How do women’s lives evolve in adulthood? This question, seemingly so simple and straightforward, has rarely been asked in psychology or the other human sciences. Very little research has been done on the life course of the individual human being, female or male, in psychology, psychiatry, biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. Indeed, “life course” is one of the most important yet least examined terms in these fields. It refers to the evolution of an individual life from beginning to end. The key words are “evolution” and “life.”
The word “evolution” indicates sequence, temporal flow, the unfolding of a life—be it an individual, a society, an organization, or any other open system—over the years. The evolution of a life involves stability and change, continuity and discontinuity, orderly progression as well as stasis, regression, chaotic flux. It is not enough to focus solely on a single moment or chapter in the life, nor to study the same individuals at intervals of several years as in standard longitudinal research, assuming simple continuity in the intervening periods. Rather, we must examine “lives in progress” (the felicitous phrase is Robert White’s) and follow the temporal sequence closely and continuously over a span of years.
The word “life” is also of crucial importance. A life is, above all, about the engagement of a person in the world. To study an individual life we must include all aspects of living. A life involves significant interpersonal relationships—with friends and lovers, parents and siblings, spouses and children, bosses, colleagues, and mentors. It also involves significant relationships with groups and institutions of all kinds: family, occupational world, religion, community. When we study any of these significant relationships, we must consider the nature of the social context in which it occurs, what goes on in the relationship at a relatively overt, behavioral level, and the subjective wishes and meanings that shape the person’s involvement in it. We must include as well the bodily aspects of life—genetic endowment, biological development, health and illness, bodily fitness and impairment. To study the life course it is necessary to look at an individual life in its complexity at a given time and to delineate its evolution over time.
The study of the life course has presented almost insuperable problems to the human sciences. Each discipline has claimed as its own special domain one aspect of life, such as personality, social structure, culture, or biological functioning, and has neglected or minimized the others. The life course itself has been split into unconnected segments, such as childhood or old age, without recognizing the place of each segment in the life cycle as a whole. The result is fragmentation. I believe that a new multidisciplinary field of study will emerge in the next few decades.
Biography, the description of an individual life, offers another approach. For the most part, biographers have focused on their subjects’ public work (be it fiction, painting, political leadership, or whatever) without considering sufficiently how the work is in the life and the life in the work. In addition, most biographies are concerned with a single life, not with a comparison of several lives or with broader theoretical issues. Well-done biographies can be of enormous value to the understanding of the life course generally. The present study is strongly biographical in method and spirit. It is part of an effort to form a boundary between the humanities and the sciences. Rather than one book-length biography of a single woman, this book contains briefer biographies of forty-five women. I have sought to capture the uniqueness of each individual life and, at the same time, to define and describe developmental principles that shape women’s lives generally.
My primary aim was to learn about the life course and development of women from the late teens to the mid-forties. This is not a comparative study of women versus men. It is, rather, an in-depth exploration of women’s lives. Equal attention has been given to common themes that hold for women generally, to differences between various groups of women, and to the unique character of each individual life. I wanted to gain a detailed picture of every life in order to show the diversity of women’s lives under various social and psychological conditions. Much of the recent research on gender differences has tended to create an oversimplified image of “woman” in opposition to an equally stereotypical image of “man.” My findings support the view that women are similar to men in certain basic respects and different in others, and that the lives of both genders are wonderfully varied.
The method of study was Intensive Biographical Interviewing. I sought to draw out each woman’s life story, as she experienced it, from childhood to the present. I explored the major events, relationships, strivings, and imaginings of her life, with attention to both external realities and subjective meanings. This method, which I initially developed during the research for my book The Seasons of a Man’s Life, has proved to be ideally suited to the exploration of the individual life course, without built-in assumptions about gender and gender differences.
The key questions animating the present study were these:
(1) Is there a human life cycle—an underlying order in the human life course, a sequence of seasons through which our lives must pass, each in its own unique way? Earlier I found that the male life cycle evolves through an age-linked sequence of eras: childhood, early adulthood, middle adulthood, late adulthood, and late late adulthood. Do women have a fundamentally different life cycle? Since the concrete life circumstances and the timing of specific events are different in many ways for women, I could not assume in advance that they would go through the same sequence of eras. (Indeed, I initially decided to study the two genders separately in order to attend fully to the differences.) To my surprise, the findings indicate that women go through the same sequence of eras as men, and at the same ages. There is, in short, a single human life cycle through which all our lives evolve, with myriad variations related to gender, class, race, culture, historical epoch, specific circumstances, and genetics. My view of this life cycle is given in Chapter 2.
