Authors: Patricia Cohen
21
“Considering the major studies”:
Laurel Lippert, “Women at Midlife: Implications for Theories of Women's Adult Development,”
Journal of Counseling & Development
76, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 16â22.
21
MacArthur recruited nearly 7,200 men:
Brim et al.,
How Healthy Are We?,
2â22.
21
Middle age begins:
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Midlife Discourses,” in
Welcome to Middle Age!,
Shweder, ed., 17.
22
“Sometimes things that really”:
Shirley S. Wang, “Is Happiness Overrated?,”
Wall Street Journal,
March 15, 2011.
22
Are you sad, nervous, restless:
MIDUS website,
http://www.midus.wisc.edu/midus1/
(accessed June 11, 2011).
23
In the early 1990s:
Deborah Carr interview with author, 2008.
23
All in all, respondents answered:
MIDMAC website,
http://midmac.med.harvard.edu/
(accessed June 12, 2011).
23
The National Institutes of Health:
MIDUS website,
http://www.midus.wisc.edu/midus2/
(accessed June 14, 2011); Brim interview with author, 2008.
24
Midlife was a “watershed period”:
Alice S. Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” in Brim et al.,
How Healthy Are We?,
556.
24
Freud rejected patients:
Eda Goldstein,
When the Bubble Bursts: Clinical Perspectives on Midlife Issues
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2005), 10.
25
When researchers asked people:
David Almeida and Melanie C. Horn, “Is Daily Life More Stressful During Middle Adulthood?,” in Brim et al.,
How Healthy Are We?,
445.
25
“From many points of view”:
Rossi, “Social Responsibility to Family and Community,” 581.
25
In 2010, Carol Ryff and her colleagues:
J. A. Morozink et al., “Socioeconomic and Psychosocial Predictors of Interleukin-6 in the MIDUS National Sample,”
Health Psychology
29, no. 6 (November 2010): 626â35.
26
you can travel to:
Another version of the series (1842) is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
26
The young have “vigor and firmness”:
Andrew W. Achenbaum,
Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 9.
26
“It appears, in fact, that”:
John Demos,
Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 117.
26
Popular illustrations sold:
Cole,
Journey of Life,
xxix.
27
In the seventeenth and eighteenth:
David Hackett Fischer,
Growing Old in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 86â87.
27
As the historian Howard Chudacoff:
Howard P. Chudacoff,
How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 107.
27
The word “midlife” first appeared:
Lachman, “Development in Midlife.”
27
References to the various:
Ariès,
Centuries of Childhood,
20â32.
28
Prior to 1850, age was rarely used to measure status:
Demos,
Past, Present, and Personal,
98, 127; John Demos,
A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
28
Thomas Cole's eulogist:
William Cullen Bryant,
On the Life of Thomas Cole,
a funeral oration delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848,
http://www.catskillarchive.com/cole/wcb.htm
(accessed June 11, 2011).
28
The term “happy birthday”:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
, author search.
28
The practice of sending cards:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
133.
28
Mothers gave birth:
Fischer,
Growing Old in America
; Carole Haber,
Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
28
A prolapsed uterus was:
Mabel Collins Donnelly,
The American Victorian Woman: The Myth and the Reality
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968).
29
And the soulful encounter:
Fischer,
Growing Old in America,
53â56; Demos,
Past, Present, and Personal.
29
Adults worked nearly eighty hours:
Robert Fogel et al.,
The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
29
Sunday church services:
W. B. Irwin, monograph,
George Irwin and His Family (1794â1846),
New York Public Library.
29
Women outside cities:
Christiane Fischer,
Let Them Speak for Themselves, Women in the American West 1849â1900
(New York: Archon Books, 1977).
30
Today, a 50-something reader:
Christopher Buckley,
Boomsday: A Novel
(New York: Twelve, 2007).
31
“Just as they neared the”:
Fischer,
Let Them Speak for Themselves,
85â86.
32
“Taylor seems to have”:
Robert Kanigel,
The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency
(New York: Viking, 1997), 12.
32
At a memorial at the National:
Bryant,
On the Life of Thomas Cole.
33
“Thirty is the age of the gods”:
Cincinnati, Methodist Episcopal Church,
The Ladies' Repository: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion
1, no. 3 (March 1868), 172â75,
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/acg2248.3-01.003
(accessed June 12, 2011); “Holidays for Middle-Age,”
Scribner's Monthly
9, no. 2 (December 1874); “Middle Age,”
Harper's Bazar,
October 26, 1889.
