Perhaps it was a coincidence, but when Meryl Streep turned forty, she got three scripts in quick succession in which her character was a witch.
Streep ignored the offers but wasn’t surprised. “It’s over,” she told her husband. She had been starring in films rapid-fire—classics like Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, and Out of Africa. But she was traveling all over the world to shoot them, and her children were getting tired of always being the new kids in class. The family settled down in California, where her job options were narrower. She had just finished making Ironweed with Jack Nicholson, a film she did not really see as a career boost—she played “an old drunk of indeterminate age. Maybe she was fifty, maybe she was—who knows? Sixty?”
Well, it obviously wasn’t over after all. Streep was nominated for an Academy Award for her Ironweed starring role. She went on to make a dozen movies in the 1990s, including The River Wild, an action drama in which she played a whitewater rafting expert who foils a pair of armed killers, and The Bridges of Madison County, a romance about a traveling photographer and a lonely housewife, for which she received another Academy Award nomination. Bridges, which was based on a bestselling novel, was a huge hit. Streep co-starred with Clint Eastwood, then sixty-five. “I was forty-five and the studio felt I was too old,” she recalled. But Eastwood, who also produced and directed the film, went to bat for her. “His mother liked me and he loved his mother,” Streep theorized.
Looking back, Streep thinks she worried most about aging when she was approaching forty. “That was the time when the curtain was supposed to fall. For my immediate predecessors, that’s when it did fall.” But, she discovered, she could “surf the wave” that had washed away previous generations of actresses. It was more than just continuing to work and finding a wise-mom or sassy-old-dame niche. She was getting all kinds of roles—in romances, action movies, musicals. It was, she felt, partly because older women were becoming a larger part of movie audiences. And the people making decisions in Hollywood began to include a number of female executives. Dawn Steel became president of Columbia Pictures in 1987. And if she was not the first woman to become powerful in Hollywood, Nora Ephron said later, “she was the first woman to understand that part of her responsibility was to make sure that eventually there were lots of other powerful women.” Ephron herself produced and directed the very successful Julie & Julia when she was in her late 60s. And Nancy Meyers was in her 50s when she made Something’s Gotta Give.
Being a Hollywood pioneer wasn’t always rosy. Steel had been head of production at Paramount when she was in her early 40s and was overthrown while she was in the hospital, giving birth to her daughter. “I don’t know how to tell you this, babe, but you got fired while you were in labor,” her husband told her. But within six months, she got the job at Columbia.
So things were looking up. But in life as in Academy Award nominations, Meryl Streep proved to be an outlier. There were still plenty of examples that illustrated Hollywood’s general allergy to aging. In 1997, Riley Weston, a writer and actress who felt she was being aged out of Hollywood, celebrated being 30 by shaving over a dozen years off her age. (It helped that she was tiny and wrinkle-free.) She began submitting screenplays in her new identity as a precocious teenager and was quickly hired to write for Felicity, a TV series about a first-year college student. She made Entertainment Weekly’s list of the “100 Most Creative People in Entertainment.” And Disney offered her a juicy screenwriting deal. Then someone blew the whistle and the deals were dead. “In a business fraught with age bias, I did what I felt I had to do to succeed,” she explained. You could appreciate her dilemma, but it’s pretty clear that when it comes to figuring out how to overcome age discrimination, pretending to be a teenager is not a long-term viable option.
Show business was a particular challenge, age-wise. Career advancement opportunities for older women were growing in many other professions, and the country was noticing—really noticing—how many older women were staying in the workforce, or reentering it after a period of full-time homemaking. In 1950, less than a quarter of the workers 55 and over were women. By 1993, it was 44 percent.
There were some obvious explanations for the change. The proportion of young working women had jumped in the 1970s, so it was logical that the proportion of women working in late middle age would show a similar increase a couple of decades later. Also, women dominated fields like retail that tolerated older workers best. And they needed the money. One survey of women 55 and older who were divorced, separated, or widowed found that only 5.5 percent got income from pension investments. And less than 2 percent of those who were divorced got alimony. Nonmarried women over 65 got, on average, 72 percent of their living from Social Security. A quarter had Social Security and absolutely nothing else. And, of course, gay women who had been living together in committed relationships for decades got no additional benefit whatsoever when their partners died.
