Crisis: Where Human Nature Meets Cultural Critique

Dr. Susanne Schmidt Postdoctoral Scholar, Freie Unviersität Berlin

One might not have expected the history of the midlife crisis to begin with a feminist bestseller. A favorite gendered cliché, it evokes the image of an affluent, middle-aged man speeding off in a red sports car with a woman half his age at his side. He leaves behind his wife and children; yet he - not they - are in “crisis.” Because most tales and treatises about the midlife crisis centre on men, you might be misled into thinking that they have nothing to do with women’s lives.

For example, in his recently published book Midlife (2017), the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya looks at the topic from a philosophical perspective. He declares gender differences irrelevant and even draws on the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Yet for all intents and purposes, Setiya presents the quest for self-knowledge as an endeavor that concerns primarily men: the author himself (who experienced a crisis at the age of 35) and the great men of philosophy, from John Stuart Mill to Arthur Schopenhauer. When he reads Leo Tolstoy, the moral philosopher is interested in Count Vronsky, not the title heroine Anna Karenina.

Others declare the male midlife crisis to be a “myth” and lame excuse for selfish behavior. They ridicule the insignia of reinvention - the expensive car, fancy dress, and adventurous holiday trips. Sometimes, shoring up stereotypes is a means of self-defense, where the symptoms are exaggerated to hold a diagnosis at bay. Yet many a satire testifies to the bitter experience of those left behind, or what Susan Sontag called the “double standard of aging,” according to which the social pathology of midlife afflicts women much more than men. Still, neither experts nor affected parties, advocates or critics, ask where the concept of midlife crisis comes from.

What has almost entirely dropped out of sight is that the midlife crisis was initially a feminist idea, which became popular at the height of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Back then, “midlife crisis” described how men and women in their thirties and forties abandoned traditional gender roles: women re-entered the world of work, while their husbands stepped in to help at home. This was how the New York journalist Gail Sheehy defined the midlife crisis in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976), the bestseller with which the midlife crisis entered popular culture and social science in the United States and abroad.

Passages was based on interviews with 115 women and men, most of them white and educated, many dissatisfied with their lives. Sheehy introduced the term “midlife crisis” - coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst and management consultant Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, but not well-known in psychology or among a broader public - to describe how her contemporaries reappraised their lives. Around the age of thirty-five, when, in a typical middle-class setting, the last child was sent off to school, women asked:

“What am I giving up for this marriage?” “Why did I have all these children?” “Why didn’t I finish my education?” “What good will my degree do me now after years out of circulation?” “Shall I take a job?” or “Why didn’t anyone tell me that I would have to go back to work?”

Sheehy’s men went through a midlife crisis too, but in a different way. While women negotiated trading the roles of at-home wife and mother for a career, men were disillusioned with the world of work. Turning forty, they experienced a period of dissatisfaction. Sometimes their careers stagnated or they even lost their jobs - this was the period right after the oil crisis and the stock market crash of 1973. But success was no safeguard. Sheehy spoke to an internationally acclaimed New York architect who, at the height of his career, felt depressed and inane. Another interviewee quit a prestigious position in Washington, DC for a lousy job in real estate which allowed him to live with his family in Maine. He told Sheehy: “I’ll stay home and take care of the kids. I really mean it. I adore children. And to tell you the truth, at this time in my life, I would just love to paint houses and build cabins.”

Despite its popular resonance, the midlife crisis was controversial in academic research. The sociologist Janet Giele, who pointed to the impact of social and historical factors, was not the only one who challenged the idea of a universal turning point.

Figure from Methods of Life Course Research, ed. by Janet Z. Giele and Glen H. Elder, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

A good dozen years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Sheehy wed the “the crisis in women’s identity” to David Riesman’s critique of conformity in The Lonely Crowd (1950). “Midlife crisis” was a new name for women’s discontent with the domestic ideal and men’s alienation from the world of work. Critically acclaimed and very widely read, Passages brought the midlife crisis to a wider popular audience. It remained on American best-seller lists for two years, selling millions of copies. The New York Times called it a “revolution in psychological writing”, Ms. magazine praised Sheehy’s analysis of gender and identity, and social scientists spoke of a “damn serious book.” In Library of Congress surveys in the 1980s and ’90s, readers voted Passages among the ten books that influenced their lives most. of “crisis” as a tool of social criticism. Often brushed aside as an indeterminate or sensational catchword, the ubiquity and resonance of “crisis” suggest that it remains a key term in social science and the public sphere. As an ambiguous, versatile concept, crisis can be a political instrument as much as an analytic category. Designating sites of intervention, it is known to legitimate the rule of experts. Giorgio Agamben is not the only one to note that the contemporary notion of a perpetual, endless crisis - just like a state of emergency - is an instrument of rule, which deflates the right to democratic participation. In contrast, the feminist construct of midlife crisis challenged the status quo, thus illustrating the critical potential of crisis declarations.

