The Wonderful Woman on the Pavement: Middle-Ageism in the Postmodern Economy
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth
In 1994 a handsome woman appeared on television news in the Boston area: poised, energetic, well-groomed, with healthy body language— the kind of midlife woman who looks competent whether she's...
...In none, however, is she economically at her wit's end...
...Men are likely to be aged by culture at midlife as women have been, with alleged physiological decline emphasized, and real "value added" minimized.' "Too old" is a code, given meaning by infatuation with youth, enforced by the generation gap—an abyss constructed by the high-tech industries, niche-marketing, Gen-X culture, and narratives of midlife decline in cartoons, films, newspapers, conversation...
...Immense damage has been done to midlife women as workers and as selves in this century by the idea that once they are no longer raising children, they are idle, out of their one real job, unloved, despairing, and useless...
...From Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God back in 1938 to Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold (1975), and since to Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Doris Lessing's Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983), and May Sarton's The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989), among others, enough older and freer heroines have come out to convince many readers that the midlife can be a time of recovery, if that is necessary, or of growth and accomplishment...
...All the novels teach (in the ways that novels teach) rebuttals: alternative ways of feeling, tones of voice, verbal formulas, actions...
...Age effects intersect with gender, race, class, sexual orien510 • DISSENT Middle-ageism tation, ethnicity, region...
...It's creeping down into the middle years...
...If anyone—if almost everyone—is at risk after age forty-five, then expectations of what management can do to labor have to be changed...
...It hides the men and women"displaced" with so many good years before them, the children dropping out of college, big debt, humiliating makeshifts, divorce, the shame of failing one's dependents and losing one's own sense of identity...
...I've been working all my adult life and I can't afford to stop...
...One of them is premature superannuation...
...Women need full-time jobs at higher wages with upward mobility...
...These words should be put in quotation marks until we get the point...
...Age discrimination at midlife is a story that needs full exposure...
...the personnel manager admitted circling her age on the list...
...Under the media deluge, "aging Baby Boomers" are compressed into a false, flattering cohort universalism...
...They show midlife women as bearers of diverse energies...
...This discussion, galvanized by "midlife" interests, should propel people in the women's movement, cultural studies and the critical social sciences, among others, into a phase of age studies in which they are all more closely connected...
...Jessie Allen and Alan Pifer (Washington, D. C.: Urban Institute Press, 1993) 134...
...Resentment might lead to resistance...
...Many need to bolster Social Security, pensions, and savings before it's too late...
...Anyone's "middle years" have a reality outside of the dominant narratives...
...We have been valorized by the historic accident of maturing within the subculture provided by feminism...
...It is obvious from the sting stories alone that in North American mainstream culture, "aging" begins very much earlier than old age...
...Aged By Culture Middle age doesn't exist, Fast Eddie...
...Most observers believe that the rate of involuntary parttime employment is high...
...The women's novels don't merely show readers that women grow...
...Yet it affects more groups and classes than anyone has imagined...
...To the extent that women believe in our value at midlife, we are likely to resent any attempts—discursive and economic—to reduce our status or economic participation or any other of our hard-won gains...
...That rising curve is the unspoken foundation of theAmerican Dream: getting the kids more education, maybe helping them get started, saving a little, securing one's old age...
...These are some of the fictions that over time have made wonderful women—helped us counter sexist ageism and grow into activism...
...It was a course in contemporary age studies, analyzing age in texts with as much rigor as gender, race, and so on...
...At forty-five, women's earnings have already peaked...
...On television, Patricia was articulate even though her self-confidence had been badly shaken...
...Many had been outraged by the discovery of how discrepant care for heart disease was, with men getting better attention before heart attacks and better treatment afterward...
...There is a war going on within the culture about the representation of midlife women, between feminist-inspired fictions producing wonderful women, and antifemale fictions that update twentieth-century stereotypes of female midlife decline...
...and the press doesn't publicize the victories enough...
...Nineteen-ninety-two and ninetythree should have been an upper: the so-called Year of the Woman was, more exactly, the Year of the Successful Midlife Woman, the Star...
...It should be a broad-based conversation, a basis for coalition building across class, race, gender, and age divisions...
...at five years older, only 77 percent are—a thirteen-point drop...
...and the male wage advantage, visible since one's twenties, looms enormous at midlife...
...Hope is a FALL • 1995 • 511 Middle-ageism muscle," in the title of a current book...
...Women who spent ten or more years in pre-movement America can't believe how far they've come...
...Some favored ones are enabled to "retire" prematurely...
...But the social fictions are powerfully determining— like the one that tells personnel directors that Patricia, Carol, and the others are "too old...
...There's no way to say how these wars will end...
