The Anti‐Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA
2018; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-0424.12344
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
ResumoIt seems almost impossible to say anything new about the midlife crisis. Some of the countless books and articles on the topic tackle men's midlife crises and women's; offer a personal report, a theologian's view and a Jungian perspective; discuss the midlife crisis in apes and at age twenty, and how to avoid or enjoy it; or refute it as a myth and cliché.1 Yet for all the apparent variety of this rather repetitive literature, the history of this pivotal concept of psychological culture has never been told. 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.2 Whether a text is journalistic or academic, approving or dismissive of midlife crisis, this historical précis is typical. Other authors attribute ‘midlife crisis’ to therapist Roger Gould, psychiatrist George Vaillant or psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, all otherwise largely unknown (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 secondly, that Gail Sheehy's Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976) is the definitive ‘popularisation’.3 The standard historical narrative is misleading and significantly so, because it turns the true publishing chronology upside down. This article 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, far from a ‘popularisation’, was actually a journalist's independent publication. It attracted nationwide, indeed international, attention and stayed on best-seller lists for two years. During that time, psychologist Daniel Levinson and psychiatrists Roger Gould and George Vaillant claimed authority over the concept of midlife crisis in their own books, all published with leading mainstream publishers. Contrary to the received narrative, they did not invent or discover the ‘midlife crisis’, but reversed its meaning. Sheehy's ‘midlife crisis’ was a feminist idea. She described the onset of middle age as the point when men and women abandon traditional gender roles. Drawing on the language of the women's movement and on feminist science, she presented a concept that challenged separate roles and encouraged women's liberation. Levinson, Vaillant and Gould responded with a male-centred definition of midlife crisis that stigmatised criticism of gender hierarchies as man-hating and barred women from changing their lives. The notion of popularisation, I shall argue, did important work in making this the dominant meaning of ‘midlife crisis’. The demarcation between ‘real’ and ‘popular’ psychology allowed Levinson, Vaillant and Gould to cast their backlash as original. The received tale of the midlife crisis is therefore not simply wrong; it feeds on and continues to nourish a narrative that has played important political roles. This article reverses histories of ‘popularisation’ 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 and 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 ‘popularised’ and ‘disseminated’ scientific research, they also drew on it to advance their own arguments, and frequently challenged academic findings and expertise. Moreover, social scientists responded to magazine articles and used or refuted ideas propagated in best-selling books, often weaponising the notion of ‘popularisation’ to delegitimise critique and assert scientific authority and originality.4 The anti-feminist reconstruction of the midlife crisis sheds light on the widespread and influential rhetoric of delegitimising claims for women's social and economic equality as ‘narcissistic’ pulp psychology. Just as historians are breaking up movement-focused ‘wave’ chronologies and so amplifying definitions of feminism, I shall suggest that we also should reconsider how backlash was articulated and to what effect.5 Discrediting liberatory voices as shallow and sensational relied on notions of female intellectual incompetence as much as key tropes of cultural criticism. As a way of sidestepping and silencing feminist critique, this was particularly influential at a time when the women's movement resonated widely and many sympathised with its messages. Ultimately, the historical story about the feminist origins and chauvinist appropriation of the midlife crisis points to the relations between the ‘change of life’ and social change. Historians, historical anthropologists and literary scholars have drawn attention to the social, economic and cultural functions of concepts of the life course and their important roles in making and changing social structures.6 Here, I show that the midlife crisis has historical roots in debates about gender roles and work and family values, and the shape these took in the United States in the 1970s. Thus, ‘midlife crisis’ turns from an anthropological constant or platitude and fabrication into a historically, culturally and socially specific concept for negotiating changing gender relations and life patterns. The notion of midlife crisis gained traction with Gail Sheehy's Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976), a book remembered for its Milton Glaser cover: a rainbow-colored flight of stairs (Figure 1). Sheehy used the term ‘midlife crisis’ – coined by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, but rarely used – to describe a turn away from traditional family values and the work ethic in the mid-thirties to forties.7 The transition was experienced by men and women, yet in different ways. Around the age of thirty-five, when, at least in a white, middle-class setting, the last child was sent off to school, women reappraised their lives. 