The findings of this study support and amplify a view of the human life cycle as an overlapping sequence of eras: childhood (age 0–22), early adulthood (17–45), middle adulthood (40–65), late adulthood (60–85), and late late adulthood (80–?). For women as for men, the eras are separate seasons, each with its own distinctive character. Within each era, women and men go through the same sequence of periods in adult life structure development, and at the same ages.
In this study, our primary focus has been on the era of early adulthood, which begins with the Early Adult Transition, occurring between the ages of 17 and 22. It forms a boundary between the eras of childhood and early adulthood and is part of both. In the Early Adult Transition we create the basis for the Entry Life Structure (22–28). The Age 30 Transition (28–33) is a mid-era shift in which we move from the first structure to the Culminating Life Structure (33–40). In the Mid-life Transition (40–45) we terminate early adulthood, initiate middle adulthood, and start forming an Entry Life Structure for the new era. The Mid-life Transition is both the final period of early adulthood and the initial period of the next era. In middle adulthood we go through the same alternating sequence of structure building/maintaining and transitional periods.
This conception of life cycle, eras, and periods in life structure development provides a framework for the study of the human life course. We have found that the framework holds for human beings generally. One of its most important functions is to highlight variations between and within cultures, classes, historical epochs, genders, and individuals. It also helps us understand specific changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning, which do not follow a highly age-linked sequence in adulthood.
Imagine, for example, a study of the life structure development of a random sample of 43-year-old women and men from any large population. The study would show, I believe, that virtually all of these women and men are going through the Mid-life Transition—moving from the Culminating Life Structure of early adulthood to the Entry Life Structure of middle adulthood. At the same time, their lives will be diverse in many other ways: in the kind of Culminating Life Structure now being terminated, the kind of Entry Life Structure being formed, the character of the transition and the kind of satisfaction and suffering it entails. These people will also vary widely in occupation, education, marital/familial condition, moral functioning, cognitive skills, personality, external stress, bodily fitness and illness.
This perspective on the life cycle and adult development is like a navigational chart that gives latitude and longitude and certain features of the territory, without the geographical detail. It is not a blueprint for the concrete course of an individual life. We can better understand particular changes in one part of a person’s life, however, if we examine them within the context of her or his current position in the pattern of life structure development.
This study has generated and utilized a gender perspective—a framework for understanding how women and men differ in life circumstances, life course, and ways of going through the developmental periods. The key concept is gender splitting: a rigid division between female and male, feminine and masculine, in all aspects of human life. Of particular importance is the splitting between the domestic sphere and the public occupational sphere; female homemaker and male provisioner within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise; women’s work and men’s work; feminine and masculine within the self. The splitting is encouraged by the existence of a patriarchal society in which women are generally subordinate to men, arid the splitting helps to maintain that society.
Gender splitting has predominated, with many variations in degree and pattern, throughout the history of the human species. The evolution of society in the past few centuries has reduced the splitting. Humanity is now in the early phases of a transformation in the meanings of gender and the place of women and men in every society. The general direction of change is clear: the lives and personalities of women and men are becoming more similar. For most women, permanent full-time homemaking is less feasible and less desirable than in previous generations. New forms of marriage enterprises are emerging. Society requires more women to work outside the home, and women are playing a less subordinate part in the public occupational sphere.
The fifteen homemakers in this study tell us about the life sequences, dilemmas, and satisfactions of women who attempt to maintain the traditional pattern. Each of them had within herself a Traditional Homemaker Figure who wanted to live within a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. This figure originated in childhood, took her initial adult shape in the Adolescent Life Structure and the Early Adult Transition, and evolved further in subsequent periods. Each woman also had an internal Anti-Traditional Figure—a self who wanted to be more independent, to be more a part of the public world, to exist on more equal terms with men. The internal Traditional Homemaker Figure was predominant during the twenties. In some women the internal Anti-Traditional Figure subsequently became stronger and exerted more influence on the evolving life structure. In others she played a minor part or remained rudimentary.