By 2000, the average monthly Social Security check for a woman would be $696, compared to $928 for men. That $696 would translate to about $1,021 now. And the story of how far Social Security would take you depended a whole lot on where you lived. A 76-year-old woman at a 1998 White House panel told President Bill Clinton that her $915 a month allowed her to “live very well, independently and… without assistance from my sons” in Bristol, Tennessee. Another woman, a home care aide who was still working, seemed to be getting a similar income, but it left her living “paycheck to paycheck” in Seattle. There were no panelists reporting from New York City, where, in the 1990s, the average one-bedroom apartment cost about $1,500 a month.
So extra cash was definitely an incentive to avoid retirement. But a lot of women who didn’t have serious financial problems still wanted to keep working because they found the prospect of a life of leisure boring. Ruth Cambron told the New York Times it was a vacation cruise that did it. “That convinced me not to retire. I did not want to feel useless,” she recalled. (There does seem to be something about cruise ships that sends certain people over the edge.) Some happily married women found that staying home all day with a retired husband was just too much togetherness. Pauline Phillips, who wrote a popular advice column under the name Abigail Van Buren, said that was one of the more common problems she heard about from her readers. “Dear Abby” herself announced in 1993, when she was 75, that she planned to keep working forever: “What would I do? Boy, they’re going to have to carry me out feet first.” She turned the column over to her daughter full-time in 2002, when she began suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Time followed up its covers on unwanted old people (1970), old people in revolt (1977), and old people enjoying their “fun years” without necessarily paying the bill (1988) with a 1996 cover titled “Forever Young.” Researchers, the magazine told its readers, “are starting to talk about the likelihood of people living well into their second centuries with the smooth skin, firm muscles, clear vision, high energy and vigorous sexual capabilities they once could enjoy only in youth.” Further reading revealed that while scientists were learning a great deal about the way the aging process worked, there hadn’t actually been any big leaps in changing it. Still, Time reported, there were lots of “new therapies” that might provide a breakthrough, “from melatonin to antioxidants to hormone-replacement therapy to the intriguing hormonal precursor DHEA.”
It was the same old story, but there were always new “miracles.” In 1995, the book The Melatonin Miracle inspired Newsweek to produce a cover piece that featured the owner of a natural-foods store in Rockledge, Pennsylvania, simply answering her phone with “Yes, we have melatonin!” Melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, was being touted as the newest way “to reset your aging clock.” But eventually expectations narrowed. It would march into the twenty-first century known mainly as an over-the-counter sleep medication.
DHEA, that “intriguing hormonal precursor,” was, like melatonin, the beneficiary of a new federal law that allowed dietary supplement manufacturers to avoid FDA scrutiny by simply noting in their ads that the products “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.” Besides slowing aging, DHEA was, at one point or another, supposed to do everything from prevent cancer to burn fat. “Some enthusiasts say that a daily dose of the substance has taken 20 years off their chronological ages,” reported a health writer in the New York Times. Like most of the miracles, DHEA ran into that old devil: research. The Mayo Clinic conducted a two-year study on its effects on elderly men and women. “Our data provide no evidence that either DHEA or low-dose testosterone is an effective antiaging hormone supplement and argue strongly against the use of these agents for this purpose,” the scientists concluded.
It’s not that there wasn’t medical progress in addressing problems that accompanied aging—like diabetes or arthritis or emphysema. But that was about improving the quality of your life as you got older, not averting aging altogether. And the public still was obsessed with that fountain of youth, egged on by the frequent publication of well-marketed books touting some new magic potion. In 1998, it was Grow Young with HGH: The Amazing Medically Proven Plan to Reverse Aging, by Dr. Ronald Klatz, which touted human growth hormone. “In a few decades, the traditional, enfeebled, ailing elderly person will be but a grotesque memory of a barbaric past,” promised Klatz, who had a medical degree from the Central America Health Sciences University in Belize. The “consequences of not acting,” he insisted, “are far worse than the consequences of acting.”
