Read an Excerpt

1
The Study of Women’s Lives
 
How do women’s lives evolve in adulthood? This question, seemingly so simple and straightforward, has rarely been asked in psychology or the other human sciences. Very little research has been done on the life course of the individual human being, female or male, in psychology, psychiatry, biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. Indeed, “life course” is one of the most important yet least examined terms in these fields. It refers to the evolution of an individual life from beginning to end. The key words are “evolution” and “life.”
 
The word “evolution” indicates sequence, temporal flow, the unfolding of a life—be it an individual, a society, an organization, or any other open system—over the years. The evolution of a life involves stability and change, continuity and discontinuity, orderly progression as well as stasis, regression, chaotic flux. It is not enough to focus solely on a single moment or chapter in the life, nor to study the same individuals at intervals of several years as in standard longitudinal research, assuming simple continuity in the intervening periods. Rather, we must examine “lives in progress” (the felicitous phrase is Robert White’s) and follow the temporal sequence closely and continuously over a span of years.
 
The word “life” is also of crucial importance. A life is, above all, about the engagement of a person in the world. To study an individual life we must include all aspects of living. A life involves significant interpersonal relationships—with friends and lovers, parents and siblings, spouses and children, bosses, colleagues, and mentors. It also involves significant relationships with groups and institutions of all kinds: family, occupational world, religion, community. When we study any of these significant relationships, we must consider the nature of the social context in which it occurs, what goes on in the relationship at a relatively overt, behavioral level, and the subjective wishes and meanings that shape the person’s involvement in it. We must include as well the bodily aspects of life—genetic endowment, biological development, health and illness, bodily fitness and impairment. To study the life course it is necessary to look at an individual life in its complexity at a given time and to delineate its evolution over time.
 
The study of the life course has presented almost insuperable problems to the human sciences. Each discipline has claimed as its own special domain one aspect of life, such as personality, social structure, culture, or biological functioning, and has neglected or minimized the others. The life course itself has been split into unconnected segments, such as childhood or old age, without recognizing the place of each segment in the life cycle as a whole. The result is fragmentation. I believe that a new multidisciplinary field of study will emerge in the next few decades.
 
Biography, the description of an individual life, offers another approach. For the most part, biographers have focused on their subjects’ public work (be it fiction, painting, political leadership, or whatever) without considering sufficiently how the work is in the life and the life in the work. In addition, most biographies are concerned with a single life, not with a comparison of several lives or with broader theoretical issues. Well-done biographies can be of enormous value to the understanding of the life course generally. The present study is strongly biographical in method and spirit. It is part of an effort to form a boundary between the humanities and the sciences. Rather than one book-length biography of a single woman, this book contains briefer biographies of forty-five women. I have sought to capture the uniqueness of each individual life and, at the same time, to define and describe developmental principles that shape women’s lives generally.
 
Major Aims and Questions
 
My primary aim was to learn about the life course and development of women from the late teens to the mid-forties. This is not a comparative study of women versus men. It is, rather, an in-depth exploration of women’s lives. Equal attention has been given to common themes that hold for women generally, to differences between various groups of women, and to the unique character of each individual life. I wanted to gain a detailed picture of every life in order to show the diversity of women’s lives under various social and psychological conditions. Much of the recent research on gender differences has tended to create an oversimplified image of “woman” in opposition to an equally stereotypical image of “man.” My findings support the view that women are similar to men in certain basic respects and different in others, and that the lives of both genders are wonderfully varied.
 
The method of study was Intensive Biographical Interviewing. I sought to draw out each woman’s life story, as she experienced it, from childhood to the present. I explored the major events, relationships, strivings, and imaginings of her life, with attention to both external realities and subjective meanings. This method, which I initially developed during the research for my book The Seasons of a Man’s Life, has proved to be ideally suited to the exploration of the individual life course, without built-in assumptions about gender and gender differences.
 
The key questions animating the present study were these:
(1) Is there a human life cycle—an underlying order in the human life course, a sequence of seasons through which our lives must pass, each in its own unique way? Earlier I found that the male life cycle evolves through an age-linked sequence of eras: childhood, early adulthood, middle adulthood, late adulthood, and late late adulthood. Do women have a fundamentally different life cycle? Since the concrete life circumstances and the timing of specific events are different in many ways for women, I could not assume in advance that they would go through the same sequence of eras. (Indeed, I initially decided to study the two genders separately in order to attend fully to the differences.) To my surprise, the findings indicate that women go through the same sequence of eras as men, and at the same ages. There is, in short, a single human life cycle through which all our lives evolve, with myriad variations related to gender, class, race, culture, historical epoch, specific circumstances, and genetics. My view of this life cycle is given in Chapter 2.
 
(2) Is there a process of adult development analogous to the earlier process of child development? The human sciences have been studying child development for over a century. It is generally recognized that there is a basic developmental pattern in the first twenty years or so of life. All human beings apparently go through a sequence of developmental periods—prenatal, infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence—before reaching that final amorphous state called adulthood. The study of child development seeks to determine the universal order and the general developmental principles that operate to produce uniquely individual lives. Research on child development is concerned equally with the universal and the idiosyncratic; it is concerned with the emergence of the unique individual out of the universal human. Of course the idea of developmental order includes the existence of disorder, even chaos. A period of relatively stable structure, we find, is followed by a period of flux in which we move from one structure to another.
 
What about adult development? Does it make sense to look at adult life from a developmental perspective similar to that used in childhood? Until recently this question was rarely asked. It was assumed that development is in its nature a childhood phenomenon: the process by which we evolve from conception to adulthood. Likewise, it has been assumed that senescence is a process of decline or negative growth that shapes our evolution in old age. In between, it would seem, we are on our own, changing in response to specific events but without any developmental order. The study of adult development is in its infancy and struggling to establish itself in the neglected space between child development and gerontology. Paradoxically, we know a lot about specific features of adult life—marriage, divorce, child-rearing, work, illness, stress—but very little about the meaning of adulthood as a season in the life cycle. We have, as it were, a detailed picture of many trees but no conception of the forest and no map to guide our journeys through it. One of my major aims is to form a conception of the life cycle and a map broad enough to provide guidelines for the infinitely varied pathways by which it may be traversed.
 
 In The Seasons of a Man’s Life I presented my own initial map of the developmental periods in men’s lives over the course of early and middle adulthood, from roughly 17 to 65. These periods are not periods in a single aspect of living, such as personality, cognitive, moral, or career development. They are, rather, periods in the development of the adult life structure—the underlying pattern or design of a person’s life at a given time. The life structure of a man, I found, evolves through a sequence of alternating periods, each lasting some five to seven years. A period of building and maintaining a life structure is followed by a transitional period in which we terminate the existing structure and move toward a new one that will fully emerge in the ensuing structure building-maintaining period.
 
I did not assume that the periods in life structure development would be the same in their nature and timing for women as for men. As with the eras, however, I made the surprising discovery that women and men go through the same sequence of periods at the same ages. At the same time, there are wide variations between and within the genders, and in concrete ways of traversing each period. My current view of human adult development is given in Chapter 2. This view is still provisional, but it has strong empirical grounding in my own and others’ research.