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?’8 While women negotiated trading the roles of at-home wife and mother for a career, men were disillusioned with the world of work. Around the age of forty, they experienced a period of dissatisfaction. Sometimes their careers stagnated or they even lost their jobs – this was, importantly, right after the oil crisis and the stock market crash of 1973. But Sheehy emphasised that even the men whose dreams had come true were unhappy. A Manhattan professional received award after award and had his work shown in international exhibitions, yet ‘Aaron’ (probably the designer Milton Glaser himself) felt depressed and inane. He gave up his studio, and took up cooking and baking.9 Another of Sheehy's interviewees quit a prestigious position in Washington, DC for a lousy job in real estate which allowed him to live with his family in Maine. He told Sheehy: ‘I'll stay home and take care of the kids. I really mean it. I adore children. And to tell you the truth, at this time in my life, I would just love to paint houses and build cabins’.10 ‘Crisis’ described the difficulties attached to this mutual shift: marital tensions, his dissatisfaction with the world of work, her problems finding a satisfying job. As it read in Sheehy's distinctive pop journalistic style: ‘Put together the mounting strong-mindedness of the midlife wife and the strange stirrings of emotional vulnerability in the midlife husband, and what have we got? A mystery story at the peak of its suspense. A chase of highest excitement after our missing personality parts. And an almost predictable couple crisis’.11 The idea of midlife crisis wed Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), from whose first paragraph Sheehy borrowed the phrase ‘strange stirring’, to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950).12 Sheehy was a writer and journalist, and contributing editor at New York magazine, where she covered marriage and family lifestyles as well as the women's movement, but also race, counterculture and city politics more broadly. She had written for various newspapers and magazines since the early 1960s, most notably the New York Herald Tribune, until it folded in the mid-1960s and New York was built from its Sunday supplement. Sheehy's book debut Lovesounds (1970) was a divorce novel, a programmatic critique of marriage, followed by a series of reportages and essays on the same topic. After a fellowship in ‘interracial reporting’ at Columbia University, she published Panthermania, about the Black Panther trials in New Haven, then an investigative report about prostitution in New York's Time Square, written in the reform-oriented ‘muckraking’ tradition. Hustling (1973) informed municipal politics and won a National Magazine Award for reporting excellence, but also got caught in the New Journalism controversy for its usage of composite characters.13 Initially planned as a book about couples, contracted with the small New York publishing house E. P. Dutton, Sheehy's latest project was soon renamed ‘Growing Up Adult: Ages and Stages of Development in Men and Women’, begun on a journalism fellowship in 1973–4.14 Tying into Sheehy's longstanding interest in sexual politics, Passages was a work of social criticism befitting an experienced journalist. The book was based on life-history interviews Sheehy had conducted with 115 women and men. She also drew on biographies, autobiographies and some novels, and made extensive use of works of social criticism – Alvin Toffler, Philip Slater – as well as research from disciplines that had a long tradition in life-course research, such as psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology and economics as well as medicine and sexology. The new feminist scholarship that multiplied rapidly through the 1970s was central. This field grew from one integrated women's studies programme in 1970 (at San Diego State, with other pioneering programmes in the California state university system following suit) to 150 in 1975 and 300 in 1980.15 Sheehy consulted published and unpublished studies by psychologist Matina Horner (on women's ‘fear of success’), economist Margaret Hennig (on women executives) and sociologist Harriet Zuckerman (on Nobel laureates). She cited Juliet Mitchell's critique of ‘penis envy’, sociologist Jessie Bernard's assessment of the use and abuse of marriage for men and women and psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey's feminist redefinition of embryogenesis.16 ‘Sheehy goes beyond the academicians’, the dust jacket of Passages said, thus pre-empting criticism of her comprehensive perspective, but also expressing Sheehy's stance towards academic research, which was often sceptical. She rarely employed the expository, laudatory tone characteristic of science writing.17 Rather than seeking to make academic work accessible, she drew on it to prove a point of her own. Such usage of scientific results and academic theory was taught at the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, where Sheehy had been a fellow in 1969–70 in the school's Interracial Reporting Program. This mid-career course was geared towards journalists with several years of experience, and rather than journalistic techniques it sought to communicate methods for deploying scientific research, especially from the behavioural and social sciences. Research, in content and method, was presented as a resource for contextualising and making sense of contemporary issues: ‘The journalist will better understand the social significance of what he is reporting if he is able to relate this to larger bodies of knowledge’.18 Sheehy attended Charles V. Hamilton's political science course on ‘Black Politics’, another class on urban politics and two anthropology courses by Margaret Mead, later involved in the Passages project as a mentor.19 The Columbia approach reflected the historical connection between journalism and the social sciences, and tied in