Women were also being barraged by stories about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Anyone watching the news in the late 1990s might reasonably believe that HRT would help prevent everything from colon cancer to tooth loss to Alzheimer’s disease. Premarin, the most popular version, was the bestselling prescription drug in the country in 1992. The manufacturers did not overpublicize the fact that the name was a reference to its source, pregnant mares’ urine. Six million women were using it regularly.
There had already been questions about its long-term effects. In 1991, a Senate subcommittee on aging held a hearing on menopause and estrogen, in which expert witnesses basically agreed that… more research needed to be done. There was, chairman Brock Adams noted, “no public health policy” on whether HRT was good, bad, or indifferent. Representative Pat Schroeder, who had been complaining long and loud about the tendency of medical researchers to use men as the basis for their studies, suggested that one of the reasons there hadn’t been more effort to study menopause was that “ageism against women is much heavier than ageism against men.
“I am delighted to be here today and finally see menopause come out of the closet, see it come out and become a legitimate health care issue rather than a joke,” she said, adding that “there are days when I think if I hear one more ‘raging hormone’ joke I will have a little trouble retaining my self-control.”
It would have been hard not to feel that if men had menopause, a lot more well-researched answers would have been available. But things were changing—thanks to champions like Schroeder and Bernadine Healy, who in 1991 became the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health. Under Healy, the NIH would launch a massive study of postmenopausal women, known as the Women’s Health Initiative.
“My wife is 61 years old. How old is she going to be when this study is completed?” Brock Adams asked. The senator, a big supporter of government spending on women’s health, wouldn’t be around to pursue the issue. In 1993, he was forced to retire after a number of women accused him of sexually molesting them after giving them drinks laced with drugs.
Sigh.
In what had clearly become a ritual, friends threw Gloria Steinem a “This is what sixty looks like” party to celebrate her birthday milestone and raise money for her charities. (Steinem’s funeral, they told one another, was inevitably going to be a fund-raiser.) “She’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman all rolled up into one—and she still doesn’t gain any weight,” announced Bella Abzug. Steinem, who had always talked about living to be 100, said she hoped to be alive in 2030 to “see what this country will be like when one in four women is 65 or over.”
Not all feminists were as serene as Steinem. “When my friends threw a surprise party on my sixtieth birthday I could have kicked them all,” recalled Betty Friedan. She felt as if her loved ones were “distancing me from their fifty-, forty-, thirty-year-old selves.” She was depressed for weeks. But that was back in 1981. Friedan was pretty good at reinventing herself, and five years later, she’d be researching a new book on women and aging. Her sixty-fifth birthday, in 1986, was a bash, featuring more than 200 people who came from around the world to put on “a musical comedy about my life, a celebration of life that transcended age.” This all happened at the Palladium, “the new ‘in’ disco in New York… and later we all went downstairs and danced.”
Friedan’s book took a little longer to write than she had anticipated. By the time The Fountain of Age came out, in 1993, she was past 70 and irate that anyone might regard that as over the hill. Retirement, she felt, was outdated—everyone should routinely expect to keep working into their 80s. Friedan specialized in angry tours of the sins of the mass media, and in her new book she had plenty of targets for her outrage. While people—especially women—were living longer and accumulating more assets for their later years, she wrote, “there was a curious absence—in effect, a blackout—of images of people over sixty-five, especially older women, doing, or even selling, anything at all.”
