Midlife Crisis by Susanne Schmidt

Author:Susanne Schmidt [Schmidt, Susanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

5 Inability to Change

In light of research about stress, Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers reframed the meaning of midlife crisis. Unlike Gilligan, they did not propose a redefinition of developmental theory. Rather than reclaiming or redefining the midlife crisis, Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers refuted life-course theories altogether. Levinson was their main target, though their criticism applied to Sheehy’s Passages, too, which they mistook for a “popularization” of Seasons: “Gail Sheehy’s work drew on Levinson’s Seasons. . . . One of the most popular notions emerging from these authors was that a ‘midlife crisis’ would inevitably occur around the age of forty. . . . Those who did not experience a crisis might wonder if they were normal. [We], in part because of personal experience and in part because of methodological concerns, doubted these models for women’s lives.”137

Not just concerned with interpreting the data, Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers had fundamental qualms about “[hauling] nature’s authority into human affairs.”138 Committed to an anti-essentialist view of gender, they worried that the connection between biological age and social change suggested that women’s problems would simply resolve themselves and go away and saw developmental theory as harmful to feminist causes. Barnett and Rivers later became some of Gilligan’s fiercest opponents, arguing in their Same Difference (2004) that it was impossible to distinguish feminist from conservative arguments for gender differences.139

In Lifeprints, Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers attributed the absence of midlife crisis to the women’s movement. Comparing mental health data from the 1950s and 1970s, they suggested that social change made it possible for women to cope better with growing older: “The women’s movement, we would argue, not only is giving women permission to think about themselves in less limited ways than in the past, it has also led to real changes in opportunities.”140 Ideas about women’s roles had been transformed, and women’s freedom had increased; they entered and stayed in the workforce. Yet if women’s well-being was linked to the social climate, then confidence, optimism, and satisfaction all could be dissipated if women stopped fighting and the gains of the movement slipped away.

Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers observed that few women in the Lifeprints survey saw what was happening in their lives in social and political terms. Most said things like “The women’s movement hasn’t had much impact on me personally” or “I don’t see what the fuss is all about.” The women’s most frequent explanation for why they were happier now than when they were younger had to do with chronological age: “It’s turning thirty-five.” “When you’re forty you know who you are.” “Being fifty makes the difference.” Even those in occupations only recently open to women failed to make the connection between their success and feminism, insisting on seeing achievement purely in personal terms. Failing to connect social change with their newfound pride and satisfaction, they assumed it must be their age.141

The Lifeprints authors argued that age did not influence well-being in a predictable way, as stage theories would suggest. Instead, they emphasized changing social and

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