Revisions

Abstract

The cataclysmic change in the social construction of women’s roles in the last quarter of the 20th century erased the old definitions of the “social clock” for women in midlife. Historically, midlife women have been represented in the psychological literature primarily in regard to their reproductive role and their marital status (Gergen, 1990). More recently, this literature has swung in the other direction and has been focused on women as career achievers. But women in midlife are to be found in a panoply of life roles, sometimes sequentially, sometimes simultaneously. Women in the middle of their life course might be grandmothers or new mothers, career women in positions of authority or women undertaking new or first careers, divorced several times or never married, formerly heterosexual and now lesbian, disenchanted with political commitment or newly engaged, or people with various other life projects central in their lives. The absence of universal markers creates a challenge to a developmental psychology that would try to conceptualize a generalized process of midlife development in women.

What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 66