Well, there was Angela Lansbury solving all those crimes on TV. But Friedan was never a fan of on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-that analyses. She was looking for the enemy, and she was especially offended by the advertising industry’s attempts to portray older people as geriatric children. She found a Massachusetts restaurant chain offering a “kiddieburger” to “all kids under 10 and over 65” and a poster inviting the “young at heart” to have a “Senior Birthday Party at McDonald’s” with cake and paper hats. There was also a book, called Teaching and Loving the Elderly, that proposed enriching “the poor childlike senior citizen” with intellectual challenges like identifying which states were in the 13 colonies.
Friedan also hated being introduced as “the mother of the women’s movement”—a term she felt was used to separate women her age from younger feminists. (She quoted a 70-year-old theologian who had been invited to speak at a conference of female ministers and discovered that she had been sectioned off into a tiny group labeled “Our Foremothers.”) She’d hit upon an important distinction: even in places where discrimination was taboo, there seemed to be a big difference between including older (i.e., middle-aged) women and accepting those who were seen as just plain old. When the National Women’s Political Caucus held its first big meeting in 1971, the founders formed a policy council that had only one member under 35 and none whatsoever over 65. The younger women immediately protested being ignored, but no one said anything about the other end of the equation.
“[T]he message has gone out to those of us over sixty that your ‘Sisterhood’ does not include us,” wrote Barbara Macdonald, a feminist in her seventies. Macdonald told her younger colleagues in the movement they were just like men, treating her generation “as women who used to be women but aren’t any more. You do not see us in our present lives, you do not identify with our issues, you exploit us, you patronize us, you stereotype us. Mainly you ignore us.”
The idea that women could keep working into their 70s and 80s was new—sort of. There had always been paragons like Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who was preaching sermons at 83 and getting paeans in the early twentieth-century press. But they were celebrated for being remarkable rarities. As the twenty-first century loomed around the corner, things did begin to shift, and soon the sight of a 70-year-old college professor or an 80-year-old museum tour guide would hardly raise an eyebrow. Younger women, planning long-term, were much less likely to expect that their lives in the public world would end with the arrival of their first Social Security check. But the failure of that fountain of youth to materialize meant that even icons who planned to go on forever discovered that aging often brought physical restrictions no amount of healthy living could stave off. “You have to be a good sport, you have to take things in good spirit, you have to accept what has to be accepted and try to put up with whatever happens to come,” said Millicent Fenwick. She had retired from a United Nations job at 77—her daughter was suffering from leukemia and her own health was slipping. So she returned to her home in New Jersey, anticipating something less than a rebirth. “Don’t talk about golden years to somebody who is old,” she said.
She tried to keep busy—fund-raising for her favorite causes and cheerleading her favorite issues. When she was 80, a woman with a similar name died and word spread that the former congresswoman had succumbed. Fenwick lounged happily on her patio, startling people who called with condolences by answering the phone with “Fenwick here.” When local reporters came to check on the rumors, she’d give them the necessary clever retort, then try to engage them in a discussion of current events. She died—really—in 1992, at 82. “We all admired her and looked up to her so much,” her grandson said. “Even though sometimes it seemed like she gave her best energy to other people.”
A few years later, the Doonesbury heroine and Fenwick alter ego Lacey Davenport passed away in her early 90s after a struggle with Alzheimer’s. In her final appearance, she saw her late husband, Dick, returning to take her to their next home. First, Lacey told him, she needed to primp a little: “I have to put on my face!”
“I think He’s seen you without it, Dearest,” said Dick.
In his comic strip, Garry Trudeau has written about aging as well as anyone in America. And he was unique in combining a celebration of older people with an acknowledgment that there was always going to be an end. That’s a topic most elderly celebrities have preferred to steer clear of. In her mid-80s, Katharine Hepburn did volunteer to an interviewer that she was looking forward to dying: “Must be wonderful, like a long sleep.” But it wasn’t anything she was scheduling immediately. She made another movie appearance, playing Warren Beatty’s aunt, and was in the TV movie One Christmas, for which she received a Screen Actors Guild nomination at 87. Hepburn died in 2003 at age 96.
