New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

by Gail Sheehy
New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time

by Gail Sheehy

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Overview

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehy's landmark bestseller Passages. Seven years ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle. . .
People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die. A fifty-year-old woman--who remains free of cancer and heart disease-- can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Men, too, can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood--beginning at twenty-one and ending at sixty-five--are hopelessly out of date. In New Passages, Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier--a Second Adulthood in middle life.
"Stop and recalculate," Sheehy writes. "Imagine the day you turn forty-five as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity--beyond both male and female menopause. Through hundreds of personal and group interviews, national surveys of professionals and working-class people, and fresh findings extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports, Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages. Combining the scholar's ability to synthesize data with the novelist's gift for storytelling, she allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us.
New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work is certain to awaken and permanently alter the way we think about ourselves.
"SHEEHY CLEARLY STATES IDEAS ABOUT LIFE THAT HAVE NEVER BEFORE BEEN AS CLEARLY STATED."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"AN OPTIMISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT IN PESSIMISTIC TIMES. . . It is grounded in the economic and psychological realities that make adult life so complex today."
--The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307763761
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/28/2011
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 528
Sales rank: 479,786
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Bestselling author and cultural observer Gail Sheehy made history with the publication of Passages, which was an international bestseller, appearing in 28 languages. She followed up with The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men’s Passages. Sheehy is also the author of Hillary’s Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, and Middletown, America, about a New Jersey town devastated by the World Trade Center attack. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy is the recipient of the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America.

Hometown:

New York City and Berkeley, California

Date of Birth:

November 27, 1937

Education:

B.A., University of Vermont; M.A., Columbia School of Journalism

Read an Excerpt

1
 
 
MAPPING LIVES ACROSS TIME
 
The playing field is quite different for each generation when its young members start the journey into adulthood. The point where you and your friends came in on your cultures history has influenced your choices and attitudes. That distinctive generational coloration affects each stage of life and the passages between them, profoundly influencing which tasks of development you accomplish early, which you postpone, and which you will have to catch up on—or may never complete.
 
WHICH GENERATION ARE YOU TRAVELING WITH?
 
I invite you to join me in mapping your own life across time. Five different generations now occupy contemporary adulthood, spanning birth dates from 1914 to 1980. You will probably find your peer traveling companions among the capsule descriptions of those five generations in this chapter.
 
To represent each one, I have selected five birth years that make up a definable “cohort group,” a sociological term that refers to people who will always share a common location in history. (See Key to Your Cohort chart.) Not only were members of any cohort born within the same few years, but they have experienced defining events when they were the same age. Economic and social conditions along with technological and medical advances have either sped up or held back their development. Thus people in different cohorts age in different ways.
 
Drawing on the PUMS file—the unique database created from Census Bureau data that spans fifty years of information on the entire U.S. population—we are able to compare and contrast what is happening at any stage to a particular cohort group over its lifetime, with regard to educational and occupational achievement, labor force status, income level, marriage, childbearing, and divorce patterns.
 
You can look yourself up in this book and compare yourself to people in your parents’ or your children’s age-groups. For instance, if you are a woman in your mid-forties, you will find yourself under the Vietnam Generation at every stage you have so far encountered—from Pulling Up Roots to the Tryout Twenties, Turbulent Thirties, and Flourishing Forties. Check out the striking increases in your education, professionalism, income, and childlessness compared with women of the previous “Silent” Generation. If you are a man in his sixties from the World War II Generation, you can look yourself up through the Flaming Fifties and Harmonizing Sixties. Notice, for example, how faithfully married you have remained since your thirties and how unprepared you are to retire at the traditional age of 65.
 
To highlight the ground conditions when you and your cohort set off on the journey of adult life, each of the five generations described below in capsules are compared during the transition out of adolescence. Pulling Up Roots, as I called it in Passages, is the time when we begin detaching from the family and initiating the search for a personal identity. Anything seems possible, but everything is open to question.
 
The tasks of this Pulling Up Roots passage are to locate ourselves in a peer group role, a sex role, an anticipated occupation, and an ideology or worldview—a tall order. By engaging in these tasks, we gather the impetus to leave home physically and the identity to begin leaving home emotionally. We generally start at this stage by claiming control over at least one aspect of our lives that our parents can’t touch. This is a key building block of adulthood. Reduced to its essence, mental health is enhanced by expanding our control over our environment.
 
This passage used to begin in earnest about age 18 and was usually completed by age 22. Military service, early marriage, or college created a compulsory break away from home. Exposure to a multicultural milieu was much more common when boys had to go to either college or boot camp, where rich and poor, snobs and hicks, North and South, all had to bunk in together. Universal military service ended in the United States in 1973. Volunteer military service now attracts only 6.4 percent of 18- to 19-year-old men.
 