The career women, in contrast, attempted to modify the traditional pattern. A recurrent theme in their lives was the intense conflict between the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure. The relative dominance of the two figures, and the ways of dealing with the conflict between them, varied from one woman to another and from one period to another.
The homemakers and the career women went through the same sequence of periods, but there were great differences between and within the two groups. In the Early Adult Transition they formed different inner scenarios for adult life. Over the course of early adulthood their life structures evolved differently and rarely in accord with their initial views. In the Mid-life Transition, as one era ended and a new one began, both groups were re-examining their past lives and trying to establish a new life structure more appropriate to middle adulthood. They had different resources and constraints, internal as well as external. For most, the road ahead seemed more an uncharted territory—or, worse, an unbridged abyss—than a well-lit path.
The difficulties of these women must be placed in social-historical context. We live in a time when the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, and the gender meanings, values, and social structures that support it, are undergoing major change. The homemakers’ lives give evidence that the traditional pattern is difficult to sustain. Most women who tried to maintain this pattern formed life structures that were relatively unsatisfactory—not viable in the world, not suitable for the self. The few who were more or less contented paid a considerable price in restriction of self-development. The career women tried to anticipate the future: to reduce the gender splitting, to enter formerly “male” occupations, to work on equal terms with men, and to establish a family life in which homemaking and provisioning were more equally divided. Their lives attest to the pleasures and problems of innovation, of attempting to realize values not well supported by the current culture and institutions.
Every woman in both groups had her share of suffering and joy. At the worst, she was engaged in a bitter struggle for survival; at the best, in a struggle for greater meaning and self-fulfillment. Each life, seen empathically and in broad perspective, contributes to our understanding and evokes our admiration, respect, compassion, and sorrow.
But, a reader may ask, “Why does this study reveal so much hardship—anguish, stressful or traumatic experiences, difficulty in marriage, motherhood, occupation, personal relationships? Does the sample contain a disproportionately large number of women with serious problems?” I believe not. Great efforts were made in the sampling procedures to maximize demographic diversity and to minimize volunteer bias. These women fall within the broader population range with regard to their psychological problems and strengths, as well as their external stresses and supports. They comprise a diverse, though far from complete, cross-section of the American population. They vary widely along the spectrum from normal to abnormal, successful to unsuccessful, well to poorly adjusted, however these are measured. To put it most simply, they are garden-variety members of various worlds within our society. In every person’s life there is an admixture of joy and sorrow, success and failure, self-fulfillment and self-defeat. Good biographers intuitively know this: every reasonably complete biography contains them all. The study of adult development requires no less.
It might be argued that we have placed more emphasis than we should on what went wrong in a given woman’s life than on her satisfactions and accomplishments. Again, I believe that we have not. The mode of interviewing was not clinical, in the sense of providing psychotherapy for a troubled patient. It was, rather, biographical. My aim was to enable a woman to tell her life story in her own words, with attention to both external realities and subjective meanings, and these accounts are the result. I remain convinced that such an approach is more fruitful in the study of life-structure development than the standard research methods of laboratory experimentation, surveys, tests, and brief structured interviews. These methods give too narrow, too cross-sectional, and usually too bland a picture of the individual life. For a while, at least, more intensive interviewing and personal documents must be used to follow the evolution of life structure over a span of years.
These interviews were done in the early 1980s. It may be questioned whether social conditions have not changed markedly since then, in the direction of greater freedom for women to become and do what they want. It is true that many studies have examined changes in specific attitudes, behaviors, laws, and institutional practices over the past twenty or thirty years, but the findings are quite mixed.
In the mid-1990s, as compared with 1980, the conditions of life for women are better in some ways, worse in others. The great majority of women are still employed in low-paying, unskilled jobs and predominantly female occupations. The “feminization of poverty” continues. Far more women than men exist below the poverty line, receive no health insurance, and have no pension. Wives with outside jobs generally have almost total responsibility for the “second shift” of domestic labor. Working mothers are doing it all but not having it all. More women are entering certain professions, but they are still advancing at a slower pace than men and earning less, and hitting sexist barriers (“glass ceilings”). Ten percent of top executives in Fortune 500 companies are women. Fifteen percent of academics on tenure tracks are women. Women’s earnings were formerly about 70 percent of men’s in the same kind of job; it is still 70 percent in some fields and up to 75 to 85 percent in others, but the discrepancies in rank and pay continue.