The public wasn’t exactly yearning for stories about famous people’s decline and death. They preferred news about late-life comebacks, and there seemed to be plenty. Margaret Chase Smith’s career certainly looked finished when she lost that Senate reelection battle at 74, to a Democrat who tried to depict her as a cranky behind-the-times relic. But she slowly rebuilt her life, traveling with Bill Lewis on a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation visiting professorship that sent her around the country to talk with students about everything from the evils of Richard Nixon to the battle for women’s rights. Then Lewis died suddenly, of a heart attack. Smith was overwhelmed that the love of her life, who was 15 years younger than she was, had gone ahead of her. But she recovered again, throwing herself into her work, traveling, speaking. As time passed, her biographer Janann Sherman wrote, “Smith was gradually transformed from a querulous old woman and washed-up politician into a living legend and a symbol of all that was good about a Maine that was rapidly fading away.”
She died at 97 in 1995, an excellent answer to complaints that all the opportunities for older women belonged to the middle-aged. She was, of course, Margaret Chase Smith, but she still was a symbol for women of all ages—that it was possible to find new purpose late in life, even after failure or personal loss.
Helen Gurley Brown, like Smith, hit a period when her former admirers began to feel she had definitely stayed too long at the fair. Brown was still editing Cosmo at 70, but her message of sexual liberation had failed to evolve with the times. She still claimed, for instance, that chasing secretaries around the office and stripping off their underpants was great fun for the secretaries as well as the bosses. “I have this possibly benighted idea that when a man finds you sexually attractive, he is paying you a compliment,” she wrote, in a 1991 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.
In 1996, Cosmo announced that Brown, 73, was going to leave—slowly. The new editor, Bonnie Fuller, would be moved in very gradually, and at the end Brown would still be editor of the magazine’s international editions, with an office and travel expenses. Brown acknowledged it was something she would never have done on her own—“They had to tell me it was over.” But she did admit that “at seventy-four, I was getting way too far out on the ledge (to put it mildly) to continue to be guru of an eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old reader.”
Brown had long resented the indignities, large and small, inflicted upon her by age; she was outraged when a young woman offered her a seat on the bus. But like many other media celebrities, she worked things out by writing a book. The Late Show was about everything from shopping to estate planning to—naturally—sex. (She warned her readers there was a chasm “as wide as Sunset Boulevard” between older women who have sex and those who don’t.) She also traveled the globe, opening new versions of Cosmo in countries where her message about enjoying life when you’re young and postponing marriage didn’t seem old hat.
Brown seemed to have figured out how to move on, but she had not figured out how to get past her lifelong obsession with her looks. When she was eighty, the author Eve Ensler came to visit and discovered Brown doing sit-ups. “Don’t mind me,” Ensler recalled her saying. “Eighty years old, [o]ne hundred sit-ups twice a day, I’m down to ninety pounds. Another ten years, I’ll be down to nothing. But even then I won’t feel beautiful.” It wasn’t one of your more uplifting visions of aging, but there did seem to be plusses to her obsession with the physical. She mentioned that she and her husband, David, had just had sex two days in a row: “He’s feisty, always has been.”
The feistiness bar seemed to be tilting toward women. In 1992, two academic researchers released a much-discussed report on the sexual attitudes of middle-aged Americans. Men, the study found, became more and more interested in emotional satisfaction, while women focused on physical desire. Or, as the Washington Post put it, “Now that dear old dad is finally looking for a tender moment, mom has the hots.” The researchers—biological scientist David Quadagno at Florida State University and sociologist Joey Sprague at the University of Kansas—found that half the men over 45 they sampled wanted sex mainly to satisfy romantic urges, while 60 percent of the women were primarily interested in the sex.
“It may be that it takes people half their sex lives to see the other half of themselves,” said Sprague. “Men finally find out that it’s okay to feel good about loving somebody, and women feel it’s all right to feel pleasure. The stereotypes are broken. Men have hearts, women have bodies.”
