Authors: Patricia Cohen
The statistics tell the story.
In 1960, sixty-eight percent of adults in
their 20s were married and five percent of births were to unwed mothers. Now,
only one in four 20-somethings has exchanged vows and single moms give birth to forty-one percent of infants. It is no longer shocking for middle-aged women to skip parenthood (twenty percent of those in their 40s were childless in 2010) or, thanks to fertility treatments, to become pregnant (more than fourteen percent of births were to women over 35).
Women match men's numbers in the workplace
and exceed them on college campuses. At the same time, economic shifts have eroded the high-paying industrial jobs that once enabled men in their late teens or early twenties, particularly those without a college degree, to earn enough money to support themselves, let alone a family. Careers are less permanent and more varied. Willingly or not, young men are increasingly postponing the leap to independence. To look at just one segment, 25-year-old white men: a quarter of them lived at home in 2007âbefore the recessionâcompared with less than one-eighth in 1970.
Despite the disdain of contemporary life span researchers for stage theories, these changes have prompted some social scientists to argue that the period between 20 and 34 should be reclassified as “emerging adulthood.” If you do not marry until your late 20s, do not have children until your 30s, and do not settle into a career until nearly 40, middle age feels less like a midpoint than a starting point. Thomas Cole's portrait of “Youth” stretching through the mid-30s and “Manhood” encompassing the late 30s, 40s, and 50s suddenly seems modern.
On the far side of midlife, another group of academics and consultants have singled out the years between 55 and 75 as a distinct category since with longer life spans so many people are healthy and capable of working past the traditional 65-year-old retirement deadline. Calling this group the “encore generation,” “the third age,” “midcourse,” or “the new old age,” advocates have revived the concept of the “young-old” category Bernice Neugarten suggested four decades ago.
Neugarten would, no doubt, be dismayed by the continuing obsession with age-based stages, but the scientific instinct to categorize and classify continues to impel men and women to more precisely situate themselves on that line between birth and death. Invariably, the first question everyone asked me upon learning I was writing about middle age was “When is it?”
Even now, long after I began thinking about this book on that sandy
beach several summers ago, I am at a loss to give a simple answer. I take comfort in the fact that after $35 million and twenty years of intensive research, MIDUS has not produced a clear definition either. Survey responses from men and women, office and blue-collar workers, East Coasters and Midwesterners don't result in a typical American; they produce an imaginary one. The particular combination of physical, psychological, social, and spiritual elements that contribute to one's entry into midlife varies from person to person. Not even Justice Potter Stewart's remarkably adaptable definition of obscenityâ“you know it when you see it”âseems to apply. Many people who ask me when midlife begins don't seem to know if they've reached it or left it.
The answers MIDUS III will elicit over the coming decade are bound to look different from those gathered during the first phase of research in the mid-nineties.
Already we know that middle-aged boomers
are more willing to divorce than their parents were. A 2011 report found that the risk of divorce among 50- to 64-year-olds has doubled during the past two decades. “
Every fresh generation is a new people
,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in
Democracy in America
. In his work on the Great Depression, Glen Elder discovered just how much a different historical context could affect two contiguous generations. Future visitors to the tableland of middle age are likely to diverge in both their views and experience from today's inhabitants. Members of the baby boom were uniquely shaped by their times. They came of age during an unusual period of extended affluence, social upheaval, civil rights breakthroughs, and an unpopular war. Born before the 1965 immigration law ushered in millions of Africans, Asians, Indians, and Latinos, they are the last band of middle-aged Americans who are so ethnically homogenous. Eighty percent of them are white. As a group, they grew up watching the same television programs and listening to the same records and radio stations. They share an unusually strong generational identity. Their unprecedented numbers have exerted an irresistible gravitational pull on the culture, whether they were watching Bozo the Clown, buying their first home, or helping their own children fill out college applications.
They moved into middle age during an extraordinary transformation of the global economic system, a digital revolution, and a political realignment
that shuffled foreign alliances and sharpened domestic partisan politics. They made scads of money, more than any of their predecessors, and spent it with wanton abandon. Girls who saw their mothers burdened by the feminine mystique grabbed at the thrilling surfeit of opportunities when their turn came and delayed marriage and motherhood, sometimes discovering belatedly that they had permanently deferred them. Boys whose fathers hid behind a newspaper have become expert diaper changers and class parents.
The next generation of midlifers will be molded by disparate circumstances. They have grown up in a faster and more connected world, where one in five Americans speaks a foreign language at home, television channels number in the hundreds, and texting is preferred to phoning. Young women who want children are more conscious of their biological clocks and more willing to remain single. College graduates, chastened by the harsh recession, bypass exhortations to “follow your passion,” and look for vocational jobs with benefits. Despite enormous medical breakthroughs, if the epidemic of obesity persists, physical problems may make them feel middle-aged sooner even if they live longer. Their midlife is likely to be overshadowed by the seismic growth of the elderly population.
If there is one lesson that the history of middle age offers, it is just how malleable this cultural fiction can be. The definition has been stretched and massaged over the last century and a half, and bears the fingerprints of every generation through which it has passed. Today, longer life spans provide additional opportunities to switch directions and to shape the world our children and parents occupy. The passage of years bestows the experience and skills to ride out unexpected, even crushing setbacks, and to accomplish goals previously considered out of reach. Middle age can bring undiscovered passions, profound satisfactions, and newfound creativity. It is a time of extravagant possibilities.
