In Our Prime (8 page)

In cities, an array of leisurely pursuits developed as factory work
replaced dawn-to-dusk farming and electricity lit up the night. Amusement parks, dance halls, social clubs, and fraternities and sororities were places where members of a single generation mingled.
Women's clubs became
“schools for the middle-aged woman,” wrote Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist, where 50-year-olds can find “friends who like her are in the middle way of life.”

This separation simultaneously introduced a generational identity and reinforced it. The spread of public junior and senior high schools (which picked up speed after 1910), segregated teenagers and provided them with a unique shared experience. High school extended their education beyond the level most of their parents had achieved, and delayed their entry into the adult world of work. The more people identified with one particular stage of life, the deeper the divisions between the stages became.

The health-care professions started to formally recognize and classify these groupings, so that by the century's end, stages, as Howard Chudacoff concludes, “were being defined with near-clinical precision, and more definite norms were being assigned to each stage.” The ages that Shakespeare and Dante had written about were no longer invoked merely as literary metaphors but declared to be verifiable scientific fact applicable to everyone. Physicians and psychologists drew up schedules of biological, social, and mental development that turned the first few years of a child's life into a set of monthly checkpoints: the expected age for the first step, the first word, the first bite of solid food; for toilet training, for school; and eventually, for knowing what happened to Bambi's mother. These measured and sequenced phases were the medical counterpart of Taylor's scientific management theories, with each moment in time corresponding to an appropriate behavior or task.

Doctors determined that the unique attributes and illnesses of childhood required specialized expertise, and in the 1880s created the field of pediatrics.
In 1900, the Swedish writer
and feminist Ellen Key published her influential book on education and parenting,
The Century of the Child,
noting that children had a nature singular and distinct from that of adults.
Arguing that the aged should
similarly be in a separate category, an article in the 1904
American Journal of Nursing
stated: “We must adapt our practice to the age of the individual. You must not treat
a young child as you would a grown person, nor must you treat an old person as you would one in the prime of life.”

Five years later
, the physician Ignatz Leo Nascher identified senescence, or old age, as “a distinct period of life, a physiological entity as much so as the period of a childhood,” and coined the term “geriatrics” for this “new special branch of medicine.”

Adolescence entered popular consciousness around the same period. The legendary psychologist G. Stanley Hall officially introduced the idea in 1905 in his massive tome
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.
Hall defined the stage
as running from ages 12 to 24—peaking between 14 and 16—and marked by a volatile mix of naïve optimism, burning sexuality, intense emotionalism, instability, self-absorption, and rashness. The adolescent's literary precursor can be found in Goethe's
Young Werther,
who exhibited the regenerative powers and romantic temperament that enamored Hall, Key, and others.

Hall was a towering figure in his field. He founded the
American Journal of Psychology
in 1887, became the first president of the American Psychological Association, presided over Clark University for more than thirty years, and hosted Freud's 1909 visit to the States. Deeply influenced by Darwin, he developed what he called “genetic psychology” and applied his ideas about the evolution of species to a single individual. Each person repeats or recapitulates the same developmental stages that the human species experienced as a whole, he argued. Babies corresponded to the pre-savage state, while adolescents manifested the characteristics of ancient and medieval societies, in which there is a “peculiar proneness to be either very good or very bad.”

Middle age lacked a grand chronicler and advocate like Hall. But as childhood, adolescence, and old age were more precisely defined and corralled, middle age stood out in sharper relief. The idea of a separate midlife period swept through the culture, pulled along by age-graded institutions, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as drops in birth and mortality rates.

A look at early life expectancy charts can
give the faulty impression that middle age was simply the result of longer life spans. After all, if
death comes at 40 (the average life expectancy in 1800), there isn't much of a middle to enjoy. But that is just a tiny part of the story. Average life expectancy hadn't increased that much; it was only 47 in 1900. In any case, neither the 1800 nor the 1900 figures reflect how long people actually lived. The all-too-frequent death of babies and children is what kept
average
life expectancy statistics so low. Even in colonial times, most people who made it past age 15 had a good chance of living to 60. Knowing that the Bible allotted a life span of “three score and ten years,” no one mistook 45 or 50 for old age.

More crucial to midlife's invention was the fact that women had fewer children. Discoveries like antiseptics and the microorganisms that caused cholera and diphtheria led to a plunge in childhood mortality and stanched the flood of women seriously disabled or killed in childbirth. Better diet and sanitation helped infants and children survive past adolescence, which contributed to the drop in birth rates.
With fewer babies and more time and money
, parents invested more in each child. Americans' growing sense of autonomy also encouraged women to consider children a personal choice rather than solely a matter of God's will or male authority, a view supported by the increasingly visible presence of feminists and birth control advocates,
who counseled families on the logistics of
vaginal jellies, douches, and withdrawal. “Always carry to bed a clean napkin,” Dr. James Ashton advised affianced men.
The invention of vulcanized
rubber that Charles Goodyear turned into a tire dynasty added to the array of methods by cheaply producing reliable rubber condoms, which became popular in the 1870s.

By 1900, the typical mother
had two or three children, less than half as many as her counterpart one hundred years earlier. On average, she was 53 when her last child left home, and she died at 71. Adulthood was no longer an unvarying, seamless whole filled with farmwork and child-rearing until death. Middle-aged women were able for the first time to turn to other pursuits, like fashion, shopping, working, and volunteering. There was life after children.

