ANONYMOUSThe Age 30 Transition is a mid-era shift from the Entry Life Structure to the Culminating Life Structure. Its nature and developmental tasks have been discussed in Chapters 2 and 7. For the career women this period began at 28 or 29 and ended at 33 or 34. It was a time of significant change, a major turning point in the life course. In each life there were several marker events of great importance. There were also important “nonevents”: highly anticipated events (such as promotion, marriage, pregnancy) that did not occur, and their nonoccurrence had an impact on the woman’s life. Broadening our perspective from single events, nonevents, and relationships to the process of living over these years, we find a transitional period in which the Entry Life Structure for early adulthood is being terminated and the Culminating Life Structure for early adulthood is getting under way. In every case the life structure that emerged in the early thirties was appreciably different from that of the twenties.
By the early twenties, as we have seen, all thirty career women had outlined a life plan for early adulthood: after college, the young woman would take a job or go to graduate school and become more competent and independent. By her middle to late twenties she would have the ability to start a family without getting trapped in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Until then, she would either defer matrimony (the course taken by most businesswomen), or she would marry a man who was ready to delay having children (the usual choice of the academic women).
What did the woman expect to do when she started a family, presumably in her middle to late twenties? She envisioned some form of modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise in which she would initially do little outside work and gradually return to full-time work as the children got more independent. Family would be the central component of her life structure and occupation would be a second priority. Her husband would be the primary provisioner; he would take her seriously as a person and respect her occupational interests, but would be minimally involved in domestic work. The early marriers typically tried to form a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise of the childless dual-working couple. This enterprise enabled both partners to lead relatively independent lives organized chiefly around work. Only two women started a family before 25 within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
During this period, all the career women went through major changes in job, workplace, income, and occupational path. They came to a new understanding of the work world: the structure of corporations and universities, the ladders (usually highly camouflaged) that exist within them, and the place and prospects of women on various ladders. Many career women went through a marked, often painful process as they became aware of the competitive struggles, the “politics” of organizational life, and the diverse obstacles to advancement for women. The work world was not as caring nor as rational as the young women had expected, and the career women’s progress within it depended upon much more than their own ability and expertise. The career women had to reappraise their occupational aspirations and the relative value they placed on work, family, and other aspects of life.
As the Age 30 Transition ended, both samples of career women were very diverse in their occupational status and prospects for the future. A few women had established themselves on a well-defined career path in a corporation or university. Some were on a career path, but their situation and prospects were more limited or ambiguous. Others were graduate students or were just moving from entry-level jobs to the beginnings of a career path on a corporate or academic ladder, and their prospects were fair to poor. Finally, a few businesswomen were on the verge of leaving the corporate world. Knowing that a woman is completing her Age 30 Transition does not tell us where she is occupationally. It does tell us that she is moving to a new place in her occupational development and that occupation will have a different place in her life structure than it did earlier.
As the Age 30 Transition began, twenty-one career women—eight in business, thirteen in academe—were married. Of the nine currently single women, seven were never-married, two divorced. During this period nine women divorced—more than in any other period. Four of the divorces were by businesswomen and five by faculty. In most divorces, the chief initiator was the woman, but in every case both partners played a significant part in terminating the marriage. The marriages that continued were often problematic (several subsequently ended in divorce), but they were “good enough” for the woman in that they initially made possible a workable combination of marriage/family and occupation. The marriage always had a different character at the end of this period than at the start.
All seven women who were single-never-married at the start of this period were in business. They became more matrimony-minded than before, and three of them married in the Age 30 Transition, despite strong qualms about the choice of husband. Each of the other four had at least one extended relationship in which matrimony was a clear issue. When the relationship failed, each woman suffered great disappointment and went through a painful reappraisal of her options for the future.
Fifty percent of the married career women had extramarital affairs, usually beginning in the Age 30 Transition. Several couples had open marriages. Many career women had not been in love or passionately engaged with the men they married, and the couples often lived parallel, unconnected lives. As time went on, these women began to feel a loneliness in their marriage and missed a more intimate/sexual connection with a partner. About half of the extramarital relationships were casual and nonintimate in character. The other half were not casual; some women fell in love for the first time and had a passionate engagement in the extramarital relationship that had been missing in their marital relationship. Often the extramarital affair was part of the woman’s efforts to live more independently and more on her own terms.
ANONYMOUSI met Brad at work in my late twenties. The personal relationship started slowly and got more intense. Work was very much a part of our relationship, and it existed in the work world. I found myself staying later and later at work, talking with Brad, finding our relationship very special. We started falling in love and started an affair when I was 29. That was my first and most important love relationship outside of marriage. It was a storybook romance—very intense, almost out of control. I never felt this strongly toward anyone else, and yet there was much that kept us apart—he was married; I was married. I knew I had my own marriage and could not consider giving it up. He had married early, had kids and was not ready to get divorced. It was all very irrational, tragic, really, yet exciting and fun, too. He generated a great sexual awakening in me and all sorts of other feelings. It was sexually fulfilling but much more than that. It was wildly romantic, everything I’d always imagined since I was a little girl.
Overall, it was more pain than pleasure. It was extremely costly, and I was full of guilt. The affair was against all my values about marriage and fidelity. I felt it was a threat to my marriage, my morals, my life. But it has been worth all the pain. Nothing has given me such a feeling of myself as a woman. It was a doomed relationship from the start, and it ended by my early thirties. We’re both still in love; we just don’t know what to do about it.
Sexual relationships outside my marriage have given me a certain sense of independence. I need to be my own person, and ultimately if that costs me my marriage I guess I’ll pay the price, but I hope it doesn’t. My husband has never learned of any of my affairs. I’ve never understood why I’ve been willing to take such enormous risk for so little in terms of real satisfaction. I think it has a lot to do with the need to be independent. There’s a strong part of me that does not like family life. It’s suffocating. I will just not suffer this kind of living death. If the cost of that is great pain and suffering, I’ll pay it. It’s been a very bad compromise, but I’ve needed the extramarital relationships for my own development and to go on with my marriage and family life. It’s like a plant that doesn’t get enough water. To play my role within the family I need some nourishment from outside, and while I’ve gotten most of that from my career, it’s not enough. I need other relationships, too. I have always gotten involved with men who do not threaten my marriage because they are not free. I don’t like myself for having the extramarital relationships, but I’ve come to accept it much more than when I was younger. We’re all just muddling through.
Fourteen career women—five in business and nine in academe—were mothers as they entered the Age 30 Transition. As we have seen, the majority of the mothers had their first child at age 27 to 29. For these women having a child was part of the culmination of the Entry Life Structure; the child’s arrival filled a long-unfilled component of that life structure, initiated the process of forming a family enterprise, and shaped the onset of the woman’s Age 30 Transition.
“Giving birth” is a concrete event occurring on a specific date. “Becoming a mother” is a complex process that ordinarily takes two or three or more years. It requires an even longer process to transform a couple into a family and to form a family enterprise. For the career women the process involved several phases: a time of wondering, usually with some conflict, about having a child; a time of decision to become pregnant; a sometimes extended period of trying to get pregnant; the pregnancy; a few years after childbirth when the three are working out, individually and collectively, what it means to be a mother, a father, a child, and a family. The duration of each phase was quite varied.
This process was extremely challenging for the career women. Initially the challenge was to become a mother and a new kind of wife in relation to a new husband/father. In addition, each woman was developing a different, often deeper relationship to occupation and moving toward a new life structure in which motherhood, marriage, occupation, and perhaps other things might coexist in a reasonably satisfactory balance.
As the Age 30 Transition began, the twelve new couples-with-infant were becoming a family and starting to build a family enterprise. The two women who had started a family by 25 came to feel now that their marriage enterprise was intolerably traditional, and they began to question and modify it. During the Age 30 Transition four women had a first child. Most of the eighteen women who became mothers by the end of the Age 30 Transition were increasing their involvement in occupation and beginning to develop more long-term career goals. This period was thus the developmental context in which career women were attempting, for the first time, to create a life structure containing both family and occupation as central components. Eight were businesswomen, ten faculty.
If being a mother is important in the Age 30 Transition, so, too, is not being a mother. Twelve career women had no children by the end of this period. Most of these women wanted to have children but feared they would not succeed. Seven were businesswomen, and four of these women were single-never-married. A fifth, Amy York, divorced without children at 31; as her Age 30 Transition ended she was in a matrimonial relationship with strong plans for marriage and family. Finally, Julia Hart and Pam Kenney were married but deliberately childless as the period ended; they formed a Culminating Life Structure as married working women who expected not to have children.
Five faculty members had no children as the Age 30 Transition ended. Three of them were divorced; without renouncing motherhood altogether, they were forming a new life structure in which career was primary. Two were married. After several miscarriages in the Age 30 Transition, Megan Bennett began coming to terms with nonmotherhood; she decided to remain in a childless marriage and make career central in her life. At 33, her career well launched, Alice Abel began thinking more seriously about having a child but deferred pregnancy for several years.
Various changes occurred in the woman’s relationships to her family of origin, especially parents, in the Age 30 Transition. She occasionally got closer to parents or siblings, but most often there was a growing emotional distance. At the same time the daughter, now an adult offspring rather than a child, often became more responsible and parental toward her aging and increasingly needy parents. It is another of life’s great paradoxes that, as we free ourselves more fully from our dependency upon parents and from our vulnerability to their (and our own) image of us as children, we are frequently caught in a role-reversal that is no less burdensome and no more based upon genuine mutuality.
The term “crisis” is often used but rarely defined (see Chapter 2). It has many implicit meanings. In psychiatry it usually indicates an actual or impending “breakdown,” an inability to maintain one’s usual life pattern, a state of emergency requiring drastic intervention. In everyday language it often refers to a state of inner turmoil, confusion, neediness so severe that urgent help is required. In a more basic sense it means a turning point, a place in a sequence where the subject’s condition is likely to alter for better or worse. It is a time of danger but also of opportunity.