(2) Is there a process of adult development analogous to the earlier process of child development? The human sciences have been studying child development for over a century. It is generally recognized that there is a basic developmental pattern in the first twenty years or so of life. All human beings apparently go through a sequence of developmental periods—prenatal, infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence—before reaching that final amorphous state called adulthood. The study of child development seeks to determine the universal order and the general developmental principles that operate to produce uniquely individual lives. Research on child development is concerned equally with the universal and the idiosyncratic; it is concerned with the emergence of the unique individual out of the universal human. Of course the idea of developmental order includes the existence of disorder, even chaos. A period of relatively stable structure, we find, is followed by a period of flux in which we move from one structure to another.
What about adult development? Does it make sense to look at adult life from a developmental perspective similar to that used in childhood? Until recently this question was rarely asked. It was assumed that development is in its nature a childhood phenomenon: the process by which we evolve from conception to adulthood. Likewise, it has been assumed that senescence is a process of decline or negative growth that shapes our evolution in old age. In between, it would seem, we are on our own, changing in response to specific events but without any developmental order. The study of adult development is in its infancy and struggling to establish itself in the neglected space between child development and gerontology. Paradoxically, we know a lot about specific features of adult life—marriage, divorce, child-rearing, work, illness, stress—but very little about the meaning of adulthood as a season in the life cycle. We have, as it were, a detailed picture of many trees but no conception of the forest and no map to guide our journeys through it. One of my major aims is to form a conception of the life cycle and a map broad enough to provide guidelines for the infinitely varied pathways by which it may be traversed.
In The Seasons of a Man’s Life I presented my own initial map of the developmental periods in men’s lives over the course of early and middle adulthood, from roughly 17 to 65. These periods are not periods in a single aspect of living, such as personality, cognitive, moral, or career development. They are, rather, periods in the development of the adult life structure—the underlying pattern or design of a person’s life at a given time. The life structure of a man, I found, evolves through a sequence of alternating periods, each lasting some five to seven years. A period of building and maintaining a life structure is followed by a transitional period in which we terminate the existing structure and move toward a new one that will fully emerge in the ensuing structure building-maintaining period.
I did not assume that the periods in life structure development would be the same in their nature and timing for women as for men. As with the eras, however, I made the surprising discovery that women and men go through the same sequence of periods at the same ages. At the same time, there are wide variations between and within the genders, and in concrete ways of traversing each period. My current view of human adult development is given in Chapter 2. This view is still provisional, but it has strong empirical grounding in my own and others’ research.
(3) What is the significance of gender in women’s lives? In my opinion, equal attention should be given to the gender differences in concrete life course and to the gender similarities in basic developmental pattern. In seeking to understand the deeper sources of the observed gender differences, I have developed a theoretical perspective on the meanings of gender and the differential place of females and males in our society.
My perspective on gender is presented in Chapter 3. The central concept is gender splitting—a sharp division between feminine and masculine that permeates every aspect of human life. Gender splitting takes many forms: the rigid distinction between feminine and masculine in the culture and in the individual psyche; the division between the domestic world and the public occupational world; the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, with its distinction between the male husband/father/provisioner and the female wife/mother/homemaker; the linkage between masculinity and authority, which makes it “natural” that the man be head of household, executive and leader within the occupational domain, and predominant in a patriarchal social structure.
The actual forms of gender splitting vary widely among cultures and historical periods, but the underlying process has operated powerfully in most societies we know about. In the last few centuries the forces of institutional and technological change have tended to modify and blur the traditional gender splitting. This in turn has led to changes in the meanings of gender and the relationships between women and men generally. We are now in the early stages of a vast historical transition. The traditional patterns are eroding but satisfactory new ones have not yet been discovered and legitimized. Evidence of our confusion and conflict is given in the current social-political turmoil regarding reproductive rights, “family values,” and the place of women in the occupational world.
(4) How are these conceptions of development and of gender reflected in the lives of individual women? Chapters 4 through 15 follow the women studied through the successive developmental periods to age 45. I will try to show how my concepts emerge out of, and are grounded in, the individual biographies. At the same time, I will show how this theoretical perspective helps to illuminate and make sense of an actual life. My goal throughout is to demonstrate both the underlying order and the manifest diversity, uniqueness, and frequent disorder in the lives of women. I turn now to a brief consideration of the methods employed to answer the above questions, especially on the methods of interviewing and selecting a sample. My purpose is not to give a highly technical account, but to show how the choice of research methods was shaped by the questions and my way of thinking about them. The questions, substantive ideas, and procedures for gaining relevant evidence were organically connected. Most of the commonly used methods would have prevented me from exploring what I had in mind.
