In Our Prime (11 page)

One reason was that suffragettes, split over tactics since 1869, reconciled in 1890 and created a formidable women's rights movement. Feminist successes expanded opportunities for middle-aged women at a time when their male counterparts saw their economic options shrink, a scenario that was replayed in the twentieth century. The frail Victorian girl, prone to bouts of fainting, became vigorous and authoritative in her middle years. The “New Woman,” a term that Henry James initially popularized, strode onto the urban scene in the 1880s and 1890s. This modern creature, a product of bourgeois affluence, was likely to attend
college, wanted to compete with men on equal terms, and was willing to postpone, or even forgo, marriage.
In 1906, a British writer
observed in the
New York Times
that “old maids” no longer existed: “The majority of New York's spinsters past 30 are bachelor women.” Newspapers outside large cosmopolitan areas also observed the phenomenon.
The
Gainesville Daily Sun
informed its readers in 1905 that “the lament of many a matchmaking mamma is that the most dreaded rivals of her darling are not to be found so much among the girls of her own age as among women who not many years ago would have been relegated to the ranks of hopeless old maidenhood. The fact is that the middle-aged lady of today is much younger in manner and tastes.”
Whether or not mammas were thrown
into a panic worthy of Jane Austen's Mrs. Bennett, among women who attended the newly endowed women's colleges and then pursued professional careers, the average age of marriage did rise.

In middle age, these women wielded social power as well. “
Today the most influential
factors in social life are the women of fifty and over,” Mrs. Wilson Woodrow informed
The Cosmopolitan
's readers. “The professional woman of 50” was “at the very zenith of her powers.” Vital middle-agers also proved the fallacy of so-called experts who warned women in midlife against sexual activity.
Edith Wharton, after suffering through a sexless
marriage for more than twenty-eight years, discovered the ecstasies of sex at 45 with her friend, the mustachioed cad Morton Fullerton. “I have drunk of the wine of life at last,” she wrote in her 1907 journal. “I have known the thing best worth knowing. I have been warmed through and through and will never grow cold again.”

Menopause, which was often considered the end of a woman's utility in men's eyes, was celebrated by Anna Garlin Spencer in
Women's Share in Social Culture
(1913).
She pronounced menopause
the beginning of a “second youth,” when “nature gives a fresh start and a fresh balance of power.”

Successive generations of New
Women helped feminism find a more stable foothold before they won the right to vote in 1920. In the years immediately before and after World War I, women managed to push their way into business, medicine, college classrooms, sports fields, and politics
in numbers that were not reached again until the second feminist wave in the 1970s.

In the midst of these exhilarating gains, other social, cultural, and political forces were conspiring to cast the middle years in an unflattering light. The brief renaissance of the middle-aged would soon draw to a close.

Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of
Physical Culture
magazine, in the 1920s

My skin's tattooed with hours and days and decades, head to foot.

—Mary Meriam, “The Romance of Middle Age”

The building up
of one's physical assets should be recognized as an imperative duty.

—Bernarr Macfadden,
Vitality Supreme
(1915)

George Beard and William Osler championed the mental vigor of younger men compared with those in middle age. Most scientists, health advocates, and members of the public in the second half of the nineteenth century were much more concerned with physical vitality. Their preoccupation was spurred by leaps in knowledge about how the body functioned. Science rather than religion had become the primary frame through which people interpreted their world. Attention shifted from the afterlife to this life, from spiritual transcendence to the material wonders of the here and now. Great minds were unlocking the mysteries of electricity, the evolution of species, the elements of the periodic table, and the movement of atoms. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch's formulation of the germ theory of disease in the 1880s cranked up an already vigorous fixation on hygiene.

Taking responsibility for the care of one's body substituted for the unchallenged control that God and king once exercised over their subjects.
Health reformers spoke
of “physical capital”—a finite store of vital energy—that had to be wisely cared for and invested. In 1899, the bodybuilder and publishing entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden put out the first issue of his magazine
Physical Culture,
the era's term for physical health and fitness. Macfadden (who reputedly changed his first name from Bernard to Bernarr because “it sounded like a lion's roar”) built a huge empire that included exercise equipment, sanitariums, restaurants, and several books and periodicals. In 1903, he founded the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, whose members became famous for taking a dip in the freezing Atlantic in wintertime.
During one of
Physical Culture
's
frequent contests, Macfadden discovered Charles Atlas, who later made a name for himself with a mail-order bodybuilding course that offered hope to ninety-seven-pound weaklings. Macfadden instructed his many followers that
success depended on “developing the
physical organism to the highest possible standard, and maintaining it there.”
Physical fitness could work
hand in hand with Taylorism. He was convinced that his regimen of exercise, hydrotherapy, and “scientific feeding,” a combination of diet and fasting, would enable American workers to become more efficient.
Even Randolph Bourne, whose body
was deformed by disease, glorified youth as much for its physical vigor as its untainted principle.
It was the “showery springtime of life,” Bourne wrote in
Youth and Life,
distinguished by a “great, rich rush and flood of energy.”

