Authors: Patricia Cohen
An engraving of Beard made at his 1862 graduation from Yale shows a handsome face with thin hair combed flat to cover a receding hairline, neatly trimmed muttonchops, and soulful eyes. He served as a medical aide during the Civil War and then attended medical school at Columbia. Mostly forgotten today, he acquired worldwide fame in his day for popularizing the term “neurasthenia” to refer to the nervous disorders, generally a mix of fatigue and depression, that afflicted “nearly every brain-working household” in the country's industrial centers. (
The revered Harvard psychologist
William James dubbed neurasthenia “acute Americanitis.”)
Beard believed nervous breakdowns
resulted from a dwindling of the electrical energy or “nervous force” that carried messages from the brain to the body. His favored treatment was electrotherapy, which he offered
soon after he got his medical degree in 1866. A cathode attached to a large generator was placed under the patient's feet or rear while the doctor held a damp sponge in his hand to conduct the electrical current. A flip of the generator switch and a jolt of electricity was applied to the suffering organ: the chest for a weak heart, the womb for menopausal pain, the penis for impotence. Beard's vocal and enthusiastic endorsement of electrotherapy prompted one doctor to label him “the P. T. Barnum of medicine.”
Middle-class Victorian women were
known to suffer from nervous hysteria well before Beard came onto the scene. Their supposedly delicate constitutions were easily overstimulated by urban hustle and bustle, which led to anxiety, sleeplessness, erotic fantasies, nausea, headaches, and fainting spells. Appearing on the witness stand at the 1883 murder trial of a woman in New York, various experts testified to the plague of hysteria among women. “Women educated in convents and brought up where they do not come in contact with the world are especially subject to hysterical manifestations,” noted the state's consulting medical examiner at asylums. Alice James, William and Henry's sister, suffered through such frequent bouts that she spent much of her time in bed and wrote often and longingly of her desire for death. Beard indicted “the mental activity of women” as a cause of neurasthenia, but he argued men were newly vulnerable because of the modern ills of “steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph,” as well as rigid schedules, required punctuality, and omnipresent clocks. Neurasthenia was the male version of hysteria.
In 1881, just as Taylor was inaugurating his time-and-motion studies at Midvale, Beard published
American Nervousness,
a mix of clinical observation and philosophy intended for a popular audience. Included in the book is his study on the link between productivity and age. Whereas Taylor measured output in minutes and seconds, Beard used years.
The longevity study was part of Beard's attempt to rebut the popular notion that indoor intellectual activity was damaging to one's physical health.
He investigated how long
brain-workers lived, as well as when they produced their most significant accomplishments, compiling lists of “the greatest men in history”âByron, Shakespeare, Mozart, Napoleon, Michelangelo, Christopher Wrenâto “determine at what time of life men do their best work.”
His conclusion was that “seventy percent of the work of the world is done before 45 and eighty percent before 50. . . . The best period of fifteen years is between 30 and 45.” Creative work has an even earlier expiration date, with the best accomplished between 25 and 40. To illustrate the results, Beard drew a graph titled “The Relation of Age to Original Work,” which showed a steep, Everest-like ascent to age 40, followed by an unbroken downward slope till death. In this off-center bell curve, the second half of life was an uninterrupted slide from the apex. Beard considered his findings to be evidence of a “law.” “The year of maximum productiveness is thirty-nine,” he declared. As if celebrating an anniversary, Beard assigned a material to each decade of life. The golden age was between 30 and 40; silver was between 40 and 50; iron between 50 and 60, and tin between 60 and 70. The years between 20 and 30 were the brazen or brass decade.
Beard was preoccupied with quality, not quantity. Men may do more work after age 40, but their most original and creative work was already behind them. “In loneliness, in poverty often as well as under discouragement, and in neglected or despised youth has been achieved all that has advanced, and all that is likely to advance mankind.” Beard dismissed the notion that the elderly had any special wisdom: “When an old man utters great thoughts, it is not age, but youth that speaks through the lips of old age.”