This study is biographical in approach and method. My primary goals were: (1) to elicit the life stories of a number of women; (2) to construct a biography of each one in her own words; and (3) to learn something from this rich material about the nature of women’s adult development and about specific life issues relating to friendship, work, love, marriage, motherhood, good times and bad times, the stuff that life is made of. These goals strongly influenced the research methods.
The standard quantitative methods of survey research, testing, and brief structured interviewing are very useful for certain purposes, as I know from my earlier research. They allow us to study the largest sample in the shortest time, using a staff composed mainly of technicians and a computer that makes statistical order out of masses of raw numbers. It is hardly more difficult or costly to study a sample of 500 than of 100. At their best, these methods provide the aura of rigor, quantification, and high technology which gives this mode of research the ring of objectivity and true science, which in turn makes it easier to obtain research grants. Considering the convenience and the appearance of scientific legitimacy such methods offer, they are hard to give up, even when it makes no real sense to use them. Unfortunately, they are poorly suited to exploratory research in a field relatively lacking in theory, in descriptive knowledge, and in measuring instruments of demonstrated validity.
I decided that, despite the difficulties involved, it was essential to use and develop further the method of Intensive Biographical Interviewing initially developed in The Seasons of a Man’s Life. This is a time-consuming process. In the present study, an interviewer and a research participant typically met weekly for a series of eight to ten sessions over a two- or three-month period. A session lasted one and a half to two hours. For each participant there were fifteen to twenty hours of taped interviews yielding some two hundred to three hundred typed pages. Owing to budget constraints, six of the faculty members were interviewed two to four times, for a total of four to eight hours. The interviews were held when and where the participant preferred, usually in her home or workplace or in the interviewer’s office. The interviewing was done by a staff of eight women and four men, including myself (see Preface). The staff met regularly to discuss individual lives, the sample as a whole, and various subsamples, issues in interviewing, our evolving ideas about gender and adult development, specific concepts and controversies, and the work of others.
The primary aim of Intensive Biographical Interviewing is to enable the participant to tell her life story from childhood to the present. The word “story” is of fundamental importance here. It is common in academic settings to say that we are getting a “history”—a clinical case history, developmental history, work history, or family history. Such histories focus selectively on particular events and issues of importance to the history taker. When we want to learn about the life course, however, the term “story” is more appropriate. The person telling her story is identified by the researcher, and experiences herself not as a patient, client, or research subject (that is, object), but as a participant in a joint effort. The participant is more freely and fully engaged when she feels invited to tell her story in her own terms, and when she feels that the interviewer is a truly interested listener/participant in the storytelling. The story is the medium in which various messages are delivered—about joys and sorrows, times of abundance and times of depletion, the sense of wasting one’s life or of using it well, efforts at building, maintaining, and ending significant relationships.
The task of telling the story is mainly the participant’s. The interviewer’s task is to facilitate the storytelling: to listen actively and empathically, to affirm the value of what she or he is hearing, to offer questions and comments that help the participant give a fuller, more coherent, and more textured account. The biographical interviewer is different from the survey interviewer, whose task is to obtain specific information on specific topics, and from the psychotherapist, whose task is to help the participant understand and modify her inner problems. The interviewer’s interest in the life story and responsiveness to it are crucial factors in the participant’s readiness to tell it, especially those parts that are deeply satisfying and/or painful.
My collaborator, Judy D. Levinson, developed the method of Biographical Reconstruction in the analysis of the qualitative interview material, which helped us hear the many subjective voices of the women. As I have said, the primary aim of Intensive Biographical Interviewing is to enable the participant to tell her life story—to give a relatively full account of the life course—from childhood to the present. The story is the raw material out of which the biography is reconstructed. The great challenge is to describe the individual life course as richly as possible and to generate concepts that represent its underlying complexity, order and chaos. The method of Biographical Reconstruction enables us to condense and order some two hundred to three hundred pages of interview transcript pages while preserving the life story in the woman’s own voice. This method provides a crucially important first step in the construction of the life. It shortens and makes more manageable the many hours of interview material while maintaining its qualitative meanings and themes. Once this step has been taken, we are in a much better position to identify major life themes that hold for all three samples, to develop concepts and hypotheses, and to give rich descriptive findings about the adult development and meanings of gender for women generally.
The biographical method has inherent limitations, especially in the reliance on memory and reconstruction, but it also has major advantages and ought to be recovered from the limbo to which psychology has relegated it. This method has special value for the study of life structure development. It is the only one that enables us to obtain a complex picture of the life structure at a given time and to delineate its evolution over a span of years. It is well suited for gaining a concrete sense of the individual life course, for generating new concepts, and for developing new hypotheses that are rooted in theory and relevant to the lived life.
