rybicki, “Letters to the Editor: Problems of Middle Age,” New York Times, November 21, 1932.
93 “How little even our brightest”: Walter B. Pitkin, Life Begins at Forty (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1934), 20.
93 In 1939, the Social Science Research: “Jobs Few in Middle Age,” New York Times, January 16, 1939.
93 Four months after the report appeared: Felix Belair Jr., “Roosevelt Scores Ban on Middle Age,” New York Times, April 28, 1939.
94 “It is glorious to be middle-aged”: “Sees Glory in Middle Age,” New York Times, December 11, 1939.
94 Fears of middle-aged superfluity: Conard Miller Gilbert, We Over Forty: America’s Human Scrap Pile (Philadelphia: Westbrook Publishing Co., 1948), 12–13; Brandes, Forty, 44.
94 After carefully analyzing the differing narratives: Martel, “Age-Sex Roles in Magazine Fiction,” in Middle Age and Aging, Neugarten, ed., 55–56.
Chapter 7: The Sixties and Seventies: The Era of Middle Age
99 “We cannot live the afternoon”: Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003).
100 “Middle age is certainly the”: Thomas C. Desmond, “America’s Unknown Middle-Agers,” New York Times, July 29, 1956.
100 As for psychologists, when it: Richard M. Lerner, Concepts and Theories of Human Development (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002), 71.
100 Freud thought middle-aged patients: Eda G. Goldstein, When the Bubble Bursts: Clinical Perspectives on Midlife Issues (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2005), 10.
100 In his eighth decade G. Stanley Hall: Hall, Senescence, 100.
101 In 1913, his bitter falling-out: Bair, Jung, 242, 254, 288–89.
101 The more mature man has had: Ibid., 394; C. G. Jung, The Essential Jung, revised ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 24.
101 Bernice L. Neugarten, a groundbreaking: Dail Ann Neugarten, ed., The Meanings of Age: Selected Papers of Bernice L. Neugarten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5–9.
102 “No one earlier had seemed”: “Growing as Long as We Live: An Interview with Bernice L. Neugarten,” Second Opinion, November 1, 1990.
102 He arrived in the United States: Lawrence Jacob Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999), 19–20, 104, 147.
102 Shocked and bewildered, Erikson immediately: Ibid., 163.
103 Both Friedman and Erikson’s daughter: Sue Erikson Bloland, In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Viking, 2005); Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 218–19.
103 “My life cycle theory”: Daniel Goleman, “Erikson, in His Own Old Age, Expands His View of Life,” New York Times, June 14, 1988.
103 Like her husband, Joan was skeptical: Erik H. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed: Extended Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 1–3.
104 As he summarized in a lecture: Erik H. Erikson, ed., Adulthood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 124. It was the Jefferson Lectures, 1973.
105 In the Eriksons’ typology, called: Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
105 Nearly a century earlier, John: John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVisions Publications, 2007), 73.
105 “Human personality in principle”: Erikson, Childhood and Society.
106 It spurred psychologists to revise: Neugarten, “The Awareness of Middle Age,” in Middle Age and Aging, Neugarten, ed., vii.
106 “Eriksonian became almost a”: Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 241.
106 His daughter, Sue, remembers eating: Bloland, In the Shadow of Fame, 2.
107 Born in 1916 in the small town: Neugarten, Meanings of Age.
108 “Many people talk about”: “Growing as Long as We Live,” Second Opinion.
109 Listing White House occupants: “Demography: The Command Generation,” Time, July 29, 1966.
109 In 1967, Neugarten wrote up her findings from: Neugarten and Moore, “The Changing Age-Status System,” in Middle Age and Aging, Neugarten, ed., 11.
109 “Most of the women interviewed”: Neugarten, “The Awareness of Middle Age,” in Middle Age and Aging, Neugarten, ed., 96.
110 In a 1982 study: Miriam Bernard, Judith Phillips, Linda Machin, and Val Harding Davies, eds., Women Ageing: Changing Identities, Challenging Myths (New York: Routledge, 2000).
110 Aging is both a biological and a: Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, first American edition 1972, French edition 1970 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 9, 13.
111 As one woman wrote in a 1973 colum
n: Cynthia Bell, “Why Middle Age Isn’t the End,” New York Times, July 29, 1973.
111 He assembled a supposedly random sample: Elliott Jaques, “Death and the Midlife Crisis,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 46 (1965): 502–14.