well with Sheehy's background.20 Under the banner of the New Journalism, New York, Sheehy's headquarters, celebrated its stories as implementations, even augmentations of Max Weber's theory of social stratification, as ‘sociological studies of urban life that academic sociology had never attempted: the culture of Wall Street, the culture of political graft in New York, cop culture, Mob culture, . . . capital-S society and its discontents’.21 Of her Passages interviews, Sheehy emphasised the methodological congruencies between journalistic and academic research, and in the spirit of the countercultural critique of expertise, cut claims to universal knowledge down to size by likening science to folklore such as the ‘seven-year itch’ and earlier life-cycle theories.22 [M]ost of the research was being done by men who were studying other men. Men and women may be isolated for the purpose of a scholar's study, but that is hardly how we live. We live together. How can we possibly expect to understand the development of men until we hear also from the people who bring them into the world, from the women they love and hate and fear and perform for, depend on and are depended on by, destroy and are destroyed by?23 A central target of Sheehy's critique was Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst who had formulated one of the most widely circulating concepts of the human life cycle, the ‘Eight Stages of Man’, presented in the landmark study Childhood and Society (1950).24 His defence of women's ‘biological destiny’ was a major target of feminist criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, voiced by Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Naomi Weisstein and others.25 Written in light of these assessments, Passages provided an alternative to the psychoanalyst's model of ego development. Sheehy argued that Erikson's stage theory did not apply to women.26 Of his definition of middle age as the stage of ‘generativity’, or parenting in the broader sense, she held that, ‘once again the male life cycle is presented as the adult life cycle. Overlooked is that serving others is what most women have been doing all along’. She proposed to supplement Erikson's model: ‘If the struggle for men in midlife comes down to having to defeat stagnation through generativity, I submit that the comparable task for women is to transcend dependency through self-declaration’.27 Dr Vaillant confuses me when he explains how the men who received the highest scores in overall adult adjustment mastered intimacy in their twenties. ‘Of the best adapted men’, she writes, ‘93 percent had achieved a stable marriage before 30 and stayed married until 50’. He would seem to define intimacy as staying married. One wonders how many of these wives enjoyed full adult development.29 Indignation marked the starting point of Passages and drove Sheehy's engagement with theory and research. In her memoirs, she remembered that she enjoyed a ‘shrug of insubordination’ by dismissing canonical works of social science that she saw as addressing ‘only one-third of a much bigger picture’, while two further questions needed to be asked, ‘What are women doing and feeling as they negotiate that tricky passage [into middle age]? And how is the transition played out in the double-message dialogue of the couple?’30 To answer, Sheehy combined studies of men with research from women's studies, and compared them, challenging male as much as female gender norms. Passages was an exercise in what the historian Joan Scott, writing some years later, described as critical supplementation: new thinking about women not only filled gaps but also critically exceeded the ways in which gender scripts had been conceived. ‘Supplementing’, in Scott's understanding always also meant ‘rewriting’.31 Passages was published in a period when economic crisis and changing social norms destabilised the model of the nuclear family with a male breadwinner and at-home wife and mother. In the United States, the ‘male-breadwinner model’ was prevalent in the white middle class, but more widely relevant as an ideal and the central paradigm for social policies. Its erosion, in the 1960s and 1970s, has been described as a classic example of an overdetermined phenomenon. The middle-aged parents of the baby boom, facing the rising cost of rearing children in late adolescence, struggled with what demographers called the ‘life-cycle squeeze’: the gap between suburban life-style aspirations and family income.32 The family wage ideal eroded, divorce rates rocketed, women's access to higher education was improved. Real wages for men stagnated, their education was prolonged and corporations ended the lockstep-career model, uncoupling the link between seniority and income and job security, an effect which early-retirement policies increased.33 The rise of the two-earner family meant the end of a life pattern of early marriages and stable family lives, what sociologists call the ‘de-standardization of the life course’.34 Life paths transformed for men and women from the middle class. Under these conditions, feminism, with its critique of the male breadwinner family and demands for careers for women and new roles for men, turned from an oppositional movement into a social and cultural value, and a strong force in reshaping the lives of men and women.35 Sheehy declared divorce and midlife career changes normal and ‘predictable’, and described them as desirable steps towards ‘growth’ and ‘development’. Her definition of midlife crisis made sense of the decline of the male breadwinner model and valorised the emergence of female breadwinners and dual-income families. Critically acclaimed and widely read, Passages made the midlife crisis broadly popular. ‘Gail Sheehy's book is different. . . . Her research is thorough and