Previous generations of men were desperate to have a paycheck by the age of 21. Supporting themselves was how they demonstrated they had achieved manhood. Young women were expected to be content with an identity confined by traditional sex roles. The message was: You are whom you marry and whom you mother. Thus women were often willing at 19 to make “jailbreak marriages” with inappropriate men just to get away from parental control.
 
Today, with the economies of the United States and Europe in the midst of a random revolution, men and women of any age feel the control over their lives threatened. To those in the not-yet-ready-for-adulthood age-group, it is particularly disorienting to have the economic ground beneath them shifting even as they make their first test steps. They haven’t had a chance yet to develop mature defenses or master any major life crises.
 
“Youth in crisis.” The label is axiomatic for any generation. Do you recognize the generation described in the following commentary from a TV magazine show?
 
They feel the rising sense of anxiety and insecurity… senseless outbreaks of savagery, as race rioting, and they are quick to absorb the new spirit of violence and recklessness.
 
The accompanying video depicts kids in their early teens smoking dope, buying pornography, and streetwalking to catch tricks. As usual, the finger of guilt for allowing this general decline in the moral health of youth is pointed at the working mother:
 
Today U.S. industry is employing hundreds of thousands of women, who before … were homemakers, devoting their full time to their families … the latchkey kid, whose working parents leave her to shift for herself at home, is today a familiar… phenomenon. Everywhere, children of working parents are being left without adequate supervision or restraint.
 
But this was not Dan Quayle harping on parents of the “X Generation” for failing to instill family values. This was a 1940s Time magazine documentary film about “Youth in Crisis,” depicting George Bush’s World War II Generation. At 19 or 22, its older male members were already away at war, proving themselves as young men in the most traditional way, while their younger brothers and sisters back home were discovering an alternative mode—juvenile delinquency. Herbert Hoover was beside himself about it. Mothers had been “drafted” by society to run the engines of war factories left idle by their soldiering husbands. Society had not foreseen the necessity to provide adequate day care.
 
So what’s new? During the 1970s and 1980s, while total money income levels were declining in constant dollars for men in every age-group except those over 65,3 wives and mothers were again “drafted” to jump-start the economy. The extra engine driving the economy during the 1980s, so that total income didn’t go down more than it did, was working women and wives. The Census Bureau incomes expert Paul Ryscavage corroborated my findings: “Returns on education for women during the 1980s drove earnings for all households in the country.” Once again society hasn’t caught up with the realities and provided adequate child care for the younger women who need it in order to work longer hours.”
 
Let’s look at psychological health in this age-group fifty years ago. One out of every four of the scared young men of the World War II Generation who stripped down for his draft physical was rejected by Selective Service because of a “mental or nervous condition.”5 Of course, the fact that nothing like that number remained psychologically dysfunctional in adulthood suggests that much of the turmoil of this passage is not new. Adolescents have always been susceptible to a “flu of the personality,” with brief but severe depressive episodes a fairly common accompaniment to the growing pains of adolescing. Weren’t you certain you would never recover from your first broken heart?
 
And so, while this chapter focuses on disparities in the life cycle from one generation to the next, be aware that important aspects of our inner development remain true to stage.
 