I use the term in this last sense. A crisis in life structure development is a time when the further evolution of the life structure is in considerable jeopardy. The present structure is not working well, but the possibilities for improvement seem limited or nil. It is hard to move forward yet virtually impossible to go back or to stay put. A transitional period is likely to be a time of crisis because the flaws in the existing structure become more evident but the options for change are not yet at hand. The outcome may be a much better or a much worse structure.
Some 90 percent of the career women had a moderate to severe crisis in life structure development during the Age 30 Transition. The woman usually focused on a specific problem: whether to remain in a deadening job or take the risk of seeking something better; being stuck in a hurtful love relationship; being devastated by the end of a relationship; severe marital conflict; difficulties related to having a child or not having a child; problems in managing a job and a household. A crisis in life structure development,however, is not simply a problem in “coping with” or “adjusting to” a single stressful situation. It stems, rather, from the experience that one’s life has somehow gone wrong. The basic question is, “How do I want to live, and how can I move in that direction?” A person’s concerns about this question underlie, and give greater weight to, her distress about the more concrete problems of work or love/marriage/family.
DEBRA ROSEAge 29–35 was a very difficult time in my life. My husband was very ill with liver disease, and it wasn’t clear that he would live. I was very unhappy with my work because I had not been promoted. My mother was dying. It was a terrible time for me, one of the worst in my life. I was very depressed.
We think in our late twenties, “Now I’m really adult.” Then your life and your whole conception of life are shattered; you realize you had a false picture. That happened to me. I was just unhappy with my life. I really didn’t want to go on with my life; the content wasn’t more specific than that. I couldn’t see any alternative to getting on with the life that I had chosen to live, but I just didn’t want to lead that life. Everything seemed hopeless.
Half of the career sample had psychotherapy lasting from several months to several years in the Age 30 Transition—a higher number than in any other period. The incidence of psychotherapy was much higher among the businesswomen and the faculty members than among the homemakers. The difference was due in part to the fact that psychotherapy was more available and more valued in the social-professional world of the career women. It was not, in my opinion, a matter of mental illness. The career women who obtained psychotherapy were not more neurotic, nor in worse straits, than those who did not—or than the homemakers who did not.
The Age 30 Transition is a uniquely difficult period, especially for women. It is a shock to recognize that the Entry Life Structure has major flaws and will not suffice for the rest of one’s life. It is distressing to discover, at around 30 (and again at several other ages), that one still has so much growing up to do. And it is never easy to imagine, explore, and pursue a new life quite different from that of the twenties. Psychotherapy was a source of help that some women could turn to. Other means were used as well: college and graduate courses, body fitness programs, encounter groups, assertiveness training, cultural pursuits, and many others that change with the times. These activities are usually intended to bring about specific improvements in knowledge, skills, aesthetic enjoyment, physical health. Many persons who engage in them have the private hope that the activity will also bring about an improvement in the overall quality and structure of their lives.
Are developmental crises necessary? If we learn better how to cope or adapt, can we not avoid crises altogether? To avoid all crises in life structure development, a person would have to traverse the Early Adult Transition without great turmoil, build a highly satisfactory Entry Life Structure, and then go through so little change in self and external circumstances that major transformation of the life structure was never needed. Unfortunately, most life structures are flawed to some degree. We must build every structure (especially the Entry Life Structure for each era) without being fully prepared to do so. Crisis is less likely if the existing structure seems to require little or no change, if considerable change can be made without great suffering, or if we remain in an unsatisfactory structure without acknowledging its hurtful qualities.
In every life I know about in some detail—through research, psychotherapy, published biography, serious fiction, personal relationships, self-exploration—the person has gone through at least one crisis in life structure development by age 65. From time to time along the life course it becomes necessary to make a significant change in life structure. The need for change in structure derives partly from changes in the self that must be lived out. It derives also from changes in external conditions such as depression, prosperity, war, cultural and institutional change, personal circumstances, our movement from one generation to another with increasing age. Certain forms of crisis accompany our active struggle to create a better life. Other forms occur when we maintain too long a life structure that, however satisfactory it may initially have been, becomes decreasingly viable in the world and suitable for the self.
In the Age 30 Transition, many of the career women, like the homemakers, often came to feel that they had gone through the twenties with minimal awareness of themselves, of their future lives, and of their relationships with significant persons and groups. They realized that they had often lived from day to day, doing what was expected, without any clear sense of making choices. It was not surprising to find this experience among the homemakers, who had generally devoted themselves to following the scenario given by family, class, and community. The career women, in contrast, had had a stronger subjective sense of making choices. During their twenties most women were genuinely independent in many ways—deferring marriage or family, learning to be competent in the work world, becoming more separate from (and in some cases directly opposing) the family of origin. Yet they, too, became aware in the Age 30 Transition that they had been remarkably naive in their personal relationships and work life. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure had operated with much greater force than they had realized and had limited their search for a different path. This awareness was sometimes furthered by psychotherapy but occurred as well without therapy.
Ellen Nagy had a very difficult Age 30 Transition, a rock bottom time. Through great effort and developmental work in the Age 30 Transition she was able to attempt to create the basis for a more satisfactory Culminating Life Structure.
ELLEN NAGYI was pregnant at 28 and very happy. I loved my job and planned to work part-time after the baby was born. I felt like a total woman. I worked intensely all day at my job and returned home to build a nest, cook, decorate my home. Inwardly I still felt insecure and at times overwhelmed with the home, the marriage, and the career.
Jennifer was born as I turned 29. It took me about two weeks after I recovered to realize that I wanted to go back to work—that I had to get out of the house. I didn’t notice any maternal instincts, quite frankly [laughs]. It took me months if not years to entangle my heart with hers. I felt lousy on all counts. I just hated it. I had a terrible sense of being trapped and didn’t know what to do. I really felt that I was the only woman who ever felt this way, that I was some sort of monster. I was awful to live with—profoundly depressed and convinced that I was losing my mind. I was terrified to see a psychiatrist because I was sure he would tell me to stay home with my child. This depressed period lasted two years. No one gave me any support. My mother wouldn’t spend any time with my child to give me relief. She was never interested in being a grandmother. I got overt support and covert undermining from my husband. He was very connected with Jennifer and felt strong competitiveness toward me: “I can be a better father to Jennifer than you can be a mother.” Two months after my daughter was born I went back on birth control pills and back on the job full time. I was commuting four hours a day and traveling internationally. I also took a graduate course because my skills were rusty—and it gave me another excuse not to go home.
I functioned well on the job. Work was the only arena in which I felt all right about myself—competent, respected, and in control. This was in sharp contrast to the relationships at home where I often felt inadequate and bewildered. As my husband grew more impatient with me, I moved more into my career. At 29 I was promoted to manager of a group of ten with line authority over projects. It was a quantum leap for me, into line management. The promotion gave me a fair amount of authority, responsibility, and voice. I enjoyed the challenge and felt that I was learning a great deal. This promotion moved me away from my mentor, Lou; he had to be left behind. It was difficult for him to have his protégée move out from under him and then surpass him. He had been important in the sense that he gave me a lot of responsibility. The fact that I was female had nothing to do with it, and that was wonderful. Lou and I didn’t socialize outside of work, and I had no other mentors.
Other than my boss, most people at work were overtly negative. “Don’t you feel bad not being home with your child?” People who had been supportive earlier became really competitive. I realized that they had written me off as a woman who would eventually go home and have kids. Now they had to deal with me as a person who might be competing for the same job.
Soon after Jennifer’s birth I was put on a task force to see whether the company was using women appropriately in the workforce. That task force altered my life. I hadn’t paid much attention as to why there weren’t women around. I was ignoring the fact that much of the workforce was female; they just happened to be secretaries and file clerks! My younger sister was becoming a pretty radical feminist. I thought she was full of crap, but I wasn’t on good terms with her at that time.
In diabolical form they put in charge of this task force a man who was the original sexist, along with two former secretaries. They decided to have one woman—me—who was educated and a professional. The task force started asking basic questions about what women can and can’t do. It was not apparent who was the most sexist, the men or the women sitting around that table. That forced me into a very activist position, and I began reading and thinking. We asked why there weren’t more women in professional positions. Then we started looking at the hiring and training efforts. There was a high level of overt sexism, a conviction that women could not do this or that. Stuff that I had ignored or buried, just as a survival kind of thing, came flooding in. We made our presentation to the executive committee. I said, “Women can do these things; I’m doing these things,” but no one would listen. All my awareness turned to anger. The anger came from a completely new awareness of what was going on in the world.
Being on the task force was a mixed blessing. At work most people saw me as a person with ability, but many saw me also as an uppity female who was out to cause all kinds of problems, who didn’t fall into line, who wasn’t docile, who didn’t know her place. I had a reputation of being a tough and radical feminist, although I was still at the conservative end of feminism. It hurt my career and helped it at the same time. I got the ultimate “compliment” from the president of the company: “That woman has balls.”
Feminism was an issue in my life by 30. This was a time of great disconnection: trying to integrate family and work, turning 30, finding my whole sense of myself as a woman changed. My business self and my personal self were split. I was involved with the struggle of: Can I be a businesswoman and also an attractive female? I assumed that once you became a mother men didn’t look at you like you’re a sexual person. Men don’t turn 30 and wonder whether they are still sexual people, whether their sex life is over. No man who is successful in his job is ever thought of as not masculine. All of this questioning and inner change was going on within the context of the birth control pills, the task force work and feminism becoming an issue in my life, being a mother for the first time, the problems in my marriage, and the extraordinary level of despair which came from my life circumstances.