33
In 1881, the
New York Times
declared:
“In the Middle Age,”
New York Times,
November 6, 1881.
34
the introduction of new novelistic:
James Wood,
The Art of Fiction
(New York: Picador, 2009), 87: “One of the obvious reasons for the rise of this kind of significantly insignificant detail is that it is needed to evoke the passage of time, and fiction has a new and unique project in literatureâthe management of temporality.”
34
In 1878, the year Bryant died:
Kanigel,
One Best Way.
35
Whether or not Taylor:
Jill Lepore, “Not So Fast,”
New Yorker,
October 12, 2009.
35
In 1913, Ford's workers:
Harold Evans,
The American Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 113.
35
One management scholar judged:
Kanigel,
One Best Way,
18.
35
Clocks began adorning walls in the 1830s:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
49â50.
36
Laying out his ideas:
Kanigel,
One Best Way,
123, 439.
37
He was born in 1856:
Ibid., 44, 49â51, 104â5; Sudhir Kakar,
Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
37
There he witnessed:
Kanigel,
One Best Way,
215.
38
Complaints of bad eyesight:
Ibid., 13, 123; Kakar,
Frederick Taylor.
38
Robert Kanigel, Taylor's biographer, compares:
Kanigel,
One Best Way,
13.
38
Even modernist artists were:
Peter Watson,
The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
(New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
38
Growing government bureaucracies:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
65.
39
Women's clubs became:
Ibid., 105â7.
39
In 1900, the Swedish writer:
Watson,
Modern Mind,
77; Ellen Key,
The Century of the Child
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909).
39
Arguing the aged should:
Louis Bishop, “The Relation of Old Age to Disease with Illustrative Cases,”
American Journal of Nursing
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1904), 679.
40
Five years later:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
53, 114; A. M. Clarfield, “Dr. Ignatz Nascher and the Birth of Geriatrics,”
CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal
143, no. 9 (November 1, 1990): 944â48.
40
Hall defined the stage:
G. Stanley Hall,
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education
(New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904); Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
67; Cole,
Journey of Life,
195.
40
A look at early life expectancy charts can:
Fischer,
Growing Old in America,
107; Haber,
Beyond Sixty-Five
; “Table 12: Estimated Life Expectancy at Birth in Years, by Race and Sex: Death-Registration States, 1900â1928, and United States, 1929â2004âCon.,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
56, no. 9 (December 28, 2007): 35.
41
With fewer babies and more time and money:
Peter Gay,
Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815â1914
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 40.
41
who counseled families on the logistics of:
Ibid., 53â54.
41
The invention of vulcanized:
H. Youssef, “The History of the Condom,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
84, no. 4 (April 1993): 226â28, PMCID: PMC1293956.
41
By 1900, the typical mother:
Fischer,
Growing Old in America,
144â45.
42
As historians note, societies are governed by:
Peter Gay,
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 27.
42
The number of urban residents:
U.S. Census,
http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt
(accessed June 11, 2011).
42
Divisions were not as:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?
; Fischer,
Growing Old in America.
42
Age consciousness was most:
Watson,
Modern Mind,
50.
42
Dire economic conditions:
Arthur Herman,
The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization
(New York: Free Press, 1997), 166.
42
In 1900, fewer than a fifth:
Claude Fischer,
Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 48.
43
The cable lines and periodicals:
Richard D. Brown,
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700â1865
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989); Evans,
American Century,
xx; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd,
Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), 479, 491.
43
Residents from coast to coast:
Anne Hollander,
Seeing Through Clothes
(New York: Viking Press, 1978), 349â50; Warren I. Susman,
Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003).
43
By the end of the century:
“Old Ladies' Fashions,”
Los Angeles Times,
February 24, 1895, 22.
43
Mrs. Wilson Woodrow:
Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, “The Woman of Fifty,”
Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine,
March 1903, 344, 5, APS Online, 505â12;
Harper's Bazar,
October 26, 1889.
43
“The New Styles That”:
“The New Styles That Are Designed for the Young, Old and Middle Aged Men,”
San Francisco Call,
June 5, 1904.
44
James Foster Scott, a:
Chudacoff,
How Old Are You?,
54.