In Our Prime (18 page)

Their depiction of middle age was skeletal, no more than two pages in the initial printing of
Childhood and Society,
but it was sufficient to
build on. Erikson presented the first comprehensive model of how a person grew throughout the “life cycle,” and he included middle age as a discrete and meaningful period. He profoundly shaped the emerging field of child development and laid the groundwork for a new field of adult development. Texts about aging and human behavior frequently date the “discovery” of middle age to this postwar period.

Assumptions that sentenced those in middle age to a steady, inexorable slump were upended by Erikson's theory. Midlife was not a period of malaise and rigidity but a work in progress, a phase as momentous in character-building as adolescence. Indeed, middle age, when one generation nurtured and mentored the next, could be seen as the period in which the most important work of an individual and a society was done.

In Erikson's welcoming model, generativity was not confined to a rarefied group of enlightened individuals like Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. With effort and self-conscious examination, anyone could work toward a more meaningful life.

Erikson's book
Childhood and Society
created a stir.
It spurred psychologists to revise
theories about personality development and adaptation, and prompted sociologists to rethink assumptions about social change and influence. In 1961, Margaret Mead nominated it in the
American Scholar
as the most important book of the last twenty-five years. As significant in popularizing his ideas was Erikson's publisher W. W. Norton, which in 1963 issued a revised paperback edition specially discounted for colleges that helped to spread his thinking on campuses.
Childhood and Society
became required reading in many courses, exposing a large cadre of students to his ideas.

“
Eriksonian became almost a
household term on many campuses,” Erikson's biographer Richard Friedman notes, and eventually turned him into a “culture hero.” Erikson's writings about identity and nonconformity struck a chord.
His daughter, Sue, remembers eating
at a restaurant when a nervous waitress came over to ask for her father's autograph; she had read
Childhood and Society
in her college psychology course and recognized his shock of wavy white hair and Wedgwood blue eyes.

Of all the movements, fads, and enthusiasms that blew across campuses in the 1960s, perhaps the most surprising was the so-called discovery
of middle age. Adult development, a topic largely confined to a small group of scholars at a handful of universities in the fifties, spread during a decade that was punch-drunk on the power and promise of youth. As student activists stood atop police cars to demand free speech at Berkeley or brandished guns outside the student union at Cornell, inside college libraries and labs, established and aspiring social scientists began, for the first time, to examine the second half of life, initiating research and constructing theories. New doctoral candidates, ever in search of virgin territory to study, found human development to be a vast untrodden field. In universities, middle age and other periods of adulthood shared a feature with new academic areas like Black Studies and Women's Studies. Just as race and gender concentrations were created to make up for the neglect of those groups in existing departments like English, History, and Political Science, adult development arose to correct the child-centered focus in psychology. Reading through the avalanche of articles, studies, and papers published in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, one can detect the incredulity of graduate students and researchers as they announce with astonishment that “no one before has examined” divorce, marriage, contentment, and a slew of other events and emotions that occupy middle age.

Ideas about adults' capacity for change also matched the spirit of the age. Deeply rooted beliefs and institutions were being yanked from their moorings and heaved into once inconceivable formations. Race relations, sexual mores, women's roles, gay rights—all testified to the possibility that human beings were capable of deep, even disorienting transformations.

In 1956, Thomas Desmond hoped that “a new discipline of ‘mediatrics' [might] blossom forth to care for middle-aged folks . . . just as pediatrics had emerged to center attention on the care of children.” His title never gained traction, but a decade later, the idea had.

Bernice Neugarten was one of the first of the psychologists interested in adult development to focus specifically on middle age and, like a scholarly Pied Piper, she inspired legions of followers with her pathbreaking work.
Born in 1916 in the small town
of Norfolk, Nebraska, Neugarten stuck
out like a sunflower among weeds. She took her first college course before turning 13 and finished a master's degree at 21. Unable to find a job as a high school teacher because she looked so young, Neugarten was glad to accept a graduate assistantship at the University of Chicago's new Committee on Childhood Development. She went on to earn her PhD in 1943. She then did something Erikson and many subsequent, mostly male, theorists had never considered: she took a break from her career for eight years to raise a family, undertake some part-time research, and volunteer in her community.

Only by happenstance did Neugarten later turn her gaze to adult development. After returning to the university in 1951, she was asked to teach a class on aging (and discovered the lack of any texts aside from Erikson's). The Committee on Childhood Development, renamed the Committee on Human Development, was expanding its focus under the leadership of Robert J. Havighurst, an education specialist who had worked with Erikson before World War II. Havighurst, too, was studying the aging process, and Neugarten ended up working with him on a new project, the Kansas City Study of Adult Life, the first community-based research to focus on middle and old age. For ten years, between 1954 and 1964, they and their colleagues followed more than two thousand men and women over 40.

The study provided Neugarten with something that her esteemed and honored predecessors lacked: data. Hall, Jung, and Erikson expounded on human nature, the meaning of existence, and the confrontation with death with enormous insight and creativity, but little actual evidence.

Neugarten used Erikson's theoretical framework, but her research provided a richer and more nuanced understanding of how people experienced their middle years. The presumption that individuals evolved over time was borne out. “
Many people talk about
how they grew up in new ways even after they were forty or sixty,” Neugarten discovered. “No one says, ‘I am the same person I was ten years ago.'”

And despite the culture's ever-deepening love affair with youth, the adults she studied did not feel overshadowed or sidelined by younger people. Americans might embrace hippies' studied scruffiness, salute the young's righteous activism, or recoil at their outrageousness, but
they recognized that the middle-aged remained the “norm-bearers and decision-makers; and they live in a society which, while it may be oriented towards youth, it is controlled by the middle age.”