At 31 I went off birth control pills to see if it would help my depression, and within two weeks I felt better. I think the physical part of the depression was caused by the pills, but part of the depression had to have come from being stumped about what I wanted to do with my life and being unable to face the implications. Finally I began to ask, “What am I going to do to make my life not be so bleak?”
The marriage started coming apart when I was 31. For a long time I hung all our problems on my commuting—the four hours daily were so tiring and took such a chunk out of my life. I had been committed to marriage as forever, even if it wasn’t working. I hadn’t thought I had a choice, but then I started to sort all that out. I started to enjoy mothering and to regret the commute. Carl refused to find a job in New York, and I began to realize I didn’t want to work outside the mainstream or go back to a much more junior level. Carl and I didn’t fight, but we didn’t have much. We had no connection. By then we had no sexual intimacy, which was certainly my preference. I felt that nobody knew me or cared what was happening to me. I finally concluded that I wanted a different relationship with a man. I wanted to have a physical component and to be with someone whose basic interests and attitudes were compatible with mine, and I wanted more children.
I separated at 32 and divorced at 33. I initiated the divorce, and Carl ultimately agreed. The split-up was difficult in that we were caring of one another. I moved to an apartment in New York City with my daughter and got a full-time housekeeper. We agreed that Jennifer would live with her father summers. There’s no blame on my ex-husband in any sense. Who could have envisioned the changes in our lives? He was moving along a course that was relatively predictable when we were 20. If anyone changed beyond what could have been envisioned, it was me. It’s one thing for a woman to work part-time, have three children, and put her husband’s career first. This was the woman Carl had married. It’s another thing to turn into this woman who was more developed, more focused outside the home, and more cosmopolitan. For the first ten years of marriage he was the right person for me and I for him, and I still think very highly of him.
When Jennifer was born, my colleagues expected me to curtail my involvement in career and channel it into parenting. When I did not do so, they gradually began to view me with more respect, and at 32 I was promoted to a senior executive position. Through my work my stature and influence increased dramatically.
Half of the career women reported having had friendships with other women of some intimacy and importance. The other women reported a wish for such friendship and a sense of deprivation in not having it in their lives. Beginning in the Age 30 Transition the issue of friendship became central for almost all of the career women.
DEBRA ROSEOne of my best friends today is one of my roommates from college, Carol. Although we have rarely lived in the same city and her life is completely different from mine, my friendship with her has always been a very important relationship in my life. I feel she is the one person who accepts me completely as I am.
For Debra Rose, as for many of her fellow career women, one great value of a close friend was as someone with whom she could be honest and open about herself. When she was 29, she wrote a letter to Carol that crystallized this theme. She spoke of the agonizing “real wilderness” she found herself in—a “wilderness” typical of the Age 30 Transition—and of the “many lies and illusions” that she felt forced to live by. Yet her friend was “still there, still a part of my life.”
How far had the career women gone occupationally as the Age 30 Transition ended? Since pathways in the business world are different from those in the academic world, I’ll discuss the two groups in turn.
Taking into account each woman’s work situation at 33/34 as well as her prospects and plans, we can distinguish four levels of advancement within the business sample:
(1) Two women were relative “stars” in terms of advancement, prospects, and income. Ellen Nagy was on a ladder leading to the upper reaches of an international firm. Debra Rose had just been promoted to a top position in a bank. At 33, both women had had mentorial relationships. They had advanced farther than most women in their fields and had good reason to believe that they were getting launched on extremely promising careers.
(2) Four women were entering a well-defined career path, but their situation and prospects were less favorable than those in (1). As the Age 30 Transition ended, Julia Hart and Molly Berger recognized that they were not strong contenders in the bitterly competitive race for promotion. They continued to develop their professional skills but understood that the next career move would take them to a less prestigious firm and/or a different organizational ladder. Abby Murphy had a top staff position in a medium-size company. She had decided to leave the corporate “major league”—subjectively a relief in many ways to those who do so, but also a disappointment. Emma Beechwood had a staff position with good prospects for advancement to a higher staff level, but she was not on a ladder that led to the top of the management structure.
(3) Six women were just moving from entry-level jobs to the beginnings of a career path on a managerial or professional ladder. Their prospects for further advancement were fair to poor. At 30 Michele Proto took her skills as computer programmer to a financial corporation where she hoped to advance from a technical to a managerial ladder, and at 33 she was not clear about her chances for promotion. Pam Kenney spent her Age 30 Transition as an administrative assistant. At 33 she was promoted and, for the first time, thought seriously about moving into management. The other four had corporate jobs as managers and a chance, albeit a small one, of advancing up the staff ladder.
(4) Three women were on the verge of leaving the corporate-financial world. They had come to feel that the psychological costs of a corporate career far exceeded the benefits. While intending to continue with some form of outside employment, they now gave first priority to family. They needed a while longer to make this change, but the plan took shape as the Age 30 Transition was ending. Jessica Hall had her first child at 34 and began planning to replace her career with a more manageable small business of her own. Sally Wolford gave up her job, had a child, and became a homemaker with part-time outside work. Amy York began a matrimonial relationship at 33, with plans to marry, have a family, and quit her corporate work in a few years. This group constituted only 20 percent of the present sample of 35–45-year-old women currently working in the corporate world. It would constitute a much larger percentage of a sample of younger women, many of whom leave full-time corporate employment during the Age 30 Transition.
To provide a context for discussing levels of advancement among the faculty members, let me note briefly the usual steps in an academic career. The university structure is a maze of positions and ranks. The prefaculty steps include: attending graduate school, obtaining a Ph.D. degree, and often holding a temporary position such as postdoctoral fellow, lecturer, or instructor. The “tenure track” faculty positions are assistant professor, associate professor, and professor, in that order. Tenure (a permanent appointment that can be terminated only for extreme cause) is most often granted at the rank of associate professor, occasionally one step higher or lower. There are also a number of nontenure track positions such as lecturer, adjunct professor, visiting assistant professor, instructor; these appointments may be made for one or more years and are renewable, but they provide no career path and no assurance that one will be considered for a promotion and/or tenure track position.
In evaluating the occupational level and prospects of the academic women at the end of the Age 30 Transition, we can distinguish three levels corresponding roughly to (1), (2), and (3) among the businesswomen. There was no faculty counterpart of level (4).
(1) Five women were in the middle of, or were just completing, an assistant professorship and had made a promising start in the academic career. Four of them earned the doctorate at age 26 to 29. Most then spent a few years as postdoctoral fellows or lecturers and at around 30 became assistant professors on the tenure track. A faculty member not on the tenure track—and there are many, a growing number being women—has a rather precarious hold in the college or university and limited chances of promotion. Getting on the tenure track is the first step in a difficult struggle for advancement. For every woman graduate student who gets to this point, there are many who drop out, go elsewhere, or get pushed out along the way. Men face similar difficulties, but to a lesser degree.
During the Age 30 Transition each faculty woman became aware that being a faculty member is tremendously different, in external situation as well as subjective experience, from being a graduate student. As a graduate student the woman was completing her professional training, gaining skills and competence, earning a modest livelihood, performing various adult roles, forming her own home base, perhaps being a wife and mother. Yet she did not have the full responsibilities of adulthood. She lived in a relatively benign, protective environment. Her academic requirements, though at times stressful, were manageable. In the woman’s private experience,however, she often felt mostly like a student without a sense of where it was leading. She had little sense of life after the doctorate. Being a graduate student was real, but being a professor oneself was a shadowy future possibility. Despite considerable success, the woman was often not entirely ready to become a full professional.
As the Age 30 Transition ended the woman had a much stronger sense of self and career and had established herself as a promising young member of the faculty. At this point Rachel Nash and Alice Abel had just become associate professors. Amanda Burns, Helen Kaplan, and Grace Tobin were in the middle of their terms as assistant professors. Advancing to this level did not mean that the women’s difficulties were over. It meant, rather, that they had mastered the initial problems and were now confronted with the challenges of the next career step.
(2) Six women were just becoming assistant professors and getting on the first rung of the faculty ladder. All completed the doctorate (for one of them, the Master of Fine Arts) at age 28 to 31 and then spent several years in fellowships or temporary jobs. They became assistant professors as the Age 30 Transition was ending.
The slower progress of this group of women had its sources both in external circumstances and in the woman’s inner relationship to her career. Florence Russo spent from 29 to 33 earning her MFA, raising a family, and teaching high school. At 33 she obtained her first full-time academic position as assistant professor in a nearby university. Brooke Thompson was an off-and-on graduate student during most of her twenties. She entered a doctoral program at 29, obtained her Ph.D. degree at 31, and started an academic career at 33 after two marginal years. The other women provide variations on these themes.
(3) Four women did not enter a doctoral program until sometime in the Age 30 Transition. They obtained their doctorates from ages 37 to 41. Holly Crane had become a full-time mother/homemaker at 21 and got her master’s degree at 29. Entering a doctoral program at 34, she committed herself for the first time to an academic career. During her twenties Kristin West taught high school and supported her husband’s faltering efforts to become a novelist. In the Age 30 Transition her own artistic/intellectual aspirations began to flourish. As the period ended she obtained a master’s degree and, in an act of great self-affirmation, entered a doctoral program. At the same time she ended her marriage and became a single childless woman attempting to make career central in her life. After getting her master’s degree at 25, Erica Warren spent several years as mother, homemaker, and part-time job holder. She entered a doctoral program at 30, divorced at 32, and remarried the following year. Stacey Lane returned to graduate school at 28; she earned her master’s degree at 31 and her doctorate at 37. As the Age 30 Transition ended she was seeking, with limited success, to combine family, outside job, and preparation for an academic career.
For these women, entering a doctoral program was part of an effort to make occupation more central in their lives. The decision to attend graduate school was a basic life choice, not simply an occupational choice. It reflected a growing sense of self and awareness of personal aspirations. The process of making and implementing this life change was shaped by the developmental tasks of the Age 30 Transition.