Table of Contents

Note from the Authorix
Book 1First Adulthood
Prologue: Oh, Pioneers!3
Updating the Passages Concept
What to Do With This Leftover Life?
The Discovery Process
New Cross-Cultural Evidence
Part 1Whatever Happened to the Life Cycle?
I.Mapping Lives Across Time23
Which Generation Are You Traveling With?
World War II Generation
Silent Generation
Vietnam Generation
Me Generation
Endangered Generation
Welcome to Provisional Adulthood
The Good News
Part 2The Flourishing Forties
2.The Vietnam Generation Hits Middlescence57
Who Me, an Adult?
Out of Control
3.Men Redefining Success67
Rise of the Nonworking Class
The Double Squeeze
The Pharmaceuticals Salesman, Age 48
The Auto Worker, Age 46
A Black Man's Bonus Time, Age 40
A Wunderkind's Handicap, Age 40
The Wunderkind Growing Up, Age 47
The New Midlife Man
4.Out-of-Sight Women85
A Woman in Early Midlife Crisis
Catch-40 for Couples
Beyond "Me"--to Another Level of Being
5.The Fantasy of Fertility Forever95
Late Babymania
The Great Postponers
The Psychic Fallout
What Do You Mean, My Eggs Are Too Old?
But Susan Sarandon Did It
The Facts on Infertility
So Glad I Didn't Wait
The Race
6.Perpetual Middlescence115
Holding the Edge
A Woman Addicted to Success, Age 52
Frozen in Time
Single Men: What Are You Doing from Five to Nine?
Single Women: Tales from the Naked City
Book 2Second Adulthood
Prologue: A Brand-New Passage137
Decline or Progress?
From Survival to Mastery
The "Little Death" of First Adulthood
Birth of Second Adulthood
The Meaning Crisis
Time to Kill?
Push Toward Authenticity
Aliveness or Stagnation?
The Time Flies Test
Safety or Danger?
Part 3Passage to the Age of Mastery
7.The Mortality Crisis159
Living on the Edge
Little Victories
Composing Your Own Progress Narrative
Peggy's Progress
Guides and Teachings
Part 4Flaming Fifties: Women
8.Women: Pits to Peak179
First, the Terror
The Vanity Crisis
The New Female Pacesetters
Working-Class Women: Finding Faith in Yourself
Surprise! You're Not Getting Older, You're Getting Happier!
Women's Historical Progress Across Time
A Survivor Who Found Passion at 50
9.Wonder Women Meets Menopause199
"I'm Out of Estrogen, and I've Got a Gun"
Phase One: The Perimenopause Panic
Phase Two: Over the Hump
Should I Take Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)?
The Breast Cancer Phobia
The Weight Gain Fallacy
Phase Three: Postmenopause
Call of the Wild Girl
10.From Pleasing to Mastery223
On the Privilege of Being 50
Moving Toward Mastery
Finding One's Own Voice
From Anger to Forgiveness
Part 5Flaming Fifties: Men
II.The Samson Complex243
The Male Vanity Crisis
The Aging Athlete, Age 57
The Excessed VP, Age 47
The Sociable Athlete, Age 59
Macho Men Holding the Line
But My Body is Bulletproof!
12.Fall Guys of the Economic Revolution259
Corporate Refugees
The Lifer, Age 53
The Meant-to-be-President, Age 55
Psychic Consequences
Angry and Anxious White Males
The New (Hostile) Dependence on Wives
Reality Testing for the Future
The Rehabilitation of the Corporate Refugee
The Company Man as Free Agent, Age 48
13.The Optimism Surge274
From Competing to Connecting
Men's Anguish Over Empty Nest
Father, I Hardly Knew Ye
Reinventing Fatherhood
The Start-Over Dad, Age 59
The Medlator, Age 48
14.The Unspeakable Passage: Male Menopause287
I'd Rather Have a Talking Frog
The Problem Without a Proper Name
Hard Statistics and Hopeful Science
Sex, Lies, and Scorekeeping
Am I Just Getting Old?
The Mind-Body Link
High-Tech Solutions
High-Technique Solution
How to Restore Vitality and Virility
Beyond Male Menopause
15.Men and Women: The New Geometry of the Sexual Diamond318
A Point of Harmony
Brain-Sex Changes
Take Back Your Diamond!
The Crossover Crisis
Secrets of Serene Potency
Bust-to-Boom Banker, Early Fifties
New-Age Electrician, Age 52
The Save-Your-Life Wife
The Divorce Springboard
Victoria's Real Secret--Sexual Power Surges
Finding Your Passion Without a Man
Part 6Passage to the Age of Integrity
16.The Serene Sixties345
Ready for Prime Time
Growing Brain
The Hunger for Harmony
Special Powers of the Sixties
Permission to Play
The Designer Who Learned to Play at 63
Self-Confident Survivors
The Wiley Widow, Age 60
Love Stories of the Sixties
Rekindling Old Flames, Age 77
Reconciliations
17.Men: Make My Passage369
Grand Dads
Retirement: Love it or Leave It?
The Bush Retirement (Non)Plan
The Carters' Retirement Plan
The Winner's Circle
Mr. Hat, the Company Man
Late-Age Entrepreneur
Sources of Well-Being in the Sixties
How Much is Enough?
Old Elephants' Club, Age 65
Comebacks from Hopelessness
The Cancer Survivor
18.Wisewomen in Training394
Dreamer Beyond Dreams
The Wit Network
A Wisewoman Model, Age 60
Survivor Sex and Extrasexual Passions
Congratulations, You're a New Grandmother!
The New Fly-In Grandmother, Age 56
Nurturing: The Second Wave
Life and Love Beyond Loss
Caretakers of the World
Master of Divinity at 63
Looking Ahead
Expanding the Wit Network
19.Two Species of Aging417
Choosing How to Age
Renaissance in the Art of Health
Sharpening up for the Sage Seventies and Beyond
Celebratory Centenarians
The Present Never Ages
Acknowledgments430
Appendixes433
I.Life History Survey
II.Professional Women's and Men's Surveys
III.Family Circle Survey
IV.New Woman Survey
V.Suggested Readings on Menopause
Notes451
Index475
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