112 G. Stanley Hall, too, had presented: Hall, Senescence, 21.
113 “Ordinarily we cling to our past”: Azoulay, ed., 100,000 Years of Beauty. Jung and Huxley’s Brave New World were juxtaposed in Azoulay.
113 Jung’s description of this perverse: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage Books, 1994).
114 Poorly adjusted individuals, he maintained: Jaques, “Death and the Midlife Crisis.”
114 Freud had a particularly: Banner, In Full Flower, 297.
114 Psychoanalytic interpretations assumed fertility: Margaret Lock, “Deconstructing the Change,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 50.
115 a term, he later said: Leslie Bennetts, “Now It’s Daniel Levinson’s Turn,” New York Times, April 2, 1978.
115 Transition points are critical in determining: Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 272.
116 Sheehy adopted Erikson’s central: Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: Ballantine Books/E. P. Dutton, 1976).
116 She labeled the years between 35 and 45: Ibid., 242–43.
116 “Changing one’s personality”: Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, August 23, 1976.
116 In 1973, an article about popular psychologist: Nadine Brozan, New York Times, March 29, 1973.
117 “It was a very exciting time”: George Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977)
117 The very existence of these novel: Neugarten, ed., Middle Age and Aging, vii.
118 Vaillant declared that the Boston: Vaillant, Adaptation to Life, 80.
118 “Our self-assurance, our tendency”: Ibid., 284–85.
118 “If such events occur during the dangerous”: Ibid., 223.
119 Looking back, Vaillant’s Harvard: Ibid., 226.
119 “Lives are lived in specific historical times and places”: Glen H. Elder Jr., The Life Course in Time and Place, presented at the International Symposium on Institutions, Interrelations, Sequences: The Bremen Life-Course Approach, Bremen, Germany, September 26–28, 2001, http://www.unc.edu/~elder/presentations/Life_course_in_time.html (accessed June 11, 2011).
119 The Oakland children who were young teenagers: Glen H. Elder Jr., The Life Course and Aging: Some Accomplishments, Unfinished Tasks, and New Directions, Prepared for Distinguished Scholar Lecture Section on Aging, ASA, August 10, 1999, http://www.unc.edu/~elder/pdf/asa-99talk.pdf (accessed June 11, 2011).
120 Elder realized some of these problems as early as: Ibid.
121 “If historical times and places change”: Elder, Life Course in Time and Place, 2001.
121 In 1974, the same year that Children of the Great Depression: B. L. Neugarten, “Age Groups in American Society and the Rise of the Young-Old,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 415, no. 1 (January 1974): 187–98.
121 “The psychological themes and preoccupations”: Neugarten, Meanings of Age, 369–70; Orville Gilbert Brim Jr., Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 91.
Chapter 8: Middle Age Under the Microscope
123 “Stage theories are a little like horoscopes”: Anne Rosenfeld, Elizabeth Stark, and Richard Cohen, “The Prime of Our Lives,” Psychology Today 21 (May 1987): 62 (9).
124 Seated at his dining room table: Brim interview with author, 2008.
125 Over a lifetime, shifts: Glen H. Elder Jr., The Life Course and Aging: Some Accomplishments, Unfinished Tasks, and New Directions, presented at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Boston, Massachusetts, November 11, 2002.
125 In 1998, the psychologist Anne Colby: Ibid.
125 Brim remembered the reaction to: Orville G. Brim and Jerome Kagan, Constancy and Change in Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1.
125 When Brim and Kagan presented their: Brim interview with author, 2008.
126 Nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century: Lerner, Concepts and Theories of Human Development, 71.
126 finite supply of the vital “male principle”: Rothman and Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, 132–33.
126 or that a human being was physiologically: Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2010), 496.
126 At a 1997 White House conference: Malcolm Gladwell, “Baby Steps,” New Yorker, January 10, 2000, http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_01_10_a_baby.htm (accessed June 12, 2011).
127 As the eighties progressed, middle age: “Life Course Perspectives: Report for 1983–1984,” Social Science Research Council, 82.
127 During those years, Brim and Baltes: Brim interview with author, June 14, 2011.
127 “It’s obvious,” Brim recalled: Brim interview with author, 2008; SRCD Oral History Interview of Orville Gilbert Brim, January 17, 2009, in Vero Beach, Florida, conducted by David L. Featherman, professor of sociology and psychology, University of Michigan, 51, 67.
