Authors: Patricia Cohen
In Our Prime (2 page)
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Age 50 marks the highpoint of a man and woman's life in these 1850 prints by Currier & Ives.
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Copyright © 2012 by Patricia Cohen
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Photo credits: Frontispiece,
page 3
,
page 192
: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Page 15
: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, NY, 55.107.
Page 32
: The
New York Times
Photo Archive.
Page 60
: Nikolas Muray.
Page 80
,
page 242
:
The New York Times
.
Page 99
: Robert Walker/
The New York Times
.
Page 123
: Courtesy of Bert Brim.
Page 140
: Waisman Brain Imaging Lab, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.
Page 163
:
Ladies' Home Journal,
May 1928,
page 77
.
Page 180
: New York Public Library Picture Collection, NY, Image ID: 807971.
Page 211
: Associated Press.
Page 228
: Ken Regan/Showtime
Lyrics from the song “Life Begins at Forty” are used by permission of JACK YELLEN MUSIC.
For Alexander,
who proved that middle age is the best age of all
A man in middle life still feels young, and
age and death lie far ahead of him.
âCarl Jung (1921)
Part I. The Invention of Middle Age
4. The Renaissance of the Middle-Aged
6. Middle Age Enters the Modern Age
Part II. Middle Age Is Rediscovered
7. The Sixties and Seventies: The Era of Middle Age
8. Middle Age Under the Microscope
Part III. The Midlife Industrial Complex
14. The Arrival of the Alpha Boomer
IN OUR
PRIME
1
The Prime Meridian
“The Four Seasons of Life: Middle AgeâThe Season of Strength,” Currier & Ives, 1868
F
or the first time, middle-aged men and women are the largest, most influential, and richest segment in the country. Floating somewhere between 40 and 64, they constitute one-third of the population and control nearly seventy percent of its net worth. In booms and recessions, a trillion-dollar economy feeds and fuels their needs, whims, and desires. Better-educated and healthier than their predecessors, these early and late midlifers are happier, more productive, and more involved than any other age group. Women are part of the first generation
to enter their 40s and 50s after the feminist movement, and they have options that their mothers and grandmothers could barely imagine. Life spans have increased as scientific advances have overcome many of the body's once-unavoidable limitations. Viagra has recharged the sex lives of middle-aged men. Beauty treatments like Botox and facial fillers can erase the stigmata of facial wrinkles. New surgical procedures and recuperative strategies for worn-out knees and creaky rotator cuffs allow aging bodies to ski moguls and surf twenty-footers.
A century ago, circumstancesâfrom the disillusionment that followed World War I to the emergence of Hollywood and mass consumerismâconspired to create a cult of youth. “
The hero of our 20th century
” was the adolescent, the historian Philippe Ariès declared in his seminal book
Centuries of Childhood
(1963), celebrated for his “purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre.” Those circumstances have changed. Now, with an unprecedented number of Americans in midlife who can expect to live three, four, or five more decades, it seems the twenty-first century belongs to the middle-ager.
Yet if this is the best possible moment
to be middle-aged, why then is this period of life still commonly greeted with resignation or regret, disappointment or evasion? No one is eager to show off the AARP membership card that arrives in the mail unbidden shortly before you turn fifty. Birthday congratulations are replaced with jokes about hearing loss, plunging libidos, and afternoon naps. Middle age is a punch line.
Hundreds of self-help manuals, spiritual handbooks, and memoirs promise to guide anxious readers through the middle decades.
Cooking with Hot Flashes, How to Survive Middle Age, In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age
are among the titles that offer advice on sex, exercise, diet, looks, childbirth, elderly parents, menopause, midlife crises, divorce, remarriage, religion, and memory loss. Countless online blogs and print columns supply personal recollections, counsel, and relentless cheerleading. Facebook and Twitter are flooded with middle-agers' quotidian dramas.
Such anxieties and ministrations would have thoroughly baffled Americans living in the early 1800s because the concept of middle age
did not exist; it had not been invented yet. Middle age may seem like a Universal Truth, a fundamental law of nature, like Earth's rotation around the sun or the force of gravity, but it is as much a man-made creation as polyester or the rules of chess.
The notion that the term “middle age” would be a source of identity, shaping the way we envision our inner lives, view our family and professional obligations, and locate ourselves in the community and culture, would have been as alien to our ancestors as iPads and airplanes. For ordinary men and women, middle age was not a topic that merited reflection or analysis. Scholars did not devote years to its study. Periodicals and books did not publish essays on the topic, nor did correspondents and diarists devote pages in their letters or journals to its qualities. Advice manuals did not refer to behavior, clothes, or activities that were appropriate for people in their middle years as opposed to any other time of life. There were no medicines, organizations, leisure activities, treatments, music, or empowerment gurus designated specifically for people in middle age. Prior to 1900, the Census Bureau did not even bother to ask for a date of birth. You were young, you were an adult, and then you were old.