When women comprise roughly 70 percent or more of a given occupation, it is identified as “women’s work” and paid less. When they comprise 20 percent or less, the occupation is regarded as “men’s work” and women in it tend to be seen as token or marginal members who have yet to prove themselves. Finally, when a formerly male occupation becomes roughly half female, there is a growing tendency for the occupation to be “feminized”—regarded as women’s work, devalued, and rendered unattractive to men. The basic gender splitting thus makes it difficult for women to avoid occupational segregation and subordination.
The level and intensity of gender conflict have risen since 1980. We live in a state of gender warfare—often covert but with flare-ups of overt antagonism. Dramatic incidents occur more frequently. There are more accusations, lawsuits, and investigations. Harassment and discrimination take a greater variety of forms, gross as well as subtle. Unsettled, conflictful relationships between women and men are increasingly represented in plays, movies, novels, TV talk shows, the 1995 conservative Congress with its views on the family, children, and “women’s issues.” There is a growing public awareness that many women are abused, discriminated against, and hindered in their personal development. Efforts to bring about greater gender equality are opposed by institutional inertia and by the fear that the ongoing changes will tear apart the fabric of social life without creating a better alternative.
The conflict is not only between women and men. It exists also among women and among men. Our established customs, laws, and values are in question. What do we mean by “feminine” and “masculine”? What are the rights and responsibilities of each partner in a marriage? How should the partners divide the provisioning, domestic labor, and child care? How should we (women and men) divide our investments in occupation and family? What shall we do about the growing incidence of divorce, singlehood, and single-parent households? In a diverse, pluralistic society, there can be no single legitimate answer to any of these questions. Diversity makes life richer and more interesting, but we are still learning how to contain many diverse elements within a single tapestry. The current intensification of gender conflict is one aspect of the historical transition from patriarchy and the Traditional Marriage Enterprise to new and still hardly imaginable forms of individual and social life.
What about the future? The long-term evolution of human society is leading, I believe, toward a reduction in gender splitting, an increase in gender equality, and a fuller participation of women in all aspects of social life. During the past few centuries some remarkable advances have been made in legal rights, education, suffrage, control of reproduction, occupational choice and development. Whether we welcome or oppose this change—and most of us, men and women, do both—it will continue. Yet, paradoxically, the recurrent advances have brought new forms of restriction, subordination, and what Susan Faludi has called “backlash.” It will probably take another century, not a few decades, to see how far the gender transformation will go and what various meanings may be ascribed to gender in various cultures, social institutions, and individual lives.
Early in its history the human species established various kinds of social order based upon the Traditional Marriage Enterprise and the sharp distinction between the feminine homemaker/wife/mother/caregiver and the masculine provisioner/husband/father/occupational achiever. This order served species survival but also had great limitations. Men were prohibited from engaging in pursuits identified as feminine and alienated from feminine aspects of the self. To an equal or greater extent, women were cut off from the masculine. Yet we now know that every man has some “feminine” interests, feelings, and talents, and every woman something of the “masculine.” The taboo on being “opposite gender” made it difficult to develop and live out those aspects of the self. A high degree of self-sacrifice, often not evident to the person or others, was required of everyone. Men had to sacrifice the internal feminine in order to be highly independent, masterful, heroic. Women had to sacrifice the internal masculine in order to put the needs and feelings of others ahead of their own.
Communal survival—obtaining essential resources and guarding against serious threats—had to be the first priority under conditions of severe scarcity and danger. The development of the self was a luxury available (at best) only to members of the small elite groups who had responsibility for leadership and management of communal life. In the past few centuries, however, technological and social advances have brought more of humanity to a level of material advantage, safety, and education that makes possible, and indeed requires, the self-development of the population generally. Society now offers more to its individual members, but it also requires us to contribute more. This in turn requires that we become more knowledgeable, skilled,understanding, ethical, creative—in short, more developed as persons. We are concerned not only with survival but with the personal meaning of our lives.