Everything in the story of American women does tend to converge. Education, equal rights, careers, economic power—it all came together, bringing a constantly expanding vision of what you could do, and how long you could do it. Sex included. Publishers were helpfully producing books like What to Do When He Has a Headache: Creating Renewed Desire in Your Man, and pharmacies were stocking lubricating gels. The Washington Post reminded its readers that back in the day, Benjamin Franklin had counseled men to pick older women for lovers “because they have more knowledge of the world.” The story generously skipped over Franklin’s observation that “in the dark all Cats are grey.”
One of the surprise hits of the 1990s was The First Wives Club, in which Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bette Midler played old college friends who meet up many years later to get revenge on husbands who had dumped them for younger women. “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood,” Hawn’s character complains at one point. “Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” It was not, if you listened to the reviewers, a particularly great film. But it definitely hit a nerve with its target audience.
“They’re showing up at movie theaters en masse—some, like the fifteen members of a women’s group in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in stretch limos and evening gowns,” reported Time. “They’re calling in to drive-time radio stations, like Raleigh, North Carolina’s WRAL-FM, which solicited listeners’ divorce horror stories and revenge fantasies—and found its switchboards lighted up like Times Square.” It was possible Time was overestimating the number of women who went to the movie in evening gowns, but the reporter did come up with a 52nd birthday party for a New Yorker named Patti Kenner “in which 60 of her female friends gathered for cocktails, then adjourned to a Manhattan theater to hoot and laugh their way through all 105 minutes of The First Wives Club.” The movie also drew lots of praise from a support group in Hollywood called LADIES (Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane), which included the ex-wives of actors Gene Hackman, Michael Landon, and Jerry Lewis. “The public thinks that money makes it different for us, but I’ve seen firsthand first wives of Oscar winners who moved from mansions to little apartments”—or even, for a while, to their cars, said Lynn Landon.
Two lessons from this story: the specter of the displaced homemaker still loomed large; and older women were a potential movie audience of serious proportion. That second point didn’t seem to hit home very quickly in Hollywood, where the stars of The First Wives Club complained that they had to take substantial pay cuts to get the film made yet weren’t offered much in the way of raises when the studio was mulling a sequel. It was, Goldie Hawn claimed, “because they were afraid of women of a certain age.”
The pants warriors were making their way toward a triumphal victory march in the 1990s. Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Barbara Mikulski broke the unwritten slacks-ban rule in the Senate in 1993. Braun, 45, was an accidental rebel, simply donning a suit she’d worn frequently at her previous job in the Illinois legislature. She was the first African American woman to win entrance to the Senate, but when she walked onto the floor, the gasps she heard were not about racial breakthrough. Mikulski, 56, knew she was ignoring the Senate dress code. It was a snowy day, and the meteorologists were promising more bad weather. “I just really wanted to be comfortable,” she said. “I’m most comfortable wearing slacks. Well, for a woman to come on the floor of the Senate in trousers was viewed as a seismographic event.”
Mikulski, like Braun, was a pioneer—at the time, she was on her way to becoming the longest-serving woman in Congress and a powerful, perpetually outspoken committee chair. “I might be short,” the four-foot-eleven Mikulski said, “but I won’t be overlooked.” In 1995, Mikulski, then 59, was slightly injured in a mugging outside her home in Baltimore. The robber, her spokeswoman said, “pushed her to take the purse. She pushed him back.” But rebellious as she could be, Mikulski didn’t try to break the pants barrier without alerting the Senate president pro tempore, Senator Robert Byrd. She got at least a tacit approval and made her breakthrough. “You would have thought that I was walking on the moon,” she said.
Pants weren’t new to Congress—Rep. Charlotte Reid had worn black bell-bottoms onto the House floor in 1969. But the Senate had continued to be a no-go zone, and it drove some of the female staff members nuts. “We’ve heard from women staff that in the 1980s, if they came in to work—if they were called in on an emergency basis—they needed to keep a dress to put on quickly or they had to borrow one if they had to appear on the Senate floor,” Senate historian Richard A. Baker told the Washington Post. Once Braun and Mikulski made the break, the grateful staff followed their lead and the dress code war was won forever.
