Midlife Crisis

The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché

Susanne Schmidt

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226686998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The phrase "midlife crisis" today conjures up images of male indulgence and irresponsibility—an affluent, middle-aged man speeding off in a red sports car with a woman half his age—but before it become a gendered cliché, it gained traction as a feminist concept. Journalist Gail Sheehy used the term to describe a midlife period when both men and women might reassess their choices and seek a change in life. Sheehy's definition challenged the double standard of middle age—where aging is advantageous to men and detrimental to women—by viewing midlife as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Widely popular in the United States and internationally, the term was quickly appropriated by psychological and psychiatric experts and redefined as a male-centered, masculinist concept.The first book-length history of this controversial concept, Susanne Schmidt's Midlife Crisis recounts the surprising origin story of the midlife debate and traces its movement from popular culture into academia. Schmidt's engaging narrative telling of the feminist construction—and ensuing antifeminist backlash—of the midlife crisis illuminates a lost legacy of feminist thought, shedding important new light on the history of gender and American social science in the 1970s and beyond.

1

Introduction

One might not have expected the history of the midlife crisis to begin with a shocking scene from a notorious massacre, and still less that a woman would tell the tale. “I was talking to a young boy in Northern Ireland where I was on assignment for a magazine when a bullet blew his face off. British armored cars began to plow into the crowd. Paratroopers jackknifed out of the tanks with high-velocity rifles. They sprayed us with steel. The boy without a face fell on top of me.”1 On Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, British soldiers killed and wounded civilians protesting against internment. Gail Sheehy, a journalist for New York magazine, was in Derry to report on the role of women in the IRA and the movement for Irish Home Rule.2 Four years later, a large international audience came to know Sheehy as the author of Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976), the best-seller with which, I shall argue, the “midlife crisis” entered popular culture and the social sciences in the United States and abroad. The book opens with a description of Sheehy’s own breakdown after Bloody Sunday. She attributed her condition in part to the trauma of Northern Ireland and in part to the imperative to reassess and change one’s life when approaching the age of forty. Sheehy decided, she tells us, “to find out everything I could about this thing called midlife crisis.”3

A favorite gendered cliché, the idea of midlife crisis conjures up images of male indulgence and irresponsibility—an affluent, middle-aged man speeding off in a red Corvette with a woman half his age—but it was first successfully presented as a concept about women’s rights. Sheehy’s own “midlife crisis” was expressed in a nervous breakdown that stretched over six months and ten pages in her book. This was tied to her observation of two political events, the traumatizing Bloody Sunday and the disastrous Democratic National Convention of July 10–13, 1972, at which tensions in the women’s movement paralyzed the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) at its first national convention.4 Sheehy did not refer again to that experience in Passages, which sought to establish the midlife crisis as a more universal phenomenon. As a literary device, autobiographical references were supposed to make the author relatable, but the danger Sheehy described would have been foreign to most of her readers. While depicting herself as a war correspondent and political commentator may have established her credibility and standing as a writer, the detailed rendering of her collapse potentially risked producing the opposite effect: “They’ll think you’re crazy,” her copy editor warned.5

FIG. 1.1. Gail Sheehy’s Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976), front cover. Sheehy’s best-seller is remembered for its Milton Glaser cover: a rainbow-colored flight of stairs. Bold colors and jumbo letters marked its publication as an event while also signifying seriousness.

Above all, there was a certain uneasiness to the analogy between the deadly conflict in Northern Ireland and the midlife crisis of a jet-setting journalist. It recalled descriptions, by Ernest Hemingway and others, of war as a rite of passage of male personality development—only that Sheehy spoke of women. And that was the point. By situating the midlife crisis in the context of Bloody Sunday and the NWPC, Sheehy introduced it as a matter of women gaining consciousness and fighting for their rights—be it with arms, like in the IRA, or by the long march through the institutions begun at the Democratic convention. “The personal is political.”6