Neugarten thought
Time
magazine was right—even if its conclusion was “less laboriously derived and more colorfully stated”—to feature middle agers on the cover of its July 29, 1966, issue and call them “The Command Generation.”
Listing White House occupants
, Cabinet members, Nobel Prize winners, hundreds of corporate CEOs, as well as leaders in education, religion, science, industry, and communications,
Time
placed those in the 40- to 60-year age group at the center of influence. They are “the ruling class,” the magazine declared, “that one-fifth of the nation between the ages of 40 and 60 (42,800,000) who occupy the seats of power, foot the bills, and make the decisions that profoundly affect how the other four-fifths live. . . . Even the revolt of the teen-aged is subsidized by middle-agers.”

In 1967, Neugarten wrote up her findings from
Kansas City and other studies and later included them in
Middle Age and Aging
(1968), a classic collection she edited that served as the discipline's first textbook for the growing number of universities and colleges that were instituting courses in this subject. (Martin Martel's comparison of the way middle age was depicted in magazine fiction in 1890 and 1955 was one of the selections.)

Because of her on-the-ground research, Neugarten recognized early on the degree to which women were transfiguring views of middle age. In 1966, the same year that Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, more than half of women between 45 and 54 were in the labor force. (After age 20, women's participation dropped steadily as they stopped work to marry and raise children. It reached a low among 30-year-old women when forty percent had jobs, before rising again.) For women new to the working world, earning a paycheck meant they saw themselves as “economic adults” for the first time in their middle years (much as Gertrude Atherton had predicted). This development, Neugarten maintained, contributed to “the broad redefinitions of age groups” in America. “
Most of the women interviewed
feel that the most conspicuous characteristic of middle age is the sense of increased freedom,” Neugarten reported in 1967. “Not only is there increased time
and energy now available for the self, but also a satisfying change in self-concept.” As one typical woman responded: “I discovered these last few years that I was old enough to admit to myself the things I could do well and to start doing them. I didn't think like this before. . . . It's a great new feeling.”

Neugarten examined how society's expectations about the age at which someone should marry, have a child, find a job, or retire exerted significant pressure on individuals regardless of class or ethnicity. Deviating from this “social clock” could be discomforting, but it could also pry open opportunities. Neugarten's hopscotching around the expected progression of school, marriage, children, and career in the 1940s was extremely rare. By the seventies, though, notions of a smooth, predictable series of life stages were thrown topsy-turvy by feminism, a changing economy, growing divorce rates, and older mothers. The number of middle-aged women who landed their first jobs or returned to work after taking time off to raise children grew, as did their status both outside and inside the family. By the end of the decade, for the first time, a clear majority of women approved of wives working (even if their husbands did not). Many women went back to school and then into the workforce.
In a 1982 study
, thirty-seven percent of women who got a graduate degree were older than 40.

The aftershocks of such changes upended a boatload of assumptions about age-appropriate behavior. Middle age did not necessarily mean one was finished with child-rearing, settled in an occupation, or set in one's ways. Erikson's notion that generativity marked a new stage of nurturing did not sufficiently account for the fact that women had already spent most of their lives caring for the next generation at home and in school, and had channeled those energies into volunteer work after their children grew up.

The feminist movement, despite its primary attention to younger women, helped to widen the possibilities for women in midlife just as Progressive Era–feminism had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the “Renaissance of the Middle Aged.” In
The Coming of Age
(first published in English in 1972), Simone de Beauvoir dissected the way societies infuse different ages with meaning.
Aging is both a
biological and a psychological phenomenon, but the significance of any particular stage of life “is imposed upon him by the society to which he belongs,” she wrote. “Every society creates its own values: and it is in the social context that the word
decline
takes on an exact meaning.”

If middle-aged women were devalued, it was because society constricted their options. Embarking on a new path as an entrepreneur or oceanographer, an artist or a drummer, a passionate lover or global traveler was not a part of most middle-aged women's mental universe. Primarily typecast as mothers and housewives, in society's view they became functionally unnecessary after menopause and after their children had grown up.

The women's movement helped to transform middle age into a period of undiscovered possibility.
As one woman wrote in a 1973 column
in the
New York Times
: “It is pure gold to realize your life is opening up. You have freedom from and freedom to—just when you thought it was all but over.”

While the women's movement gave middle-aged women a novel feeling of expanding opportunity and liberation, men's middle years seemed increasingly enveloped in gloom thanks to the appearance of a catchy meme that appeared in 1965: the midlife crisis. Of the many theories about adult development that arose in Erikson's wake, few have been more influential. This allegedly omnipresent affliction has remained a touchstone, a powerful presence in our imaginations if not our lives.

The phrase was coined by Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psychoanalyst and management consultant who studied with the child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in London and later consulted for the Church of England and the U.S. Army. Unlike Erikson, who proposed a comprehensive model of lifelong development, Jaques concentrated on what he believed was a seminal turning point.
He assembled a supposedly random sample
of 310 renowned painters, composers, poets, writers, and sculptors—including Shakespeare, Goya, Bach, Gauguin, Purcell, and Dante—and then analyzed their art to assess at what age they created their greatest work. Jaques was investigating the same question that the neurologist
George Miller Beard had puzzled over a century earlier and he employed virtually the same flawed method. Jaques's project, nevertheless, differed from Beard's “Relation of Age to Original Work” graph in crucial ways. While Beard measured value in terms of productivity, a reflection of the era's industrial orientation, Jaques explored the psyche. The purely material evaluation of middle age was replaced by more intangible measures. To Jaques, the midlife crisis was wholly a psychological phenomenon. The cause was a new awareness of “one's own death, one's own real and actual mortality.”