Eighteen career women became mothers before the end of the Age 30 Transition. These women had the opportunity to work toward a Culminating Life Structure combining family and occupation. To what extent did they do so? Twelve career women did not have children by the end of this period. How did these women deal with the nonrealization of their plans, and what kinds of life structures did they go on to build? For both groups, I’ll examine the changing place of occupation as well as family in the life structure.
Of the 18 career women who had their first child by the end of the Age 30 Transition, only two started a family before age 25. They initially formed a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise and then sought to combine family and occupation in the Age 30 Transition. Thirteen became mothers at age 25 to 29, in the second phase of the Entry Life Structure; their Age 30 Transition began during the pregnancy or within a few years thereafter. In every case, the onset of the Age 30 Transition led to a severe questioning of the initial modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise and an effort to balance family and occupation more equally in the life structure. Three women had their first child late in the Age 30 Transition. Toward the end of the period most of the eighteen mothers made a firm decision to combine family and full-time occupation. Some women made the decision after being home with an infant for a while and finding full-time motherhood too limiting. Others, like Emma Beechwood, made the decision during the pregnancy. Every mother came to a new view of herself and the meaning of occupation. Work had become essential to her sense of self, and she wanted to have a significant place in the occupational world for the rest of her life.
Some women experienced a growing sense of career. They were forming an occupational identity and long-term goals based on cumulative accomplishment. Other women did not form, or considered and then rejected, the idea of a career with long-term goals. They wanted to make a contribution and be appropriately rewarded by it, but they expected to have a succession of jobs, each presenting itself as an unpredicted outcome of the previous one, without active planning or strategy on their part. The women had come to recognize that the organizational world was a highly competitive arena in which most others were engaged in bitter rivalries, and that women generally fared poorly in that game. They themselves chose not to “play politics” nor to seek highly ambitious goals but to take the best available options.
At the same time, each mother wanted a family and was prepared to accept primary responsibility for the homemaking and child care functions. She “managed” the home by hiring and supervising help, by devoting much of her evening and weekend time to domestic work, and by dealing herself with the recurrent emergencies of household and child care. The husband had to deal with unexpected demands. His new role in family life was not what he had envisaged. His wife was less available than he had imagined to children, to household, and to him personally. She needed his domestic labor, moral support, and involvement with children—not in large amounts, but to a degree that he sometimes found uncongenial or in violation of his own attitudes and values. Every couple had to work out a new marriage enterprise based in part upon a modified marital relationship and sense of self. This task was never simple or without difficulty.
A word about the husbands and their part in the career women’s process of change. They had accepted their wives’ occupational interests and limited involvement in domesticity, but they were by no means egalitarian feminists. Even in the initial phase of marriage as a childless dual-working couple, his career had been seen by both as the primary one, and she was responsible for most of the domestic work. Both partners preferred to give and to receive a good deal of emotional and social space; usually neither wanted an intense or entangling relationship. Many couples lived parallel, unconnected lives.
In many cases the husband’s career progress was uncertain or troubled during the wife’s twenties. By the end of her Age 30 Transition, the wife’s earnings and prospects equaled or exceeded the husband’s in about half of the business sample and a third of the faculty sample. When the first child arrived, the husband was accustomed to living on a dual income and had an interest in maintaining it. Although the couple shared the provisioning function, they had an agreement that he was the primary provisioner: his income covered the standard living expenses, whereas her “net income,” after deducting expenses attributed to her working, was a kind of a bonus to be used for taxes, extra household costs, and savings. The couple went through all sorts of gyrations to downplay the woman’s own career success and to make the husband feel more successful. Once the family began, some of the husbands gave more time to homemaking—but not much more. Each man did a limited amount and kind of domestic work. Anything beyond that limit, however, the husband often experienced as a threat to his career, his personal rights, and his masculinity.
In every couple, considerable effort was required by both partners to resolve the tensions and to create a new marriage enterprise. Divorces were obtained in the Age 30 Transition by three of the eight business mothers and by four of the ten faculty mothers—roughly 40 percent of all the career mothers, a larger percentage of divorce than in any other period.
During the Age 30 Transition, many career women realized that they wanted love/marriage/family and career to be co-central components of their next life structures. They started forming the combined Dream of the Successful Career Woman in a Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprise. In this enterprise, the husband would be the primary provisioner, and his career would have first priority. At the same time, both spouses would recognize the legitimacy and importance of the wife’s career. The woman assumed that she would continue to take major responsibility for the homemaking and child care, delegating some chores to paid household help and doing the rest herself. Under the current historical conditions, it was the best available compromise the women could find between the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The faculty members were more successful than the businesswomen at transforming their modified Traditional Marriage Enterprises into more Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises or choosing second husbands who were more interested in Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprises.
EMMA BEECHWOODEmma Beechwood ended this period with two children, an intact first marriage, a newly structured marriage enterprise, and a new career path. In Chapter 12 we followed her course through the Entry Life Structure, culminating with her pregnancy at 28 and her unexpected decision to continue working full-time after the baby arrived. The story continues with her motherhood at 29:
Jamie turned out to be an ideal child—cute as a button, very smart, very easy to deal with. I don’t remember having a postpartum depression. I was very happy, very pleased with being a mother and having this lovely child. Despite his earlier negative attitudes about girls, my husband liked and enjoyed Jamie, but he wasn’t that actively involved in her care, and he pretty well left the entire thing to me. Our basic rule was and is: I’m responsible for the children; my working is secondary and not my main contribution. Even after my daughter was born, we ran our family finances on the theory that we lived off his income, whereas we saved and invested my income. If for some reason I stayed home it would not be a problem, since my husband supported the family. Until the pregnancy I had expected to follow the same course as my mother: work for several years after college, start a family in my late twenties, spend five or ten years raising kids, and then go back to work, but no career.
The odd thing is that although Russ sees me as responsible for the home, he also wants me to work. He didn’t push me to work, but he made it clear that he was more than happy for me to continue working. He has always viewed his mother as lazy because all she ever did was stay home. For him, being a housewife in the suburbs is a real rip-off.
So I got a full-time housekeeper and went back to work when the baby was born. It wouldn’t have worked at all if I had stayed home. Russ has always worked late a few nights a week and on weekends. I would have gone berserk very quickly, being home all day with a child. I’m perfectly happy to spend time with the children on the weekends when my husband is at the office or at the gym. When Jamie was born I cut down to a forty-hour workweek, at the office from 9 to 5, being a good mother and spending time with my daughter. But that was very hard on me. I felt fine as a mother but terrible about my work—very inadequate, like I wasn’t working enough or doing it right, sort of postpartum work blues. After three months I went back to my usual schedule, leaving earlier for work and getting home around 7:00 p.m.
Wall Street had been in turmoil for five years. I got promoted and found that most titles don’t mean a bloody thing; my title was a substitute for a real promotion and pay raise. I knew that Wall Street and I were not going to make it for the long term, and I began, slowly, to consider other jobs with more career potential.
When Jamie was about 6 months old, my husband and I decided to have another child, so I got pregnant again. A few months later I had a miscarriage. That was pretty sad, a trauma. I decided that was it with my job. I was not going to fool around taking week-long swings around the country and endangering a pregnancy.
Turning 30, I got an excellent job with a small financial company. I worked 9 to 5, had very little travel and more time with my child, which was ideal. There wasn’t the tension and turmoil of Wall Street. Six months later there was another economic downturn, and they fired 25 percent of the staff, including me. Getting fired triggered the decision I had been contemplating for some months: to make a major career change and work in the safe, sane world of the corporation. I wanted a more stable work environment that would give me time for raising a family, and I wanted a place in which I could have a career—be able to change jobs periodically and have a sense of advancement. I hadn’t been looking for either of those before.
At that point I got a job here, a major corporation, and it turned out to be a great decision. I learned later that I was hired as part of an affirmative action program for women. They wanted a woman from an Ivy League school who had a liberal arts background and some experience in the financial community. I more than met those requirements; after seven years on the Street, I was very competent and experienced.
There were lots of problems at the company but also real opportunities for a competent staff person to advance. There were very few junior women and almost no senior women. It is still extremely difficult for women here; that is not explicit policy, but it’s how the world operates. So far I’ve done well—four promotions in seven years. Whenever I got bored with a job, I was offered another one.
Around this time I became concerned that I hadn’t gotten pregnant again, and I really wanted more children, so the doctor gave me mild fertility drugs. Several months later I got pregnant. I had figured that the second child would be a snap. It would be a boy, and we’d have a nice family, and I’d go right back to work because that’s easy, right? I worked until the day before childbirth. But I had a C-section! It was physically a killer, and recovery and taking care of an infant and a toddler was overwhelming through the first year for my husband and myself, even with our good housekeeper. I went back to work part-time three weeks after childbirth and full-time soon after that.
Another thing made that first year (age 32–33) really tough: I was promoted to manager. Just before the baby was born, my boss was promoted up a step, and I was promoted to his job. I had never known what my next job would be and have never plotted out my career in the sense of setting long-term goals. I just figured that as long as I’m performing well one job will lead to another.
Between the job and the kids, it was almost too much. My husband and I got married way before women’s liberation. We have what I would call a traditional relationship where he works and I’m responsible for the house and children, although I work too. We’ve always had a housekeeper to do the household chores, but the child care is my responsibility, and my husband’s help is an extra. I cook the dinners and wash the dishes. My husband occasionally cooks a fancy dinner. After the baby was born, my husband suddenly had to do a lot more. At night he would often get up and feed the baby. We were physically wiped out, just struggling to survive, for months after the baby was born. I remember going away to a management meeting and thinking it was fantastic. You could have breakfast peacefully and just deal with the day without changing diapers and cleaning up messes.