Sheehy used the term “midlife crisis”—coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst and management consultant Elliott Jaques in the 1950s but not well-known in psychology or among a broader public—to describe how women reappraised their lives around the age of thirty-five, when, in a typical middle-class setting, the last child was sent off to school. They asked: “What am I giving up for this marriage?” “Why did I have all these children?” “Why didn’t I finish my education?” “What good will my degree do me now after years out of circulation?” “Shall I take a job?” or “Why didn’t anyone tell me I would have to go back to work?”7

Sheehy’s men went through a midlife crisis, too, yet in a different way. While women negotiated trading the roles of at-home wife and mother for a career, men were disillusioned with the world of work. Turning forty, they experienced a period of dissatisfaction. Sometimes their careers stagnated or they even lost their jobs—this was the period right after the oil crisis and the stock market crash of 1973. But success was no safeguard. Sheehy’s prime example of a male midlife crisis was an established and internationally successful New York professional—probably the graphic designer Milton Glaser, known for the I ♥ NY logo. At the height of his career, he felt forced to stop and scrutinize what his life was all about, and he realized that his achievements had been at the expense of his wife’s happiness and self-fulfillment. As she returned to university, he went to cooking school.8

Passages wed Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) to David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), giving a new name to women’s discontent with the domestic ideal and men’s alienation from the world of work.9 Critically acclaimed and very widely read, it made the midlife crisis broadly popular. It remained on American best-seller lists for two years, longer than any other book published the same year. By a rough estimate, at least 8 million Americans read Sheehy’s book; even more knew it from reviews, excerpts, and author interviews, which were printed in major newspapers and in many academic journals, or from the bookshelves of friends and relatives. In Library of Congress surveys in the 1980s and ’90s, readers voted Passages among the ten books that influenced their lives most—following the Bible and The Feminine Mystique.10 The midlife crisis also circulated internationally. Translated into twenty-eight languages, Sheehy’s message reached readers throughout North America and Western Europe, as well as audiences in Asian, African, and Latin-American countries and the South Pacific. Commentators spoke of a “global best-seller.”11

*

The history of the midlife crisis has never been told. To be sure, most writing on the topic includes a brief origin story. Often presented in introductory remarks or brief asides, these mini-histories are characterized by a tacit consensus. One professor of psychology writes: “The midlife crisis started out very innocently with the less hyped-up name of ‘midlife transition.’ A Yale psychologist named Daniel Levinson published a book . . . called [The] Seasons of a Man’s Life. . . . The midlife crisis got its punchy name with the aid of journalist Gail Sheehy, who published her own book (Passages), based heavily on Levinson’s own work.”12 Whether a text is journalistic or academic, approving or dismissive, this historical précis is typical. Other authors attribute “midlife crisis” to psychiatrist George Vaillant, therapist Roger Gould, or psychoanalyst Jaques, all otherwise largely unknown.13 (Alexander Mitscherlich, the German psychoanalyst, used to be a candidate but has fallen off the list.) Regardless of who precisely is given priority, there is general agreement, first, that “midlife crisis” emerged as an idea within psychology and, second, that Sheehy’s Passages is the definitive “popularization.”

This standard historical narrative is misleading—and significantly so, because it turns the true publishing chronology upside down. In this book, I will show that, thanks to Passages, the idea of midlife crisis was popular before the science of psychology claimed it, and that Sheehy’s book was no “popularization” but a journalist’s independent and critical publication. By citing Jaques, she invented a precursor to back up her own ideas. Levinson, Vaillant, Gould, and other scientific and medical experts authored their own books on midlife crisis in the wake of Sheehy’s success.14

This book reverses histories of “popularization” by tracing how an idea moved from popular culture into academia and demonstrates how it matters to set this trajectory right. Contrary to the assumption that knowledge is created or discovered in libraries, surveys, and intellectual traditions, then trickles down to the public, the history of the midlife crisis illustrates how academics, writers, and activists swapped ideas back and forth and argued over issues of gender and the life course. Journalists not only “popularized” and “disseminated” scientific research; they also drew on it to advance their own arguments and frequently challenged academic findings and expertise. Moreover, popular wisdom informed social scientists who responded to magazine articles and borrowed or refuted ideas propagated in best-selling books, often utilizing their professional authority to delegitimize diverging views and criticism.15