128 They gathered a large random: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 7–8.
128 Political parties in the nineteenth century: U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare, Children’s Bureau, The Story of the White House Conferences on Children and Youth, 1967, 3–4.
128 By 1944, both political parties: Neugarten, “The Changing Age Status System,” in Middle Age and Aging, 19–20. In 1950, the name of the White House Conference expanded to include “Children and Youth.”
128 “That really did put middle”: Brim interview with author, June 2009.
128 “this enterprise established”: Featherman, SRCD Oral History Interview of Orville Gilbert Brim, 55–56.
129 “Midlife is more flexible than”: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?
129 middle age wasn’t so bad: Erica Goode, “New Study Finds Middle Age Is Prime of Life,” New York Times, February 16, 1999; Ronald Kotulak, “Study Finds Midlife ‘Best Time, Best Place to Be,’” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1999; “Midlife Without the Crisis,” Washington Post, February 16, 1999.
129 The research debunked a number of popular: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 161, 445, 603.
129 Divorce in midlife was relatively rare: Larry Bumpass interview with author, May 10, 2010.
130 Nearly sixty-two percent said: Alice S. Rossi, “Menopausal Transition” in Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 170.
130 So while middle-aged women might have: ICPSR Bulletin XX, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 4.
130 Although many people made it: Lachman, “Development in Midlife,” 325.
130 Less than ten percent of those: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 611.
131 Brim told me he believes that people: Brim interview with author; Brim, Ambition.
131 Alice S. Rossi, a sociologist and MacArthur investigator, suggested: Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” in Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 581; Alice S. Rossi, “Life-Span Theories and Women’s Lives,” Signs 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980), 4–32.
132 “Shortcomings that date from earlier years”: Hall, Senescence, ix.
132 So David Foster Wallace, a deeply insightful: D. T. Max, “The Unfinished,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009.
132 Lars von Trier: Dennis Lim, “Danish Director Barred from Film Festival After Making Hitler Jokes,” New York Times, May 19, 2011.
132 As David Almeida, a psychologist at: Sue Marquette Poremba, Probing Question: Is the Midlife Crisis a Myth?, Research Penn State, http://www.rps.psu.edu/probing/midlifecrisis.html (accessed June 11, 2011).
132 “One spends a lifetime reconstructing”: Brim, Ambition, 85.
133 “For investigators trying to sort”: Lachman, “Development in Midlife.”
133 When
it came to describing: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 617–35.
134 Educational divisions revealed other unexpected: Ibid., 306–15.
134 A similar class divide showed up: Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” in Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 364.
135 From their early 30s through: “Marital Status,” MIDUS newsletter, http://www.midus.wisc.edu/newsletter/ (accessed June 12, 2011).
136 The MacArthur project attempted to probe more deeply: Brim et al., How Healthy Are We?, 21, 374, 390, 418; MIDMAC website, http://midmac.med.harvard.edu/research.html (accessed June 12, 2011).
137 “When you get to be 40,” said Geoffrey Powers: Katherine Newman, A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City (New York: New Press, 2006), 99.
137 Katherine Newman, a sociologist at Princeton University, oversaw: Newman, Different Shade of Gray, 16–17, 51–52, 96, 114–15, 122, 221; Katherine Newman, “Place and Race,” in Welcome to Middle Age!, Shweder, ed., 283, 290.
Chapter 9: The Middle-Aged Brain
140 In 2004, ten years after Bert Brim’s: Midlife in the United States website, http://www.midus.wisc.edu/midus2/ (accessed June 12, 2011).
142 Despite claims that emerged in the 1990s: Richard Davidson interview with author, 2008 and 2009; Elkhonon Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older (New York: Gotham Books, 2005), 41–42.
143 “That’s been a spectacular strategy”: Davidson interview with author, 2008.
143 Davidson and his colleagues plan to follow: Davidson interview with author, 2008 and 2009.
144 He had kept this passion: Dirk Johnson, “Dalai Lama Donates to Center in Wisconsin,” New York Times, September 26, 2010; excerpts from Dr. Richard Davidson’s keynote address on contemplative neuroscience at the Center for Mindfulness 7th Annual International Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, in March 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAGu1LeE-SE (accessed June 12, 2011).
145 “This I (that is to say, my soul by which”: Nicholas Bunnin, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995), 509–21.
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