Physical culture was pursued with almost religious devotion. Worried that portrayals of Jesus Christ had lacked sufficient manliness, Christians presented a form of “Muscular Christianity” that was practiced in the growing number of YMCAs. Theodore Roosevelt, convinced that his own childhood maladies were cured by vigorous outdoor activity, extolled the virtues of the hearty physical life. Physical education and team sports were instituted at the girls' schools and women's colleges that were established at the end of the nineteenth century.
The use of the word “hygiene”
in English-language books, which began a steady rise after 1850, shot up exponentially around 1900. That year the British biologist William Bateson coined the word “genetics” to describe the physical material of heredity, the start of a phenomenal series of breakthroughs. Two years later, the British physiologist Ernest Starling discovered secretin, subsequently giving this and similar substances a name: hormones.

Science had transformed the body
, which once represented a basket of cosmic forces and moral standards, into a collection of tissues and organs that signaled health or decay, normality or deviance.
John Henry Kellogg wrote
that he founded his Battle Creek sanitarium, visited by thousands of middle-class and wealthy patrons each year, in order to employ every aspect of modern medical science to determine “deviations from the normal standard of health.” (
Macfadden also ran a sanitarium
in Battle Creek from 1907 to 1909, later renaming it the Macfadden Healthatorium and relocating it to Chicago.)
A healthy body was seen as
an emblem of a rational, individualized self. Many scientists at the time held that the state of the body determined mental health, just as earlier reformers assumed it reflected moral fitness. In women, the ovaries were believed to control personality. Troublesome changes in the female disposition were frequently treated by removing the offending organs.
Cesare Lombroso, the Italian doctor
who founded the field of criminology in the 1880s, linked the shape and size of the face and head to mental capacity and cultural differences. In his schema, some people were “born criminals”; they were throwbacks from an earlier stage of Darwinian evolution. Lombroso, whose views were particularly influential in the
United States among Progressive intellectuals and politicians, warned that physical “degeneration” presaged the social and cultural decline of Western civilization. Biology was destiny. Such views gained wider currency in the early 1900s after more of the mechanics of genetics were uncovered.

But defining age strictly in terms of biology carries an inherent bias toward the young. Inevitably, a purely physical inventory of middle age—stiffer muscles, dimmer eyesight, slower reflexes—will reveal deficiencies in comparison with youth so that the advancing years parallel a regression from health to deterioration. In this context, the very process of aging was seen as abnormal. Some scientists hypothesized that aging was not a natural condition at all but a disease caused by a virus.
Elie Metchnikoff, who won the Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for his work in immunology, theorized the cause was toxic bacteria that was produced in the bowel and spread through the body. Other doctors attributed aging to a failing of the thyroid gland.

The emphasis on physicality trapped middle age in a destructive cycle. A focus on biology reinforced a negative view of middle age, which in turn drove attention to the body's decay.

A keen awareness of the body was further heightened by the spread of sensual comforts in everyday life. In this wealthier, democratic age, the middle class as well as blue bloods could enjoy indoor plumbing, silken fabrics, plumped-up comforters, and woven rugs. As America was transformed from a producer-oriented society that encouraged thrift and savings to an affluent consumer-centered society, more and more citizens were able to appreciate physical amenities.
The flush of spending and display
caused the “conspicuous consumption” that the economist Thorstein Veblen famously skewered. If the nineteenth century was like a sturdy wooden chair, the beginning of the twentieth was a plush red velvet cushion.

In the early 1900s, businesses catered to this newfound appreciation of comfort, physical hygiene, and looks by offering hundreds of new cosmetics and toiletries to ensure everything from a luminous complexion
to a spic-and-span bowel. “
All, with hardly an exception
, pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever before and many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of some item of food or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue,” G. Stanley Hall remarked.

The flood of advertising and movies also put the physicality of the body on display as never before in magazines, Sunday newspapers, and theaters.
America had turned into what the poet
and author Vachel Lindsay, famous in his day for traveling throughout the country to give dramatic recitations, called “a hieroglyphic civilization.” The flood of shared images helped mold expectations about how people should look.

Movies further modified accustomed ways of seeing. Images that streamed out of Hollywood in the first decade of the twentieth century imprinted ideals of youthful beauty on enthusiastic audiences.
D. W. Griffith invented the close-up
, zooming in on a lineless and wide-eyed face. By the early teens, millions of Americans were taking in a picture show every week. Certainly the tilt toward youth is part of the industry's founding story. Those in front of and behind the camera in the early days were barely past adolescence themselves. America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford, appeared in films at 16, as did Clara Bow, the original “It Girl,” who ended up a has-been by 28. Rudolph Valentino was dead by age 31.

Pioneering filmmakers did not initially assume that actors would become obsessive objects of fans' desires; before 1910, most movies hid the names of players and creators. As modern advertising evolved in the twenties, studios used it to create and market movie stars. The large and lucrative industry that developed around fan magazines further forged the connection between beauty and youth. Actors gained a second profession as celebrities, creating models of glamour that were reinforced at every Saturday matinee. Concocting backgrounds for its budding stars, the studios encouraged readers to identify with their tales of ugly ducklings turned into swans. Advertisers offered readers the opportunity to buy products that promised to effect a similar transformation. “
Is Your Skin Younger or Older Than You Are
?” asked a 1923 ad in
Pictorial Review
for Pond's Cold Cream and Pond's Vanishing Cream. “Actresses tax their skin to the utmost. Yet they are noted for their beautiful complexions because they have learned to give their skin regularly the two things it needs to
keep it in the fresh, supple condition that wards off age.” Four young starlets were enlisted to offer their endorsements.