This was one of the hardest times for our marriage, though not the only one. I felt like I was working very hard, and I felt Russ didn’t appreciate me. He may have felt the same way—that he was doing double duty, having a job and doing a lot with the kids, and I didn’t appreciate him. Part of it was that I was more successful in terms of salary and advancement. We didn’t discuss it, but I was becoming more aware that it bothered him. I tried not to mention my income, or getting a raise, but the tension was there.
When I was 33 the turmoil subsided a good deal. My son was a year old, and things were easier at home. My job was also much more in control. My boss was slated for a promotion and prepared me as his successor, and just before turning 34 I got the promotion. I didn’t start out with any great career aspirations and still don’t have them. I have never pushed for a salary increase or promotion; they just came. I think you do better if you’re not pushy. It was somewhat haphazard that I got where I have. I have a good chance of getting into the corporate structure before long, but I don’t dwell on that; others will make those decisions for me.
As the Age 30 Transition ended, Emma Beechwood was forming a Culminating Life Structure in which family and career were co-central components. For her, this life structure was flawed in some respects yet well worth its considerable costs. Her occupation was highly affirming and apparently led, in its meandering way, to an interesting future. She felt committed to her family and hopeful for its future as well. At the same time, there was evidence of discontent. The marital relationship gave her little personally and contained frictions that might in time become harder to tolerate. Likewise, she had done well thus far in her career without having to set long-term goals, to exercise a high level of authority, and to get engaged in competitive struggles for advancement. As she moved up the organizational ladder and into successive developmental periods, the questions of ambition, authority, and competition would probably have to be confronted more directly.
ABBY MURPHYI met Andrew at 25, just as I decided it was time to get married. I liked him, and he had the right credentials—good family, professional, getting an MBA, similar backgrounds and interests. We got married as I turned 27, and it was very nice. We went out to dinner a lot, met people, had companionship. I got home at 8 p.m. after a long commute, and he’d be sitting there reading the paper. Then I’d cook dinner and clean up and do everything, and that was fine with both of us. At the time I thought, “I really enjoy being married.” What I had in mind was, “We will have a happy marriage and everybody will know that, and Thou Shalt Ignore Any Problems.” I was busy putting up and keeping up this image. Looking back, I realize that I didn’t know what a close relationship was; I didn’t have one with my parents or see one between them or anyone else. My main idea was to be the perfect wife, which meant taking care of everything and everyone, including my husband.
A year after we married, Andrew wanted to have a baby. I had mixed feelings about it, and I was trying and not trying to get pregnant, but I got pregnant at 30. During the pregnancy I felt confused and isolated. I didn’t want someone else dependent on me. I hated the idea that I had no control over what was happening to my body and that I was dependent on others for help. I felt ugly and fat. The combination of job, home, and pregnancy was just too much. Andrew wouldn’t talk about it, and I couldn’t talk to anyone else. For a while I even considered abortion.
Finally, I decided to keep working full-time. I would have this perfect child who would be wonderful and dressed in little pink dresses from Saks, and I would be the perfect mother—the opposite of my own mother and of myself as a child. I had never allowed myself to feel things. When I got so upset during the pregnancy, I couldn’t understand where these feelings were coming from inside of me. I lost my self-control and got a little more introspective, but it took me several more years to begin to know myself somewhat better.
My dissatisfaction with Andrew began to surface during the pregnancy. One day I was weeding the garden and asked him to help me. “I don’t do yard work,” he says. I was furious! After that we got a yard service, but it was clear that he still wanted me to do it. That was the beginning of the end. I traveled for six months during the pregnancy—left on Monday, got home Friday night—but I still took responsibility for arranging Andrew’s meals for the week, all the housekeeping chores, everything. At work, my boss gave me a hard time because I was pregnant, but I was determined to stay to the end, and I worked until the last day.
My daughter Mary was born when I was 31. It was an incredibly happy surprise! I felt immediate closeness and a great rush of feeling that I hadn’t expected. I wanted to have more children. She loved to be cuddled, and I loved to cuddle her. I wanted a lot for Mary, and at the same time I started wanting more for myself. I would see the pressure Andrew put on her to fit a certain mold. I didn’t want that for her, and I became less comfortable with the mold I had always accepted for myself—the good little girl who becomes a good housewife. Andrew liked the Abby he had first known: superefficient, uncomplaining, taking care of him and everything else. And as I learned later in my therapy, I had chosen a man who was weak so I could be the strong one, rather than weak like my mother. He couldn’t enjoy Mary and resented my having fun with her. But we never fought because I never stood up for myself.
We had a live-in nurse during the week and a cleaning lady, but I was in charge of the whole shebang. Andrew was very critical of my performance as a mother and gave me no help. I remember once the baby started crying while I was taking a shower, and Andrew brought her to the shower door and insisted that I take care of her; he just couldn’t! Early in the marriage we had a good, active sex life, but it gradually diminished, and after Mary’s birth there were long stretches when we had no sex. I think we both contributed to that. I learned in therapy that I regarded sex as my giving to the man, not as receiving for myself, and after a while I didn’t feel much like giving to Andrew. I also came to understand that the important thing to me was the emotional contact; the sex was secondary.
During Mary’s first year I got more and more depressed. It wasn’t her; she was the only good part of my life. But my job wasn’t satisfying and neither was my marriage. It wasn’t one thing—my life as a whole just wasn’t working. In spite of my newfound resolution to work full time, I felt guilty for not staying home and taking better care of everything—the baby, Andrew, the household. I thought of Andrew as a good father even though his only responsibility was taking out the trash. I felt overwhelmed: “If the wind blows from the wrong direction, this whole house of cards will come tumbling down.” Then I began to realize that I deserved more than I was getting. Instead of believing that I should do everything, I was bothered by all the demands people made on me.
Unfortunately, my job was awful, too. From 30 to 33 I had a position as manager at an international corporation. The job provided good experience, but the company was very impersonal, regimented. I didn’t feel challenged or part of a working team. It was a staff role, and I need to be involved in the decision making. But they figured that women can’t make decisions, so they put them in staff jobs and use that as evidence that women can’t make decisions! I monitored men who didn’t want anyone monitoring them, especially a woman. I was the only woman and the youngest manager in the department. When I’d talk to a project manager, he’d typically pat me on the head and send me away. I felt totally ineffective though I did better than most; all the other managers had ulcers and were counting the days to retirement. I was learning a lot and knew the job would look good on my résumé. It didn’t matter that I hated the job, since I didn’t seriously consider whether I enjoyed my work and what it gave me personally. Your own self-growth is not a relevant topic in the corporate world. Men see business as a game, with no room for feelings or intuition. A big part of my trouble was not understanding the game plan. I was set up in a no-win situation, and I wasn’t good at the politics, manipulating people to do things for me. I just couldn’t survive there.
At 33 I was going nuts about my job and knew that I had to make a change. I went to an intensive six-day personal growth workshop for managers, and it had a tremendous impact on my life. A few months later I took a new job with a big insurance company, another bad decision. I chalk it up by saying that my life was so bad I had to make it impossible before I could get myself out. My biggest problem was the marriage, but I wanted to believe that the marriage would work if I just had a good enough job. I still think that, with a good enough job, I would have tolerated the bad marriage—that’s how I was then. But the new job was horrible. I worked for a vice president and had a fancy title—bullshit! I did liaison work between companies within the corporation. I had to solve their problems without any authority of my own. I worked with men who were part of the Old Boys’ Network, and there was no way they were going to let me in. They were looking for a scapegoat, someone who had the responsibility for creating an order they didn’t want and who could then be blamed for its failure.
At 34, after six months in the new job, I got into intensive psychotherapy and soon decided to leave the marriage and the job, in that order. The best thing in my life was my relationship with my daughter, Mary. I couldn’t stand to see her so sad and alone and lost, drifting aimlessly. I was beginning to focus on those feelings in myself, and it drove me crazy to see them in her. For the first time, I realized that what you need to give a child is not just food and clothing. It’s listening to them, talking, cuddling, commiserating with them. My husband couldn’t give her those things and neither could I for a while. In giving her what I hadn’t received, I was giving to myself as well. The first few years I had offered her very little, partly because my own feelings were so blocked and partly because I was being drained by all the demands on me, especially from her father.
I felt that I was in a life-or-death struggle. I could have killed myself, not by actual suicide but by becoming alcoholic, being nothing, helpless, out of contact, childlike, dull, like my mother. And that would have been all right with Andrew—his mother was like that, too.
I left the marriage at 34. The amazing thing is that I stayed as long as I did. I believed that as long as I had a husband I was safe. Not that he’d meet any needs of mine—I wasn’t aware that I had specific needs or that I had a right to have them—but just that I was safe. As long as my marriage looked like the fairy-tale marriage, it must be so; I had no right to be unhappy. It’s like my parents’ saying they loved me, and I believed it even though I felt so alone and unloved.
Andrew and I quickly got caught up in this horrible custody fight and court battle. That was my initiation rite, and I won every step of the way. We split our assets 50-50. I wanted no money from him for myself, just half of the expenses for child care and my daughter’s education. I went back several times to try to come to a better understanding, but we have never forgiven each other. He sat and cried and said I’d ruined everything. He said, “I did a terrible thing by marrying you. I wanted someone who’d take care of me.”
Andrew always said he supported my career, but he really didn’t. He certainly wanted the money I made; together we earned a great deal. At the end of the marriage he admitted that he had always felt bad because I consistently earned more money and was more competent. He felt that there was no room for him, that he was useless in the relationship. That was true in a lot of ways, and it got much worse after my daughter was born. I felt she deserved more, and I wanted to spend more time with her. It was like taking care of two babies, but she had a right to be a baby and my husband didn’t. He wanted me to take care of everything and be home more, but it was essential for me to work because that was the only place I got recognition and stimulation from other adults.