For all the public discussion of these new stages, the label “middle age,” with its recently gathered retinue of associations, was initially meaningful
to a relatively small segment of the population.
As historians note, societies are governed by
“laws of uneven development” that sabotage efforts to generalize.
The number of urban residents
did not inch past that of their rural neighbors until 1920, when they made up fifty-one percent of the country's 106 million people.
Divisions were not as
stark between parents and children in rural areas, where fathers maintained power over land and inheritance and claimed greater authority. The fashions and amusements of middle-aged women and the factory life of middle-aged men detailed in the press primarily referred to white city dwellers.

Age consciousness was most
keenly felt in urban hubs, “the storm centers of civilization,” where opinion makers lived and people were headed. The growing middle class—the white professionals, managers, and bureaucrats who administered the industrialized economy—formed a new tier beneath wealthy landowners and businessmen, and above unskilled laborers and subsistence farmers. Divisions between classes and between men and women hardened in the late 1870s and 1880s. Couples moved from the farm, where all work was shared, to the city, where men and women were separated into the domestic or the business realm.
Dire economic conditions
stoked class identities and resentments, further parting professionals and businessmen from manual laborers, whose numbers increased daily as shiploads of immigrants streamed into America's ports.

In 1900, fewer than a fifth
of employed men, about four million, held white-collar jobs. At the top of this stratum were lawyers, scientists, clergymen, doctors, and managers; at the bottom were clerks, teachers, and governesses who did not earn as much money but shared the same values of hard work, moderation, responsibility, and prudence. Two-thirds of Americans still lived in rural areas, and half of the population was poor at any given time.

Later in the twentieth century, the middle class dominated and defined the United States, but even at this early stage, this relatively small group, along with the nation's wealthier class, controlled the levers of influence and power; their voices dominated the media. These cultural brokers helped fashion the images and explanations of America's disorienting hurly-burly. They command special attention because they steered the
conversation and shaped perceptions of their own middle age, as well as those of the ethnically varied working classes they viewed as their inferiors.

The cable lines and periodicals
that connected the Eastern part of the country with the West, and the North with the South, disseminated their tastes and prejudices. In 1890, there were nearly 200,000 miles of railway track, 250,000 miles of telephone wire, and 1,610 daily newspapers in print. By 1900, automobiles had entered the landscape.
Residents from coast to coast
could share photographs, cartoons, news, jokes, styles, and ideas through advertisements, novels, journals, newspapers, the Sears Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward catalogs, and later, movies in a fraction of the time it used to take for information to travel. The public drew on this store of unfamiliar pictures, gestures, attitudes, and behaviors to construct a generational identity. In many parts of the country, the media's “Middle-Aged Man” (and Woman) came into being before the flesh-and-blood article.

Fashion manufacturers and editors were among the first to assign appropriate clothes to various age groups. In rural America in the early 1800s, a sweet 16 and a sedate 60-year-old could wear the same style without embarrassment.
By the end of the century
, expectations had altered as each age developed its own dress code. The
Los Angeles Times
in 1895 even offered fashion tips for “a little roly poly grandmamma,” so that she need not “look wider than she is long.”
Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
(married to James Wilson Woodrow, a cousin of the future president) sternly informed
The Cosmopolitan
's readers in 1903, “Sweet simplicity at fifty is absurd.” Middle-aged women should indulge in elaborate design and adornments, “the splendor of jewels, forbidden to the debutante, is her privilege.”
Harper's Bazar
advised that 25 was the upper limit for simple clothing, and told perplexed 45-year-olds how to dress: “Fine clothes and jaunty and piquant fashions are in fact the property of middle life; not of old age, indeed, any more than of early youth.”

Men's fashions also distinguished among generations, with the width of a brim or the placement of a crease as reliable a guide to age as the number of rings on a tree. “
The New Styles That
Are Designed for Young, Old and Middle-Aged Men” that appeared in the newspaper the
San Francisco Call
in 1904 explained: “There are straw hats for the young
man, straw hats for the middle-aged man, straw hats for the old man and straw hats for the boy. Each age has its own particular and exclusive style more pronouncedly this year than ever before.”

Etiquette manuals, reform pamphlets, academic lectures, government reports, medical conferences, journals, and advertisements laid out the appropriate age for everything from marriage to eating meat. They set the social clock, defining expectations for when someone should finish an education, live independently, or have children. These new norms informed middle-aged wives how to dress and how often to have sex (alas, for them, it tended to be never).
James Foster Scott, a
former obstetrician, wrote in his 1898 text
The Sexual Instinct
what he considered appropriate sexual activity for every stage of life, declaring that when “the individual is in the afternoon of life” he and she are “again sexless from a physical standpoint.” He estimated that this turning point occurred in women between 42 and 50, and in men between 50 and 65.
According to John Henry Kellogg
, the food reformer and health spa founder (who helped perfect the humble cornflake with his brother, William Keith), men and women in different stages of life should not marry because older people didn't have the energy to withstand the youthful demands of sex. Meanwhile, the forerunners of Miss Manners were policing the social corridors. “
The haste and impetuosity
so becoming to 18 are immoral at 50,” Celia Parker Woolley wrote in 1903. “It is neither pleasant nor edifying to see an aging man or woman aping the behavior of the young.”

Failure to conform to these
widely proclaimed standards risked placing one outside the new “normal,” a word that passed into common use around mid-century, when it began to enjoy a steady rise in popularity. “Deviation,” previously a neutral statistical term, took on a more negative connotation. Fitting in mattered.
As assorted experts displaced religious authorities
, being normal was emphasized more than being moral.