imaginative’, said the New York Times Book Review; for the Los Angeles Times the book elicited ‘a shock of both identification and profound relief’; and the Ms. reviewer reported that she ‘barely made it beyond the introduction to Passages before I found myself underlining passages – not because I was learning new facts, but because finally somebody was putting universal human fears and uncertainties about change and growing old into a manageable perspective’.36 ‘That's an excellent book’, said a young woman standing with her partner in front of a shelf of books at the Harvard ‘Coop’, and pointed to Sheehy's, then out for close to twelve months.37 It remained on American best-seller lists for two years, longer than any other book published the same year. On a rough estimate, one in five American book-readers read Sheehy's book. Even more knew it from reviews, excerpts and author interviews, which were printed in the major newspapers and in many academic journals, or from the bookshelves of friends and relatives. The success was double-edged for Sheehy's publisher Dutton, whom it allegedly led to overspend on increasing production.38 But as a result, Passages also circulated internationally. Translated into twenty-eight languages, it reached readers throughout North America and Western Europe, as well as in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the South Pacific. Commentators spoke of a ‘global best-seller’.39 In America, Passages was also read as social science. Between 1976 and 1978, it was reviewed in numerous academic journals, including Contemporary Psychology and Contemporary Sociology – the organs of the American Psychological and Sociological Associations respectively – and in various professional periodicals in the fields of marriage and career counselling, social work and adult education.40 Writers and journalists contributed fundamentally to academic controversies over gendering central theories of the social and human sciences in the 1970s.41 Their impact built on the established influence of journalistic reportage on American social science and on a tradition of operationalising ‘everyday psychology’.42 Science in public, Ludwik Fleck writes, ‘furnishes the major portion of every person's knowledge. Even the most specialized expert owes to it many concepts, many comparisons, and even his general viewpoint . . . [Scientists] build up their specialized sciences around these concepts’.43 Sociologist Jessie Bernard's mention of Passages in her classic The Female World (1981) is indicative of the dialogue between academia and journalism, and of Sheehy's close relation to women's studies in particular: ‘Twenty years ago I wrote that the age of thirty-five seemed an important watershed in the lives of women . . . These observations were made without any systematic research to support them. Twenty years later Gail Sheehy, on the basis of long interviews with women, confirmed them’.44 Bernard's explicit reference was, however, exceptional in its open acknowledgement of non-expert literature. Experts who embraced Sheehy's message rarely gave her credit and often downplayed her impact, praising, for example, her collection of ‘mountains of interview data’, ‘impressive’ notes and ‘substantial’ bibliography, but making sure to add that, written for a general audience, the book was of ‘limited value’ for professionals.45 If sympathisers were sometimes inhibited, then critics of Passages exploited Sheehy's position on the margins of academia. Adversaries were few, but they had access to influential platforms.46 Primarily, they discredited Passages as bad psychology, an argument that relied on Sheehy's usage of psychology and the social sciences but was also a sign of her feminist politics. The same criticism had just been lodged against other feminist authors, independent of whether they used psychology. In an assault on ‘Psychobabble’ (1975), writer and self-described neologist Richard Rosen moved seamlessly between R. D. Laing or Fritz Pearls and the recent feminist literature: Erica Jong's classic consciousness-raising novel Fear of Flying (1975) and Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden (1973) and Forbidden Flowers (1975) – compilations of women's sexual fantasies collected through letters and interviews that intended to refute stereotypical images of female sexuality.47 (Friday's more famous My Mother/My Self was published two years later). Such criticism was based on the established link between femininity and feelings, which implied women's intellectual inferiority.48 The notion of ‘psychobabble’ differed from that of ‘folk’ or ‘kitchen’ psychology only insofar as it applied specifically to ideas from ego psychology and the human potential movement, such as ‘self’, ‘development’ and ‘liberation’. Because of the prominence of psychological ideas in Passages and because of the book's high profile, criticism of Sheehy acted as an important catalyst for establishing the anti-feminist dismissal of feminist publishing as bad psychology. Passages had been dismissed before it was even published. In an anonymous Time article about the book, ‘The Gripes of Academe’, John Leo, editor of the magazine's behavioural science section and an ardent anti-feminist, who would soon lash out against Shere Hite's Report on Male Sexuality (1981) and later Thelma & Louise, reported a plagiarism charge against Sheehy.49 This had been levelled two years earlier by Roger Gould, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, also in private practice, who threatened to sue Sheehy for ‘plagiarism and copyright infringement, inter alia’.50 The appendage was important; plagiarism was not an actionable civil offence and American copyright protected verbatim expressions only, not ideas, so that Gould (or his lawyer) reverted to contract law, a common