Just before leaving, I phoned my parents and said, “I’m going to divorce Andrew. If you can’t give me your support, don’t call me anymore.” I was feeling very fragile at that point. I waited for them to call, but they never did. I finally phoned them three months ago—over three years later. There is not much between us now. After I left the marriage I started a whole new life, and a year later I got a much better job.
As her Age 30 Transition ended at 34, Abby Murphy terminated her marriage, began seeking a new job, and started a new life structure as a divorced working mother. The central components of this structure were motherhood and career. Ending the marriage was a “life-or-death” struggle. To remain in it would be a living death like her mother’s life. To terminate it gave Abby the possibility of living with greater engagement and vitality, more on her own terms. She hoped in time to marry again, but this was a question for the future.
STACEY LANEI got a fellowship for financial support. It was a validation and huge moral boost. It meant that somebody else thought I could do this, too. It was three years of courses, one or two a semester. The commuting and going back to school took a huge physical cost, but it was worth it because I wanted my own identity. I finished my courses at 32 and began a six-year project for my Ph.D. I wrote my dissertation a chapter a summer. During all those years I had part time jobs as instructor, lecturer, not getting paid very much for a great deal of work. It was a long, slow process, but I loved it, and I learned I was a good teacher.
ERICA WARRENIn my late twenties I got involved in political activities and began to meet women who were in the Women’s Movement. Then I began to see that it was a systemic problem, that other women were going through the things I was, and it wasn’t just my personal problem. I wanted my husband to share in taking care of the child, but he was very resistant. His attitude was “I don’t want to take the responsibility, and we can’t afford babysitters, so you give up your outside activities—especially those women who are agitating and subverting my wife when she is supposed to be home taking care of the house and baby.” At 28 I got a teaching job as instructor for one year in order to pay for child care. The chairman told me if I’d been a man I’d be paid $3,000 a year more! It was just an incredible amount of work for little pay. I started thinking I’d like to do some serious work, and I began questioning my marriage. I really liked teaching, and I was encouraged to go back for my Ph.D. I was a graduate student from 30 to 37; it was a great reclaiming of a course and self I had left behind so many years earlier. I enjoyed the combination of school and motherhood, and I felt better about myself as a person.
My husband and I hadn’t resolved the business of who was going to do housework and child care, and I was still doing it all. There were incredible time pressures involved in trying to maintain all of these activities at once. My husband expected me to be able to manage the child care and the house on the one hand and going to graduate school on the other. But graduate school was an incredible amount of work and a lot of pressure. I just couldn’t handle it all, and I wanted support from him. His reaction was, “If you can’t handle it, quit graduate school.” We had recurring battles which got louder and more unpleasant as time went on. If he did baby-sit I’d come home and he’d be sitting in front of the TV watching football with my daughter in the house all day, and nothing had been done about getting supper ready.
I felt there was no resolution. The conflict had been resolved each time by me accommodating and repressing my own needs. I began seeing lots of other women divorcing, but I just didn’t see how I as a woman could pull that off. I just didn’t have the strength or the financial independence. But then I thought, “I guess I can do it, too.” By that time I didn’t love my husband anymore. Our sexual relationship had deteriorated, and the last months we slept in separate rooms.
I met George when I was 30. He was a faculty member. We became friends, and we were also attracted to each other right away.
My husband and I separated when I was 32. The separation was orderly and rational and painful and poignant. I had an incredibly awful post-separation trauma. I lived in a collective situation, and I immediately began a relationship with George.
RACHEL NASHI became a part-time lecturer at this college at 27 and had my second child, Paul, at 28. I loved the combination of work and family. I very much liked the students and trying to get their minds to stretch. It was only when I had been here for a while that I got a sense of what I wanted with my work in a positive sense.
Cynthia was an associate professor in my department, twenty years older than me. She was very encouraging and supportive, and we became good friends. She was a marvelous role model of a woman with a career and children. Gradually I got more separate from her and defined myself in a different way, but she certainly had an important early influence on me.
I was given a full-time two-year appointment as lecturer when I was 28. I felt, “Now I have a seriousness of my own; I’m not just a faculty wife.” I got much more involved in my field. I hadn’t done any research since my thesis, and I began to ask myself research questions and felt my thesis subject was sterile and didn’t lead anywhere for me.
Gina was a researcher here, and we started working together. It was the first collaborative relationship I had had. She really introduced me to my field, but she was very difficult to work with. Gradually I moved away from her approach, but the main thing is that she opened the subject to me, and she encouraged me right down the line.
By the time my son was born my husband Bill’s psychological difficulties had set in, and I think he was less enthusiastic about the baby than I was, more aloof. He has always treated Paul from a distance except to get angry at him. Paul has built up this absolute hate for him. Bill has a tremendous need for control, and for a long time I just accepted that. Mainly, at that time I thought of him as being helpful, allowing me to have the kind of life I wanted. Had he not been so helpful I could never have done what I have. We didn’t have any domestic help, and he would be home in the morning when I was at work, and then I’d be home in the afternoons. He did a lot around the house, too. I thought our problems were due to the strains because we were running a circus for a while with the two small children and both of us on tenure tracks. Since Bill was having his emotional ups and downs, it seemed essential for me to do well and get tenure so that if he completely fell apart one of us would have a stable job to keep things going. By my early thirties we had a complete reversal of roles.
I was on such a limited time schedule because of the children. I was here from 10 to 2. I taught at 10 and 11 and then saw students, then I had to leave. My schedule was very, very, very tight. I would be sitting in my office trying to do all my work, and in would walk one of these men. He’d sit there and talk about how he wasn’t being rewarded properly at the college. I was sitting there, and my time was ticking away. I’d get so mad! I thought they were just idiots. Here I am with this time constraint, and they’re taking up my time. I had my office changed to the third floor.
By 30 I knew I didn’t want to be part-time anything, because then I could be pulled out at any time by the demands of my children. I felt that I had to have an identity they could recognize apart from them, an identity that would be taken seriously as well as any other commitment, like my husband’s work. I was still haunted by that image of women frittering away their time. I really wanted to build, not a career, but some sort of separate identity of my own outside the family. At 31 I got a three-year appointment as an assistant professor, so I knew I was going to be here awhile.
I don’t think it ever dawned on me that having a career and family wouldn’t work. I didn’t see a conflict between being a mother and working because I felt being a mother didn’t really have much substance to it. Many afternoons as a child I’d come home from school, and my mother would be at a neighbor’s playing bridge until 4:00. I couldn’t see how that was better for me than having a mother who did interesting work. The claim that my mother stayed home and took care of the children just didn’t ring true to me. She probably did keep a cleaner house, but I don’t see that that matters very much unless it becomes a health problem [laughs].
Work and motherhood worked out for me; marriage and self suffered. Work and children were mine in a way that the marriage wasn’t. With Bill I always felt that somehow I wasn’t quite up to what he wanted or doing what he wanted. I often felt I wasn’t being authentically me. There was always a feeling that something would set him off when I least expected it. Gradually Bill came to want a sort of perfection in me. I didn’t have that, and he began trying to force it on me. He’d get violently upset and physically abusive if everything did not work his way. And for reasons I don’t understand I just accepted that pattern, and in some ways felt it was my fault. I had this feeling that I owed my husband everything for enabling me to have the kind of life I wanted. I just suppressed all my anger and tried to avoid conflict. The cost of that didn’t register for a long time. I was trying to be the person he wanted and wasn’t being authentically myself. And I was distressed to discover over time that despite my efforts to avoid conflict, Bill was a very, very unhappy person. I started seeing these things in Bill in my early thirties, but it has taken me until now to get more clear.
Work gradually became a very big part of my life. But for a long time I had to operate on two completely different levels. One level was at school, where I could be myself, and the other level was at home, where I did everything possible to avoid conflicts at all times. Bill ran the house totally, starting with financial. I never saw a penny. He did the shopping and the cooking and even chose the clothes I wore. He was controlling every aspect of our life.
I turn now to the twelve career women—seven businesswomen and five faculty—who were not mothers by the end of the Age 30 Transition. Six were married for much or all of this period and six were single (never-married or divorced). A common theme in this group is that the women did not realize their earlier aim of becoming mothers by the late twenties. Three decided that it was preferable, or at least acceptable, not to have children. For the other nine, however, life in the Age 30 Transition was permeated by the concern with motherhood and the growing probability that it was not to be. Not having children was a great disappointment that colored the women’s occupational involvement, love relationships, and sense of self. Each woman had to come to terms with the likely reality that motherhood would remain an unfilled component of her life.
What alternative life structures might there be, and how could one explore the possibilities? Occupation became the leading candidate for central component of the next life structure. By the end of the Age 30 Transition, most of these women were devoting themselves more fully than before to occupation and thinking more seriously about having a long-term career, though family continued to be a hoped-for central unfilled component. Within this common framework, the twelve women were extremely varied with regard to love relationships, marriage, occupational advancement, and hopes/plans for the future. Let us now look at some individual lives in more detail. For descriptive purposes I’ll divide them into two subgroups, the single and the married.
Six of the twelve childless women were single (never-married or divorced) throughout the Age 30 Transition. All of the women had at least one significant love relationship in this period and all were interested in having a stable partner. With regard to love/marriage/family, perhaps the most important difference among the women was this: Four women gave first priority to occupation; they wanted to have a stable love relationship (with or without marriage), but preferred to postpone or rule out family. Two wanted above all to get married and have a family, even if this meant limiting their involvement in occupation.
The women who put occupation first wanted a stable romantic-domestic partnership, though not necessarily legal marriage or motherhood. Amanda Burns and Brooke Thompson were faculty members who had divorced at age 26 or 27 and did not subsequently remarry.