But the big breakthrough was happening in the White House, where Hillary Clinton was a huge fan. “Mrs. Clinton believes that pants can be elegant and practical,” said a spokesman for the First Lady, who confirmed that Hillary “wears pants about once a week.” She was the first, and so far the only, First Lady to pose for a presidential portrait in trousers. “Why must she dress that way?” demanded fashion consultant Tim Gunn. “I think she’s confused about her gender.”
When Clinton became the first First Lady to run for the U.S. Senate, the Hillary campaign uniform was a black pantsuit with a pastel blouse. Celebrating her election, she recalled the morning she had announced her candidacy, the summer before: “And sixty-two counties, sixteen months, three debates, two opponents and six black pantsuits later, because of you, here we are.” It seemed like a smart response to the ability of male candidates to wear the same basic suit every day without inducing any comment. But Clinton said she got tired of it, and when she ran for president, the pantsuits evolved into multiple bright colors.
In 1999, the New York Times announced that a new study had determined that “Middle Age Is Prime of Life.” The news came from an ambitious 10-year research project on Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) that kept track of nearly 8,000 Americans 25 to 74. And the winning life stage, when it came to feelings of well-being and control was—yes!—middle age. “On balance, the sense we all have is that midlife is the best place to be,” one of the researchers told the Times. The sweet spot came between 40 and 60.
Most people, the study found, never did have a midlife crisis. Less than a quarter of those surveyed felt they’d gone through one, and most of the people who did reported that the crisis was about an outside event—death, job loss, divorce—rather than any general reaction to age. Those who did have a genuine midlife crisis, the researchers said, tended to have a high “neuroticism” score and a high level of… education.
The good news from that MIDUS study was mainly limited to middle age—it found that later in life, women in particular seemed to lose their sense of life purpose. Carol Ryff, the director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, told the Times that one of the study’s messages to middle-aged Americans was to “be mindful of what’s ahead.”
But the survey was another blow against the popular conception of menopause as something to be feared and dreaded. Most of the women in the MIDUS research said their only reaction to the end of menstruation was “relief.” A measly 2 percent reported feeling “only regret.” Half didn’t get hot flashes—and only around 13 percent said they had them “almost every day.” As we’ve seen, menopause was getting good press all over the place during the 1990s. “Why is menopause suddenly so fashionable?” Good Housekeeping asked—rather rhetorically. The answer was (three guesses): the baby-boom generation. “Their feisty spirit—if not their sheer number—has already redefined femininity, work styles and parenting, and it now promises to revolutionize society’s views toward ‘the change,’” author Martha King told GH readers. The Times discovered a menopause support group that called itself Red Hot Mamas.
As the twenty-first century approached, there was a lot of discussion in the media about what the next millennium might bring. It was a very old tradition: back in the sixteenth century, the French astrologer Nostradamus announced that sometime around the year 2000—well, actually, in July of 1999; the man was very precise—the King of Terror would arrive from the sky and… do something awful. Edgar Cayce, a predictor known as The Sleeping Prophet, who was very popular until his death in 1945, said there was going to be a wonderful era of peace and brotherhood—but not until the earth’s axis shifted, creating all kinds of disasters, including the collapse of California into the Pacific. Some students of the Great Pyramid of Giza claimed a careful examination of its interior showed that the world was going to come to an end on September 17, 2001.
Once we got through relatively unscathed, the predictions for life post-2000 were often more cheery. “The Baby Boom generation, and perhaps its parents, can expect to live healthy, active lives that stretch to between 110 and 120 years,” wrote Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies in a much-quoted book called Cheating Death. Unsurprisingly, given the title, they also suggested that perhaps “some of us may never die, save by accident or choice.” On the other hand, the authors thought all those old people would scarf up all the resources, leading to “an all-out war between generations.”
We stop once again to contemplate the fact that the news is never all good, even when it’s being made up.