The choice of research method influenced the size and character of the sample. I decided to study forty-five women in all, fifteen in each of three samples. This number was small enough so that we could obtain relatively full life stories, yet large enough to provide a picture of individual lives under widely varying conditions. In addition, we obtained questionnaire data from several hundred women, the pool from which our interviewees were selected. Since the study dealt with the life course until age 45, there were arguments for selecting a sample currently in their middle to late forties. Instead, I chose to include women ranging in age from 35 to 45. This age distribution has the disadvantage that its younger members have not completed the entire sequence to 45, but it has several compensating advantages. Women of about 45 can describe their lives until that age and give a rich account of the recent years, but their story of the earlier years may not be as full. Women in their late thirties generally describe their twenties and early thirties with more immediacy and vividness. In eliciting and interpreting a life story, we must take into account the vantage point from which it is told. A person of 45 reviewing her life until 30 is telling the story from a different vantage point than she would have at 30 or 40. All research, no matter how rigorous its design and measurement, inevitably presents problems of interpretation. No single study can be conclusive.
On what basis should the sample for this kind of study be formed? There are many possibilities. Some are clearly better than others but no single one is “best.” I decided on the following: (1) homemakers; (2) women with careers in the corporate-financial world; (3) women with careers in the academic world.
The fifteen homemakers were drawn randomly from the city directory of the greater New Haven area (excluding only the small number in careers of the kind represented by the other two samples). They were a good cross section of the general population and varied widely in social class, education, religion, ethnicity, work, and marital history. They lived mainly as traditional homemakers in a family-centered pattern. The nature and extent of their outside work were quite varied: a few had not worked at all outside the home; some had worked off and on at unskilled or semiskilled jobs; still others were in “female” occupations such as nursing and schoolteaching. They differed also in the evolution of their involvement in outside work. For some, a job had always been a burden to be undertaken only out of financial necessity, and not a source of satisfaction or meaning in life. For others, outside work became increasingly important, joining family as a central component of their lives. This sample reveals the durability of the traditional pattern as well as the profound forces that are changing it.
These fifteen career women were at the opposite extreme from the homemakers. They were employed in major corporate-financial organizations in the New York City area. They were part of the first generation in which a sizable number of women (though still a small minority) entered a high-status male occupational system and tried to make occupation a central component of their life structure. Some of them held professional-technical positions such as investment analyst or portfolio manager, with no managerial responsibilities. Others had management staff positions in areas such as human resources, public relations, and corporate planning, which were not on a track leading to the highest levels. Very few women in this sample, or in the corporate world, had positions involving line authority in the corporate structure. Their average annual income in the early 1980s was about $60,000, with a range of roughly $25,000 to over $200,000. It would be considerably higher in 1990s dollars. In the larger pool from which the sample was selected, the great majority were in their thirties; a smaller number were in their early forties and very few over 45; before the 1970s a career path in this field was virtually closed to women. About half were unmarried, slightly more childless. Both the benefits and the costs of this life were substantial.
The sample of fifteen faculty members in colleges and universities was intermediate between the first two. Like the businesswomen they were struggling to combine career and family, but the corporate world is even more stressful and sexist than the academic and provides even less support for combining career and family. They all were employed at one of several institutions located in the New York–Boston corridor. Each of these institutions provided rather different career paths for women, and their faculty members varied somewhat in social and educational background. In all of the institutions, however, the female faculty were largely in junior faculty or marginal (non-tenure track) positions and more were in the humanities than the sciences. The women in this sample were highly diverse with regard to academic rank, field of study, and social background, as well as educational, occupational, and marital/family history.
These samples are certainly not an accurate cross section of the national population, but this is not a statistical study. The great majority of American women are still primarily homemakers. Although most of them have jobs, few have a long-term occupational career. Women with corporate or academic careers such as those studied here are still in a small minority. Their numbers are increasing, however. A better understanding of their lives will be of growing importance to individual women and men, to work organizations, and to the direction of our future social policies.
Many significant groups are not represented in our sample. However, there are great differences between the samples and great variation within each. The intensive study of individual lives enabled us to explore the complexity, subtlety, and variety of those lives and to free ourselves from the stereotypical images of “woman” that flourish in this time of gender splitting. In comparing the lives of the homemakers and the career women, it became clear that we have much to learn about the current state of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise and the issues women face when they attempt to modify it.
Chapters 2 and 3 present more fully the perspectives on adult development and on gender, which form the twin vantage points from which I shall then examine women’s lives. Chapters 4 through 9 follow the homemakers through the successive developmental periods to age 45. Chapters 10 through 15 do the same for the career women, identifying themes common to both career samples while also noting differences between the faculty members and those in the corporate-financial world.