AMANDA BURNSAs we saw in Chapter 12, Amanda Burns’s abusive husband insisted that she become primarily a traditional homemaker, in opposition to her own desire for a combination of family and career. She divorced at 27 and completed her Ph.D. degree at 29. During the Age 30 Transition Amanda expanded greatly in occupational identity and expertise. At 33 she launched a career that led subsequently to a senior academic position, and she had established a lesbian personal life. She was moving toward a Culminating Life Structure in which she was an achieving career woman and a partner in a lesbian relationship without children. She regretted the lack of children and did not rule out the possibility of having them in the future in a homosexual or heterosexual relationship. For the present, however, family had a lower priority in a life built around occupation and personal/social interests.
TRISHA WALLAt 28 Trisha Wall was a single dating businesswoman. She wanted to be financially independent but had no occupational path and no sense of an occupational future. As her Age 30 Transition ended at 34, she had established a stable nonlegal marriage with Nat and was laying the groundwork for a managerial career.
We met when I was 29 and Nat was 45. He had divorced in his thirties and was a mature and worldly man—extremely attractive, wealthy, cultured, exciting. We were chemically attracted to each other and spent a lot of time together, a wonderful new affair-type thing. I was a young in-transit character, naive, just beginning to learn about the world that he was so much a part of. It turned out that Nat was in transit, too. During the previous five years he had gotten divorced, left his career, and gone through a period of floundering. He was a loner and very elusive. He was doing the New York dating scene, dating the broad spectrum of available women that men have here.
When I was 32 we started spending weekends and a few nights a week together. I got more committed to staying with Nat and building a more solid relationship. I was just about totally focused on him, and that was satisfying to both of us. I was the naive novice in awe of this fabulous man and willing to live pretty much on his terms. I was simply having a good time, with no thoughts about the future.
Luckily, at 32 I got a job at a major firm. I had a staff of twenty-five, and I transformed a small, mediocre unit into an excellent, well-run department. It brought me to the beginnings of a managerial career. By 33, however, I had figured out the job and was again in a maintenance-type situation. In the next year the job was unexciting, but I didn’t care that much, since Nat and I were deciding to live together.
Two single childless women tried without success to marry and give first priority to family. For Molly Berger and Michele Proto, family became an increasingly central, unfilled component of the life structure, and its absence cast a growing shadow on their lives in the Age 30 Transition. Despite this pattern’s low incidence here, it merits our attention. For one thing, it probably occurs more often in the larger population than in this sample. For another, these women articulated wishes and experiences that were probably true of other childless women (married as well as single) who were less aware of them or less candid in voicing them. Some women who made a considered choice not to have children probably had at times the same feelings described by these two women.
Michele Proto and Molly Berger actively sought matrimony during this period and had a relationship in which marriage was the vainly desired outcome. Both went through a major crisis in which the key issue was: How will I live if I don’t have a marriage and family? Is it possible to have a satisfying life as a permanently single childless working woman?
As the Age 30 Transition ended, these women gave occupation a more central place in the Culminating Life Structure. At the same time, love/marriage/family remained a central unfilled or partially filled component, and the women maintained a cautious hopefulness that it was not too late, that marriage and family might yet happen.
While focusing on occupation as a source of satisfaction and self-esteem, these women often found it difficult to invest the self fully in career. Their involvement in work during the Age 30 Transition was complicated by the severe disappointments in their love lives. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure had bursts of self-righteous indignation: “I told you so! You were so devoted to independence and work that you have lost everything important—marriage, family, a ‘normal’ life.” Even the internal Anti-Traditional Figure was aggrieved: “I urged you to become more self-reliant so you wouldn’t get entrapped in domesticity, but you have really gone too far. Marriage and family are important as well.”
The women’s disappointment had external sources as well. In the traditional cultural meanings of gender, it is a profound failure for a woman not to become a wife and mother. A “spinster” is discriminated against, subtly and not so subtly, in work organizations, in informal community life, and in social circles composed chiefly of married couples. She is subject to harsh images of the cold ruthless competitor, the needy woman in search of matrimony, the pathetic woman leading an emotionally empty life. During the Age 30 Transition women are especially vulnerable to these images and to the assaults on their self-esteem.
MOLLY BERGERAt 25 I was still living at home and dating Art, a surgeon. He was for all intents and purposes the perfect husband, but he was totally boring. My relationship with him involved no communication; it was like my mother being married to my father. My father tried to reassure me by saying that if I married Art and got bored, I could occupy myself by becoming president of the Ladies’ Medical Auxiliary! It took me until my thirties to recognize the possibility that I might be able to get married and not be like my mother—though at 39 I’m still not entirely convinced.
At 26, after stewing for a year, I started graduate school and got my master’s degree a year later. During that year I met Don and had my first sexual relationship. He thought I was wasting my life. That’s one of my life themes: I get involved with men who are smart and nutty and help me do more in the world. Those five years living with my parents were like doing time in prison. It was stifling. I often think that I had to spend the next ten years in the city, working hard and traveling all over and being unstable, just to get away from my mother’s life.
After getting my MA at 27 I moved to New York City. I worked in corporate finance. I was just one step above the typing pool, whereas most of the professionals with MBAs came in as managers. I had no idea of where it might lead or what I wanted, and I certainly could not picture myself in my present career. After a few months I noticed that there were women assistant managers, and I decided I wanted to do that, so I got myself assigned to a project.
As I turned 28 I worked on a project, and the next four years were the most exciting time in my life. The key person in that story was Ben. He became my mentor and lover and helped me in a million ways. We were the same age, but he was farther along in his career and destined to go much farther. People who work together so closely often share more of their lives than people who are married. The downside for the woman is that you never know whether you’re getting ahead because of your relationship or your ability. The worst accusation of all is “She slept her way to the top.”
Ben was brilliant, charismatic, tremendously involved in his work but difficult personally. I learned everything from him. It was fantastic to travel all over the world with him and do innovative work and have this secret love relationship, but it was rotten, too. We both dated other people. I did that in order to keep the secret, and he claimed the same thing, but after six months I realized that he enjoyed having a lot of girlfriends. I wasn’t special to him, and he had no intention of getting married! I was intensely involved in the work with him, but for me getting married was important also. I was dating a lawyer from my hometown who wanted to marry me. He was a nice guy and everything I did not want, but I considered marrying him. Ben’s comment was, “What do you want to do, marry him and become a baby factory?”
I was promoted to assistant manager at 29, after doing the work for six months without title or salary. That started the most exciting work time I’ve ever had—working with the smartest people; I absolutely loved the whole thing. By 30 I was in the middle of all the action. I was also the only woman assistant manager in my group. I had to raise hell to get to go to the meetings with clients. If you’re the only woman, people don’t expect a lot; you just sit there and listen. But I got to see all these guys in action. They were all stars, just terrific. The other women stayed in the office and never went to meetings with the clients. In a report on affirmative action that year, the company said that women managers would perhaps be acceptable in government, but certainly never in industry! There were only three women assistant managers out of one hundred in the company at that time, and I figured I should be thrilled just to be allowed to participate as I did.
By 30 my career was my top priority, and at 31 I felt I deserved a promotion to manager. I felt educationally disadvantaged for not having an MBA, but I also thought I was smart and deserving of the opportunity. My boss told me to talk with everyone on my team and learn my developmental needs. The men gave me some important but painful criticism. One told me to stop acting like a little girl, and he was right. Despite making progress in many ways, I was still playing dumb and deferring to men, as I had all my life. They insisted that I had to grow up if I wanted to advance. They were trying to be helpful, but in some ways it was very intimidating. For the first time I felt inferior to the guys: I was not older, I was not smarter, I didn’t have their education and experience, I didn’t have any of these reasons to act equal to or smarter than them. There were also the tough organizational realities. The company was a very hierarchical organization where it was hard to rise higher, especially for a woman. Often I was in deep despair and thought I’d never get promoted.
At 32 I finally got promoted to manager. It was a huge success but a mixed blessing. For two years I had dedicated all of my energies to getting promoted and having the possibility of a long-term career. I was also so wrapped up with my feelings about Ben I didn’t have one other ounce of feeling. I knew that we would never marry, yet I still channeled all my feelings there.
Several months before I got the promotion my group broke up. I started working in another group, but it never had the same meaning and excitement for me as the earlier group. And, at the same time, I split up with Ben. I was 31. For the first six months of our relationship I thought we’d get married. Then I caught on about the other women. He was always dating other women—always, always, always. It got to be just awful. He was dating other women, living with other women, going on trips with other women. I mean, honestly, they were like live-in maids, ironing and washing his clothes! And he was always seeing me, too. I couldn’t tell who had the worst deal, them or me. At 31 I told him I couldn’t stand the situation any longer, and we stopped dating, but the feelings continued. At 32 I began dating Matt. I didn’t want to marry him, and I dated other men as well, but Matt helped me get past Ben. With my changed work situation and breaking up with Ben, it was like a double divorce. The impact of both changes didn’t register all at once, but over the next few years I had to re-evaluate my whole life and plans: Where do I go from here?
I’ll talk about the work first. At 32 I got promoted and finally got to be a real person, according to that organization. But then I was on the bottom again, the most junior one at my level. I continued having the long hours and the travel and the pressure, but not the fun I’d had with Ben and the earlier group. The worst thing was having one’s life completely wrapped up in work and having no personal life. I knew that I would never make the next level; there were only a few women at my level. Only about 5 or 10 percent of all people at my level would be promoted, and no woman had yet been promoted. By 33 I had a new idea of where I was going with my work life. I wasn’t running on the standard game plan, aiming for promotion. Instead, I was building a portfolio that would help me get a job elsewhere. I planned to leave in two or three years; meanwhile, I continued full-time work and got more involved in my personal life.