Crisis is typically understood as a diagnostic category, its etymological origins are attributed to Hippocratic medicine, where the term described the critical days or hours when the fever breaks and a disease changes for the better or worse. Depending on the kind of illness, a crisis was thought to occur at specific hours, on specific days, or during specific weeks, even years. According to the ancient theory of “critical” or “climacteric” years - on which the idea of midlife crisis built - human life proceeded by steps of seven (or, sometimes, nine) years; every seventh (or ninth) year was an “annus climacterius.” These periods of transition brought sudden shifts in constitution. In children and youths, the climacteric years were seen as steps toward maturity: in the seventh year children grew permanent teeth, in the fourteenth they entered puberty. But every change also implied danger, and among the elderly, the profound change which their bodies underwent in climacteric years could pose lethal risks. Numerous works explained that people often died in a climacteric year. The deadliest of all was the sixty-third, the so-called “annus climactericus maximus” or “androklas” (man-killing), with the forty-ninth the slightly less dangerous “small climacteric year.

However, as the historian Reinhart Koselleck pointed out, in classical Greek, “krísis” was first and foremost a political term. Used in governmental, military, and juridical contexts, it implied a normative “critique” as much as a descriptive “crisis.” It meant not only “quarrel,” “fight,” and “divorce,” but also “decision.” It was in this sense that Thucydides applied the word to the battles that ended the Greco- Persian Wars. But “crisis” also meant “decision” in the sense of reaching a verdict or judgment, what today is meant by criticism. Designating a transition, “crisis” described the period in which a decision was due but not yet taken. From this meaning of reason, reflection, and critique, the term acquired political significance. To identify a crisis was tantamount to calling for change, reform, or revolution.

The biological and social understandings of crisis were fused. The metaphor of the body organism had been applied to the community since antiquity and became central in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Hannah Arendt noted in On Revolution, modern organic theories of society, which saw the multitude of the nation, people, or society in the image of one supernatural organism, used the notion of biological necessity to call for social change. In the 1970s, when the women’s movement drew attention to the political relevance of seemingly personal issues, often associated with body and mind, “crisis” was a ubiquitous term. Linguists who tracked its proliferation in the media, counting more than 200 “crisis” compounds in international newspapers and magazines in 1979, identified it as an emotional as much as economic and political concept. The human science to define “crisis” in the twentieth century, psychology distinguished between a pathological definition of crisis as maladaptation and a positive understanding of crisis as a developmental step. For the post-war analyst Erik Erikson, famous for describing the “identity crisis” of adolescence, “crisis” connoted a normative turning point, not a catastrophe.

Though the psychological, developmental notion of crisis fuelled Sheehy’s observations, the comparison with Erikson also illuminates a key characteristic of crisis as critical concept. The psychologist described a cyclical crisis - an anthropological constant repeated over the course of generations, thus serving to maintain societal institutions, as Erikson expressly emphasized. In contrast, Sheehy’s “midlife crisis” was transformative by design. Passages entailed different messages to readers from different generations. A call for change for readers beyond thirty, the midlife crisis constituted a cautionary tale for younger women and men, whom Sheehy advised to forego established role patterns, thus preventing the “predictable crisis.”

The call to end traditional gender roles was only partially successful.

Today, the working woman seems to have replaced the at-home wife and mother, whose “midlife crisis” Sheehy described. Yet the incompatibility of personal and professional requirements persists, triggering a new kind of midlife crisis. “The typical male midlife crisis tends to hit out of the blue and take men by surprise,” remarks the journalist Hanna Rosin in The End of Men (2012), “but for women it’s been lingering there all along.” In their thirties, many professional women are exhausted by the competing demands of work and children, now in reverse order. Everything looks right on paper. They’re climbing the corporate ladder, may be on the verge of promotion, up against one or another glass-ceiling. Now, the crisis is: how to have a life beyond the job? The female midlife crisis has not disappeared. It has just changed.