Self-development is furthered by the value placed on individuality, on individual rights, desires, choices. The person must have some freedom to ask, “Who am I? What is important to me? How can I pursue my aims?” Individualism is restricted by externally given requirements (and an internalized sense of obligation) to live within a narrow, gender-based scenario of choices and relationships. But individuation is not rugged individualism, “selfishness” (in the sense of egocentrism or self-indulgence), or lack of concern for others. It involves a balancing of responsibility to and for others with responsibility to and for oneself. A woman cannot become very individuated when she lives primarily as a traditional homemaker and suppresses most of the “masculine” in her self. Likewise, a man’s individuation is limited when he dedicates himself to living as a provisioner and suppresses the “feminine.”
What are the potential consequences of a long-term reduction in gender splitting? As I imagine it, the lives of women and men will be more variegated and there will be fewer differences between us. The meanings of gender will be more inclusive, complex, and individualized. We will learn more about biologically given gender differences and take account of these in the socio-psychological construction of gender, while freeing ourselves from narrow, culture-bound images of feminine and masculine. Women and men will be freer to participate in both the domestic and public worlds. We will be less different in the ways we give and receive care, and in loving, working, achieving, competing, cooperating. Both genders will have a greater range of choice in building our life structures and in using transitional periods to change ourselves and our lives. We will derive greater meaning and satisfaction from every season of life.
Lest this view sound too utopian, let me add that such changes are a matter of degree. We can reduce but not eliminate our uniquely human proclivities for damaging the bodies and souls of others, for self-abnegation, self-aggrandizement, and self-deception, for regarding life from a primitive (rather than more developed) sense of good versus evil, for the irrationalities that have plagued us throughout our history. We can do better. We must do better. But we have a long way to go.
In Chapter 3 I quoted from an essay by Virginia Woolf, who has been both a subject and a mentor to me in this study of women. The essay, “Professions for Women,” was based upon a talk she gave in 1931, at the age of 49, to an association of young professional women. She clearly identified herself as a middle-aged career woman speaking intimately to a younger generation of women who were embarking on careers in a seemingly more open world and carrying the hope of occupational freedom for women generally. Her audience was the historical counterpart of the younger women who may read this book, over sixty years and three or four generations later.
In the essay, Woolf described the Angel in the House—the Victorian version of the Traditional Homemaker Figure—and other obstacles to women’s full participation in social life. After portraying her mortal combat with the Angel, Woolf concluded: “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of the woman writer.” She then raised a further question:
The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a … young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skills. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here—out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.… Even when the path is nominally open … there are many phantoms and obstacles … looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared.
… It is necessary also to discuss the ends and aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. These aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined.… You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your 500 pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be.
These remarks have a curiously contemporary relevance and provide a fitting theme for the conclusion of this book. Woolf’s questions still need to be asked, the answers still elude us, and the obstacles are many. A similar talk might be given today by a woman in middle adulthood to a group of younger women. It is perhaps a sign of progress that a man in late adulthood can now attempt to raise, study, and discuss similar questions in a different historical context.
This book is addressed to women of all ages, not solely early adulthood—and to men as well. I consider myself a feminist, but also an equalist. The struggle for gender equality is not for the benefit of women alone and cannot be won by women alone. Men must understand women better, and women men, if we are to understand ourselves. Both genders will gain from a greater appreciation of our common humanity and of the elemental gender differences—whatever they may turn out to be—that complicate and enrich our lives. All of us, men as well as women, must continue our experiments in living so that we can begin to conceive of hitherto unimagined possibilities.
It is a paradox of human existence that we are impelled to create noble ideals and to work for their realization, while acknowledging that the ideals may be unattainable and perhaps illusory. The ideas of gender equality and adult development are now in our cultural awareness and have been tentatively placed on our cultural agenda. They also evoke great anxiety and run counter to our traditional ways of thinking. Despite our individual and institutional reluctance to examine them more deeply, we must make the effort to find and smooth a path for the generations of daughters and sons who will come after us.