I
have many people to thank, but three deserve special mention: my friend Susan Lehman, my agent Scott Moyers, and my husband, Eddie Sutton. Susan helped me come up with the idea for the book and gave advice and assistance all the way through. Scott wrote me a fan letter after reading my work to say I had a book in me, and then he made it happen. He guided and encouraged me, and introduced me to one of the truly great editors. Eddie offered unstinting love, childcare, and ice cream.
I am extraordinarily lucky to work at the
New York Times,
where the reporters and editors inspire and amaze me every day with their dedication and talent. Particular thanks to Jon Landman, Chip McGrath, Scott Heller, Bill Carter, the brilliant lunch table, and the colleagues whose work is frequently cited in these pages. I am forever indebted to Jeff Roth. If it weren't for him, there would be no pictures in this book. Mary Hardiman has frequently lent me her creative gifts. Thanks to Fred Conrad. I am very grateful to friends who offered to read drafts and engage in lengthy discussions, including Jennifer Gordon, Phoebe Hoban, Christina Malle, Michael Massing, Celia McGee, Esther Perel, Tina Rosenberg, David Serlin, Dinitia Smith, and Chuck Sabel, who also doubled as a dedicated researcher.
I am indebted to the people who took time from their own work to help me do mine, particularly Bert Brim, Margie Lachman, Richard Davidson, Nikki Rute, Susan Jensen, Abbe Raven, David Poltrack, and Richie Jackson. I received research help early on from the smart and enthusiastic Natasha Degen.
I have benefited from the intelligence and hard work of many other scholars
and authors who have written about aging, culture, and related subjects, including Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Howard Chudacoff, Thomas Cole, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Robert Kanigel, David and Sheila Rothman, Sander Gilman, Roland Marchand, Warren Susman, Glen Elder, and Anne Hollander.
Nan Graham was a demanding and wise editor, and this is a better book because of her. I am grateful to many people at Scribner who worked on my manuscript, including Daniel Burgess, Paul Whitlatch, Katie Hanson, Katie Monaghan, Katie Rizzo, Susan Moldow, Rex Bonomelli, Roz Lippel, and Kara Watson. Mindy Werner helped me work through difficult organizational problems. Andrew Wylie and his wonderful staff thankfully picked up where Scott left off.
The MacDowell Colony was a heaven-sent haven where I got an enormous amount of work done in a very short time. I also love the New York Public Library.
I am fortunate to have a surrogate family, a dear circle of close friends who were understanding when I dropped out of sight for months, and who offer love and support whether or not I am writing a book. I also want to thank my son, Alex, for putting up with my long evenings and weekends at the computer and my absence from so many of his soccer games.
Most of all, I owe an immeasurable debt to my mother and my late father, who always showered me with love and believed I could do anything.
4
“The hero of our 20th century”:
Philippe Ariès,
Centuries of Childhood,
trans. by Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 30.
4
Yet if this is the best possible moment:
For example, Daphne Merkin, “Reinventing Middle Age,”
New York Times Magazine,
May 6, 2007; William Safire, “The Way We Live Now: Halfway Humanity,”
New York Times Magazine,
May 6, 2007; Winifred Gallagher, “Midlife Myths,”
Atlantic Monthly,
May 1993, 51.
6
But only in the last 150 years:
Thomas R. Cole,
The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), x, 10â11.
6
Middle age is a “cultural fiction”:
Bradd Shore, “Status Reversed,” in
Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions),
Richard Shweder, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xivâxv, 109.
7
Despite a freighter's worth of books:
Margaret Morganroth Gullette is one of the few scholars who have written about the history of middle age.
8
The task of improving our midlife:
Alfred Kazin, “The Freudian Revolution Analyzed,”
New York Times Magazine,
May 6, 1956.
8
Forty has long been:
Robert Kastenbaum, ed.
Encyclopedia of Adult Development
(Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1993), 32â34; Stanley Brandes,
Forty: The Age and the Symbol
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).
9
Extensive surveys reveal that the:
Subjective Aging, MIDUS newsletter,
http://www.midus.wisc.edu/newsletter/
(accessed June 11, 2011).
9
In 2009, Pew asked:
Pew Research Center staff,
Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality,
Pew Research Center (June 2009),
http://pew socialtrends.org/2009/06/29/growing-old-in-america-expectations-vs-reality/
(accessed June 30, 2009).
9
The mammoth ongoing study:
Midlife in the United States was originally funded by the MacArthur Foundation and called the MacArthur Foundation Network on Successful Midlife Development. When the federal government took it over in 2002, the name changed.
9
We are like the tourists:
ID: 122649, published in
New Yorker,
July 10, 2006.
9
As Bernice Neugarten, a pioneer:
Bernice Neugarten, “The Awareness of Middle Age,” in
Middle Age and Aging: A Reader in Social Psychology,
Bernice Neugarten, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 97.
11
It is a “missing category”:
Katherine S. Newman, “Place and Race: Midlife Experience in Harlem,” in
Welcome to Middle Age!,
Shweder, ed., 283; Katherine S. Newman,
A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City
(New York: New Press, 2003).
12
Middle age was an unavoidable:
Gail Sheehy,
Passages
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 17.
12
As researchers attempted to redefine:
Margie Lachman, “Development in Midlife,”
Annual Review of Psychology
55 (2004): 305â31.
15
“Surprisingly little attention has been”:
Orville Gilbert Brim, Carol D. Ryff, and Ronald C. Kessler,
How Healthy Are We? A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.
19
“People in midlife raise”:
MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Midlife Development,
ICPSR Bulletin
XX, no. 4 (Summer 2000).
20
As Brim declared:
Brim et al.,
How Healthy Are We?,
1â2; Orville Gilbert Brim interview with author, June 8, 2008.