Beard's theory was proved correct at least as far as his own life was concerned. He caught pneumonia and died in 1883 at the age of 44.
This idea of a limited number of constructive
years was satirized by Anthony Trollope in his 1882 novel
The Fixed Period,
in which the young founders of the island nation Britannula mandate that before turning 68, a man will happily agree to be euthanized to avoid the decrepitude and expense of old age. The problem arises only when one of the original supporters finally turns 67 and realizes he is not quite ready to accept the “honor” of being chloroformed after all.
Trollope's fixed period intrigued Sir William Osler, the most influential and revered physician of his era.
After deciding to leave the
medical faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1905 at the age of 56, Osler gave a speech declaring: “In the science and art of medicine there has not been
an advance of the first rank which has not been started by young or comparatively young men. . . . [The] effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of 25 and 40 yearsâthese fifteen golden years of plenty.” In comparison, “men above 40 years of age” are useless. As for those over 60, there would be an “incalculable benefit” in “commercial, political and professional life, if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” Leave and make room for younger men, he advised.
Reports of Osler's joking references
to a Trollope-style solution sparked outraged editorials and letters. Newspapers responded with tales of the vigor and productiveness of older people. In published replies, the doctor took pains to emphasize that his comments regarding euthanasia were facetious, but he remained steadfast in the belief that “the real work of life is done before the fortieth year.”
On the issue of aging, the scientist's view meshed with that of the businessman. Since older people were seen as having less energy and capacity, they had to be moved along to make way for the younger and more fit, just as Darwin's evolutionary theories, first published in 1859, suggested happened naturally.
Census reports before 1900 reveal that a growing number of people started to hide their entry into middle age.
In eighteenth-century America
, the added value of maturity and experience frequently caused young men and women to pretend they were older. People tended to round
up
their age to the nearest five or ten years. By 1880, however, Americans were rounding
down
. More and more, people were reluctant to admit they had turned 40, 50, or 60 and repeatedly told census takers, who grouped individuals according to decade, that they were 39, 49, or 59.
In reality, the view of midlife generally depended on one's class, ethnicity, and sex. Laborers most frequently tried to mask their true age in order to keep a job or get a new one.
A 1904 article in the
New York Times
entitled “Youth Crowding Out Even Middle Age” noted that the “best customers for hair dyes are sometimes the working men,” especially in the machinery and building trades, “where there is constant muscular exercise and where men age quickly.” Henry C. Hunter, secretary of the New York Metal Trades Association, said, “When mechanics become middleaged,
they have to take less remunerative positions.” Boilermakers, deaf after a few years from the noise, were let go because they were unable to hear directions as well. “There is no disguising the fact that a man of 40 is not worth as much as a man between 20 and 30,” an official from the bricklayers union lamented.
The burdens of manual labor and poverty were what prematurely aged men and women. As the
Times
noted in its story: “There are plenty of gray-haired railroad Presidents and gray-haired men in other high positions, where years of experience are looked upon as a valuable adjunct to brains, but gray hair is a fatal obstacle to a mechanic in search of employment.” Men like Osler may have talked about the need for an influx of younger “brain-workers,” but few of them were actually pushed out. Men solidly in middle age dominated office suites and the professions, gaining respect with the years. Osler, after resigning from Johns Hopkins, accepted the Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford University, considered the most prestigious appointment in his field, a post he kept until his death in 1919 at age 70.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who disdained contemporaries
who failed to produce a major work by 40, served on the Supreme Court for thirty years before finally retiring in 1932 at age 90.
Magazines and newspapers with large numbers of middle-class subscribers like
Ladies' Home Journal,
the
Saturday Evening Post,
The Cosmopolitan,
and
American
reaffirmed that power accrued to those in their middle years.