procedure for plagiarism cases.51 The charges referred to a pre-published Passages excerpt in New York magazine, ‘Why Mid Life Is Crisis Time for Couples’ (1974), a detailed case study, which prominently cited Gould.52 Sheehy had interviewed the psychiatrist several months earlier, and they had exchanged and discussed unpublished texts.53 Gould accused her of paraphrasing and copying him, and – more legally relevant – of violating a potential ‘co-authorship agreement’ by publishing the text under her ‘exclusive ostensible authorship’.54 He demanded to be ‘fairly compensated’ for his ‘contribution to the basic concept and content of Ms. Sheehy's book’, threatening that else he might go to court. Such plagiarism cases against writers and journalists were not uncommon (although typically advanced against male authors), and were regularly settled to the claimant's advantage.55 The ‘fair use’ defence that allows the appropriation of copyrighted work in journalism and research in the US became effective only four years later, and the use of unpublished sources remained difficult even then.56 Sheehy kept Gould from bringing the action to law and publicising it by offering to pay him $10,000 and 10 per cent of the book's royalties, including a $250,000 paperback sale. Within two years after the publication of Passages, Gould had already earned more than $75,000 in royalties, and was ironically called ‘the first [academic] to make that much from someone else's book’.57 As Marilyn Randall has argued, plagiarism arises from the judgment of readers more than from the intentions of authors.58 In publicising Gould's plagiarism accusation, Time magazine corroborated it, speaking of a ‘plagiarism suit’, not breach of contract. It also updated and extended the charges from the magazine article to the forthcoming book, and from Sheehy's exchange with the psychiatrist to her handling of scientific sources in general. Leo charged Sheehy with having ‘unfairly ripped off her professional mentors’ and appropriated their research: ‘Many of Sheehy's findings were indeed reported earlier by academics; where she does cite experts they tend to be introduced as mere spear carriers in her own pageant’.59 He elicited an additional complaint about ‘unacknowledged borrowing’ (a paraphrase for plagiarism) from social psychologist Daniel Levinson: ‘She is incomplete, to put it mildly, in acknowledging her use of my published and unpublished material’. Sheehy rejected the charge of plagiarism as ‘wholly false’. In a letter to the editor, she pointed out that Leo's judgment was based on advance galleys without the notes and bibliography, explained that ‘the original theory came from Erik Erikson’, and that she departed from it anyway: ‘Most of the current research . . . was being done by men who were studying other men. I focused on the life-stages of women, and once it became clear that the developmental rhythms of the sexes are strikingly unsynchronised, I went on to examine the predictable crises for couples’. Time typically published letters to the editor within three weeks; Sheehy's response was printed with an unusual delay of six weeks.60 I think that Miss Sheehy's fundamental idea is more original – at least in the way she applies it – than she does . . . Miss Sheehy does not give herself sufficient credit for adapting this notion with some ingenuity to contemporary life. Erik Homburger Erikson wrote of various stages of human life, too, but while she draws upon his ideas, she adds to them as well. She has a talent for the concrete, partly because she is a good journalist and partly because she has talked with 115 people.62 One of the few reviewers to pick up the plagiarism allegation was Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic known for an adversarial stance toward women's liberation. He turned the plagiarism allegation into the less morally charged but more encompassing notion of pulp psychology. His write-up in the New York Review of Books, ‘Planned Obsolescence’, appeared when Passages had been out for close to half a year and reviewed in most American newspapers and many magazines.63 The last review had been published six weeks prior, in the New Republic, where sociologist Robert Hassenger praised Sheehy's critique of gender roles and anticipated that ‘this book . . . will scare the pants off a lot of people’.64 Lasch proved him right. The midlife crisis was an early target of Lasch's criticism of ‘narcissism’, which he had conceptualised in the New York Review of Books a few weeks earlier.65 It was pre-dated by a wider journalistic usage of the term and concept, most prominently exemplified by Tom Wolfe's New York magazine essay ‘The Me Decade’.66 In the Passages review, Lasch did not speak of ‘narcissism’ (he would, later), but the criticism he lodged against Sheehy was typical of the concept's use to deplore the erosion of family values and blame it on self-absorption as much as feebleness and resignation, and especially on women's liberation.67 In the 1970s, the idea of narcissism expressed anxieties about declining status at a time of economic crisis, climbing divorce rates and changing sexual politics, and accused the women's movement of furthering these problems.68 In effect, she urges people [read: men] to prepare for “mid-life crisis” so that they can be phased out without making a fuss. Under existing arrangements, this may be the best we can expect, but it should not be disguised as “renewal” . . . This is a recipe not for growth but for planned obsolescence.69 Later, reviewing Lasch's The Minimal Self (1984), an updated diatribe against ‘narcissism’, Sheehy repaid the professor in kind: ‘Reading this essay gives one a case not of future shock but of past shock . . . Has Mr Lasch been out of th
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