The second big change was my final break-up with Ben. At 34 I met him on a project, and he asked me, “How would you like to have my children?” He was looking for someone to handle that job for him—to have his kids! I knew it was ridiculous, but I said I’d see him again if he’d stop seeing the woman he was living with. He said he would, and then I discovered he hadn’t. So I learned again that I couldn’t trust him. It’s amazing how many times I had to relearn that. He was forever manipulating people, but I lent myself to it.
As her Age 30 Transition ended, Molly Berger could not build the kind of Culminating Life Structure she wanted most. Like many others in this situation, she formed a tentative structure with the hope of improving it soon. Her new occupational goal was to obtain a senior managerial position in another field. Toward this end she decided to remain a few years longer at the same company and improve her credentials. Likewise, she gave up the relationship with Ben. She thus moved toward a Culminating Life Structure as a single dating woman, devoted first of all to career, with love/marriage/family as a central unfilled component. She hoped soon to marry, make family central, and have a rewarding though less demanding career. The years from 33 to 36 thus had a very provisional quality. The start of the Culminating Life Structure at 33 was reflected, however, in a growing sense of urgency and the need to make key choices around which a new structure could be built.
Six women were married and childless during all or part of the Age 30 Transition. Three were in business and three in academe. For most married women, a crucial factor in deferring motherhood was the feeling that their marriages were too fragile to sustain a family. Amy York, a businesswoman, and Megan Bennett, a faculty member, provide variations on this theme.
AMY YORKAmy York started her first matrimonial relationship at 25, married at 27, and divorced after four years of a disastrous, emotionally abusive marriage. Most of Amy’s Age 30 Transition was devoted to getting her marriage and occupation in order; her interest in motherhood did not emerge until the very end of the period.
It was a shock that someone actually wanted to marry me. Having no confidence that I would get anyone else, I said, “Oh, well, I’ll give it a try.” I never thought I wanted children. My husband wanted someone who was bright, attractive, and independent, which I was. He also wanted someone he could criticize and push around, and I was more of that than I had understood. Nothing I did was right. Within a few months he lost his job, and I was supporting us financially! I started feeling totally trapped and getting panic attacks.
At 28 I went to work as a programmer in a consulting firm, the best job I had ever had. I realized that the marriage was bad and that I had to move toward a different life. The firm’s tuition payment plan allowed me to attend night school for an MBA. I continued for four years because it gave me some hope for the future, even though the classes were boring and I had no specific goals. Mainly, school was a refuge from my bad marriage—everything was a refuge from my bad marriage. I was miserable but couldn’t imagine leaving my husband. Our friends thought we had a wonderful marriage, and I couldn’t talk openly with them. My parents put up with Steve. They didn’t really approve of him, but we weren’t close, and I rarely saw them.
At 30 I was getting more involved in my work and interested in advancing beyond being a little programmer. I told my boss I wanted to become an associate, the first MBA professional-level job. They made me corporate analyst, a new intermediate position created mainly for women which entailed more research but little contact with customers. As the work got better, the marriage reached an all-time low. Steve was screwing all my girlfriends, and they were telling me! The contrast between me in the marriage and me at work was overwhelming.
At 31 I was promoted to associate and onto a ladder toward partner. I left the marriage. For the next two years my life was horrible. I worked 70 hours a week, traveled a lot, but that’s about all I did. I had no friends for a while and no personal life. It was a low, low time.
For years I had put most of my energy into my fantasy life, watching an internal TV in which an imaginary hero did all the things I secretly wanted. I made a tremendously important decision: to give up my vicarious fantasy world and start remaking my life. I said to myself, “Okay, kid, you’re really on your own now. If you don’t like something about yourself, work on it. From now on I’ll have real memories, I’ll have reality inside my head.” I started going through my whole psyche and sorting everything out. It was a slow process, and I spent several months by myself. Then I came out of my shell and started a relationship with Patrick. I wanted to put 100 percent of myself into the relationship, to be an equal contributing partner for the first time, but whenever I tried to get closer, Patrick ran.
Meanwhile, I started to get disillusioned at work. The traveling was horrible, and you were treated like a piece of garbage. You’re an associate, which equals a chair, and that’s how they treat you—as if you have no feelings and no personal life. I remember coming home on a plane and thinking about the kind of person I’d have to turn myself into so they would find me acceptable for partner—which no woman had ever done at that company. I just said, “No, to hell with this. It wouldn’t leave anything else in my life.” But it took a while to make the change.
At 33 things were going so badly that I got into therapy. I started the first session of therapy sobbing, “Help me! Please help me! What is going to become of me?” A few months later I had the strength to stop seeing Patrick.
I also changed my mind about having kids. I realized that I hadn’t wanted kids until then because I felt I didn’t have much to offer a child. Now, for the first time, I wanted a family, descendants, something stable that would go with me into the future and beyond me. When you strip everything else away, that’s the only thing we’re here for, really. I wanted to find a mate, and I wanted to have kids. I wanted something real. At that point I met Kirk. A week later I asked him to marry me, and he said yes. We have been living together in our little cocoon for the last three years in a good, healthy relationship, and we plan to marry next spring and have babies.
As I started with Kirk at 33 I also switched into a new work group at my company. I loved it! We worked together as a real team and had a chance to do something significant. Unfortunately, the group wasn’t given the support needed to survive. A year later the group just fell apart—a total failure. I received a poor bonus and got slapped down for working in this off-beat group. Essentially they told me, “Get back into the mainstream, or leave.”
So I tried the mainstream again but couldn’t stand it; it meant going back into the pressure cooker. The decision to leave had been perking for a few years but one incident set it off: One Sunday I got a hysterical phone call from a partner above me. Why had one of the lackeys not sent out a memo? I got up from the dinner table. My stomach was in knots. I went to the office and got the job done, but I was completely fed up. I’d just had too many years of it. The next day I asked for a transfer.
Now, turning 36, my work future is uncertain. I may stay at this company or move to another company. I also might restore houses with Kirk or open a little bookstore. I don’t buy this whole career thing to the exclusion of the rest of my life. Making money is okay, but it’s not the meaning of my existence.
I’ll marry and start a family in a year or so—gotta get the babies in before I’m 40. I’ve come to understand in the last few years that it’s great to enjoy all aspects of civilization, but don’t forget what we’re here for. We are physical creatures. We shit and make love, we sneeze, we throw up, we die eventually. It’s all part of the process, and so is having kids.
MEGAN BENNETTAt 27 I was a graduate student, dating a professor. I felt that Robert was a wonderful person to have an affair with, but it was a surprise when he wanted to marry me. I felt that if I didn’t marry him I’d probably never marry, since the work side of me was so important by then. At the same time, I had very conventional ideas about becoming a wife and mother who would work and support her husband’s career but not have a career of her own. In short, I had powerful interests in both career and family, without any sense of how to combine them. Fortunately, my husband had a sense of mission about my career just as I did about his. He wanted a coworker and partner, not a traditional wife.
We got married when I was 28. I got a part-time job as an instructor. For the first three years I invested very little in my job; all our joint energies went into Robert’s work. He was having a terrible time with his career, and he went through an alcoholic period.
Our biggest problem was trying to have a family. I desperately wanted children, but I could not carry a baby to term. It was just overwhelming to have miscarriages, and after the second I got quite depressed. Then Robert had a catastrophic heart attack that kept him hospitalized for several months.
At 33 I decided that I would not have a family. The physicians told me that getting pregnant was almost impossible for medical reasons. Robert’s illness absolutely forced me to become much more independent. I realized that I was not looking at my life in the right way. I had a devoted husband and a fascinating career and an interesting life—yet I was in a state of recurring grief about not having children. So I became more active professionally and put more of myself into my career.
I had a really consciousness-raising experience of gender. I discovered that the women faculty were paid several thousand dollars a year less than the men, though we were doing more teaching and research!
My work was very exciting, and I had a wonderful relationship with a woman colleague. We taught a course together, wrote some papers, and had a great friendship. She was a big stimulus to the work I did in my early thirties. Then she got a professorship at another university and left.
By 34 I had a tenure-track appointment, and my career was blossoming. I really enjoyed my work and was coming to be in control of my professional life, and I was entering the national scene in my research field. My career was becoming the main thing in my life.
Meanwhile, Robert was recovering, but his work was problematic, and he didn’t get any joy out of the work. After five or six years of marriage things were to some extent reversed between us. He didn’t expect a lot more from his career while mine was going well and promising more, even though its future trajectory was not clear. I had a very satisfying career, a good marriage, and no children. Now, ten years later, I still regret not having a family, but I have found partial substitutes and have largely come to terms with the loss.
For the career women, as for the homemakers, the Age 30 Transition was a critical period in adult development. Virtually all of the women experienced much personal growth and development as they made significant changes in their relationships to occupation, love/marriage/family, life goals, and self. Those who made great external changes (in marriage, serious love relationship, education, job, family, place of residence) usually went through considerable questioning and turmoil. Even when no dramatic overt changes were made in a relationship, there were subtle changes in its nature and meaning for the woman. It is difficult to form a relatively satisfactory Culminating Life Structure without undergoing some difficulty in the Age 30 Transition.
In college, most of the career women had expected to be married and have a family within a modified Traditional Marriage Enterprise by their middle to late twenties. While attempting to develop some degree of financial independence and competence, they took it for granted that family would be central in their future lives, occupation peripheral. They had earlier assumed that a woman could have a family or a long-term career, but not both. In the Age 30 Transition this assumption was changed. Many of the career women’s Anti-Traditional Dream evolved into a dual Anti-Traditional Dream of the Successful Career Woman within a Neo-Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Most of the eighteen mothers made the firm decision that career and family would be co-central components of the life structure they were starting to build. The twelve who did not have children made a greater commitment to occupation and saw it as central in their future lives. For most of them, family was a major unfilled component that they hoped in time to fill. Whatever their circumstances and preferences, all of the career women began to build a Culminating Life Structure at age 33/34.