The psychoanalyst and developmental theorist Erik Erikson, for example, was not amused when his former student Betty Friedan used his theory of “identity crisis” to bolster the case for women’s right to work. Women’s problems, Friedan claimed to broad attention, were not attributable to a “role crisis”—difficulties in adapting to the “feminine mystique”—but indicated a collective “identity crisis”: an ideological reorientation such as Erikson had described for the young Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.16 Erikson responded by clarifying, in a controversial paper about women’s “inner space,” that “biology is destiny”: a woman’s place was in the home.17 The psychoanalyst did not counter Sheehy, whose concept of midlife crisis pushed Friedan’s point further by redefining standards of maturity for men and women. But with Levinson, Vaillant, and Gould, some of Erikson’s followers were central among those who disputed her alternative model of the life course.

Contrary to the received narrative, these three experts did not invent or discover the midlife crisis but reversed its meaning. They advanced a male-centered concept, which described midlife as the end of a man’s family obligations and the moment when he would abandon his family to reinvent himself. This “crisis of masculinity” upended visions of the nuclear family but bolstered gender hierarchies. Categorically exempting women from midlife reinvention, Vaillant, Levinson, and Gould banned them from reimagining their family and work lives. The experts weaponized the notion of popularization to dodge and disparage Sheehy’s critique of psychoanalytic models of identity and assert their own scientific respectability. Presented and read as more original and exact, the anti-feminist definition of midlife crisis became dominant. Yet this was not a simple tale of conquest.

The received account of the midlife crisis misses not only the origins but also the tail end of the story. In the 1980s, the male midlife crisis was broadly refuted by feminist social scientists, most prominently the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, in her Harvard University Press best-seller In a Different Voice (1982), and Wellesley psychologists Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett, with a large-scale study on women who combined careers and family.18 These psychologists represented different feminist visions of selfhood: Gilligan reclaimed the relevance of values and venues traditionally associated with femininity—care, human interconnectedness, and the ability to empathize—while Baruch and Barnett foregrounded women’s autonomy, choice, and control over their lives. Yet they agreed on one point: midlife crisis was a social pathology.

Finding no “second adolescence” in women’s lives, Gilligan, Baruch, and Barnett challenged the midlife crisis as a universal developmental stage and redefined its meaning for both genders. A midlife crisis resulted from adherence to traditional gender roles; it was a sign of regression and rigidity, not growth. Levinson, Vaillant, and Gould had merely chronicled some men’s refusal to change.

The feminist critique circulated widely throughout the 1980s, with Gilligan’s In a Different Voice the most-cited book of feminist theory for a decade.19 In the early 2000s, when the authoritative Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey put the critique in quantitative terms, the results showed that personal and emotional turmoil in midlife occurred among less than 10 percent of the American population. This confirmed the received understanding of many Americans, for whom the midlife crisis had turned into a lame excuse and chauvinist cliché.20

*

Today, the question of what the midlife crisis is and how to deal with it, or whether it even exists, is the subject of a vast literature ranging from psychology, philosophy, and self-help literature to journalism, sociology, and social policy. There is “no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis,” writes the psychiatrist and columnist Richard Friedman in the New York Times. (The remainder of the text makes clear that “human” misbehavior means “male.”) “But you have to admit that ‘I’m having a midlife crisis’ sounds much better than ‘I’m a narcissistic jerk.’”21

FIG. 1.2. The “Happiness U-curve” establishes a relationship between age and subjective well-being, with the low point in life satisfaction in the forties, around the world. Based on calculations from the economists Carol Graham and Milena Nikolova.

Others continue to insist that the midlife crisis exists. Economists and primatologists discuss the “U-shape” of satisfaction over the life course, which they observe in men and women (and chimpanzees), all over the world and irrespective of social and economic differences: starting at a high level in early life, well-being is supposed to reach a nadir in the forties, then rise again.22 Fundamental questions ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Double Standard
• 3  Feminist Origins
• 4  Serious Sensation
• 5  Psychology and the Crisis of Masculinity
• 6  Feminist Riposte
• 7  Oldness
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index