In a revealing study of
fiction in 1890s periodicals, the sociologist Martin U. Martel concluded: “For both men and women, the middle-age period is the time of greatest independence, respect, esteem, prestige and social involvement . . . a time of active involvement in the affairs of the young.” Out-of-touch parents and mocking teenagers were absent. “Middle-age is a central phase of life.”
Newspapers reflected similarly positive attitudes.
In 1905, the same year Osler
gave his speech, the
Gainesville Daily Sun
declared that middle age “would seem actually to have stepped backward and marched alongside of youth. There is a jauntiness, a buoyancy, an elasticity, about the middle age of today at which our fathers would have shaken their heads as unseemly.”
The invention of middle age turned out to have a wonderfully liberating effect on privileged and professional women, initially filling their middle years with unaccustomed promise.
Women had started to carve out a more distinct identity in the public sphere after the Civil War.
Those who became active
as the fighting ragedâraising money, nursing soldiers, and wrapping bandagesâlater channeled their efforts into urban reform. They were generally not radicals or social activists but, rather, traditionalists who saw womanly virtue as a counterweight to the corrupt and selfish world of men. These midlife matrons discovered that their new social roles brought them unexpected personal fulfillment. They formed temperance societies, settlement houses, and cultural clubs, reformed fallen women and young urban gang members, and worked to assimilate the swarms of strange (and, in their eyes, somewhat distasteful) immigrants.
A number of these reformers
became professional teachers, educators, nurses, social workers, journalists, and community and labor organizers. As the middle class was expanding, the availability of factory-made goods eliminated the endless cycle of sewing, planting, washing, canning, and soap-, candle-, and butter-making. Untethered to the house, the demands of subsistence living, and unending childcare, more and more women discovered a new phenomenon: free time. They busied themselves with good works and demonstrated their productivity in a different venue. “
The needs of the world
are endless and the middle-aged woman has usually more leisure to devote to them than has a woman of a younger period,” an 1889 column on middle age in
Harper's Bazar
declared. “Who shall placate the querulous inmates of that somewhat forlorn hostelry the Old Ladies' Home. . . . Who shall so compassionately guide the orphan and look after neglected childhood and carry on the manifold work of churches and clubs as the woman not yet elderly, but still not young.” The female activists and innovators that we remember today, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Jane Addams, and M. Carey Thomas, hit their prime in their 40s or 50s. Indeed, middle-aged women remained the mainstay of reform efforts and clubs like the League of Women Voters well into the 1960s.
Whether they worked in a factory or an office
, some women brought home money and a dollop of economic power, possibly for the first time, in their middle years. (
In 1900, about a fifth
of the female population worked, accounting for eighteen percent of the labor force; about half of those worked as maids or servants.)
As the writer Gertrude Atherton
reminded readers in an 1891 newspaper article: “Money is a controlling force in married life. . . . When a woman finds that she too can make it, her self-respect becomes colossal and quite swamps the little she has left for man.” Magazines recounted stories of middle-aged mothers pursuing lifelong dreams.
A 45-year-old who
had always wanted to be a physician was finally going to medical school. Another went into business despite the protestations of her family and friends.
Martin Martel, the sociologist
who analyzed 1890 magazine fiction, noted, “The standing of the middle-aged woman in many ways is higher than that of the man.” She is expected to be “a reservoir of emotional strength and fortitude . . . the possessor of a complex body of knowledge and skills brought to fruition over many years of experience.”
Between 1890 and 1920
, the years encapsulating the Progressive Era, a feminist wave helped promote what was popularly referred to at the time as a “Renaissance of the Middle Aged.”
Those thirty years
“seemed to be the Eldorado for the middle-aged woman, both in social and business life,” a letter writer to the
New York Times
noted. “For her mere sex, she was shown just as much consideration as the young girl, no work was refused to her on account of her years, nor did her sex or age bar her from taking an active interest in politics, science, social work, and business long before women obtained the right to vote.”