...Projections are that they will constitute a growing percentage of the labor force...
...when they win they can be gagged...
...The postmatemal woman changes when she is portrayed by a midlife woman in our era...
...As unions have declined, so have security, wage levels, regular raises, and protections against arbitrary dismissal for older employees...
...Boomers are told they are entering into their most prosperous years on the age-wage curve...
...She and Becky, aged twenty-two, composed one set of four all-white teams matched for education, personal qualities, and (limited) work experience...
...There were many just-doingthejob stories: California Treasurer Kathleen Brown selling $3 billion of state prison-expansion bonds on Wall Street...
...Walter Tevis, The Color of Money The midlife, like all "life stages," is an invention of culture...
...She could be a woman of color...
...and that muscle has gotten stronger with aging and done some real work in the world...
...Since everyone at midlife is going to need a politics and a future, we need to undertake "age studies"—an approach to age that is multidisciplinary, social-constructionist, textbased, alert to culture, and activist...
...Many economic facts portend the weakening of "seniority," broadly understood, at all class levels...
...There are underlying structural causes for our age quandary...
...Fifty-four percent of women ages fiftyfive to sixty-four are expected to be working by 2005, some 9 percentage points more than in 1990...
...job search...
...I say "seemed to be," because these were women with careers, not wanting jobs, and there was no news about the latter...
...This is our postmodern quandary...
...Two final questions unsettle all the previous ones...
...Evan Connell's Mrs...
...3 Robert Lewis, "Tests Find Age Bias in Hiring," AARP Bulletin (February 1994), p. 2. 4 Daniel S. Hamermesh, "A Ray of Sunshine...
...We need all the collective resistance we can muster...
...It's an invention of the media, like halitosis...
...I might live to be eighty—ninety...
...The Lead Ceiling The reality, however, is grim...
...In some novels the heroine is living in immiseration...
...The devastating news is that full-time work, a dire necessity for many, is becoming a "privilege" denied to midlife women, and men, as they age...
...Everyone is aged by culture, just as everyone is gendered and racialized by culture...
...Few mainstream analysts have brought home to us the full horrors of a postindustrial, transnational economy intent on "the global drive to the bottom...
...The expansion of "seniority" depends on the continued existence of rising curves and high peaks...
...Why this is so requires a separate investigation...
...Up to a point...
...Aging into the midlife is supposed to mean a curve of wages rising with age...
...The forty-fiveyearolds had been offered a few jobs, but they were the new service jobs: seasonal and without benefits...
...In late midlife, Paule Marshall's Avey Johnson (Praisesong for the Widow, 1983) is going to have a closer relationship with her exigent daughter and a more meaningful vocation than she had in the earlier upwardly mobile bourgeois phases of life...
...Midlife men are also already being commercially aged by this culture: witness the ad in the Washington Times for cosmetic surgery, illustrated by a comfortable middle-aged man in an expensive business suit...
...What can keep newly energized men from focusing on men's needs at midlife and crowding out the plight of women...
...Lotus fired business manager Carol Moskowitz, one of the highest-paid people in her department, after she turned fifty...
...Living in mainstream culture at this time, everyone is receiving mixed and contradictory messages about what midlife women are worth and what we can do...
...Every value linked to the age-wage curve is at risk...
...Most of the early socialization prepares Americans to accept and apply to ourselves a negative label, "aging," at chronological ages that get younger all the time...
...Collegeeducated men suffer less (drop of eight points...
...What about the relations between the economic, the political, and the representational...
...Making the wonderful woman appear "too old" is a cultural fiction, allied not only with older patriarchal stereotypes about postsexual and postmatemal women (which I think are weakening), but with an increasingly significant macroeconomic fact...
...Of course, anonymous women in news stories are mostly presented as passive victims of male events: mothers in little wars far away, bending over their sons' coffins...
...I studied both wars with a group of adult students at the Radcliffe Seminars, most in their forties and fifties...
...But men shouldn't be fooled by doing less badly than some women...
...Ninety percent of white men in this sample are employed between ages forty-five and forty-nine...
...Moskowitz sued Lotus for discrimination and won money...
...Feminism has been learning to add up the ways in which representation matters...
...Middle-ageism may be the most efficient way to push wages toward the bottom, by cutting the top off a person's economic life curve...
...Midlife women need to take their postmodern quandary seriously, and ponder it collectively, with older and younger women, and men...
...When defense contracts disappeared, a firm in Massachusetts laid off every one of its computer consultants over fifty—over 25 percent of its workforce...
...If this begins to slow down, if advances turn out to benefit only younger women, what will happen to feminism...
...And if the fiction of progress turns out to have been a historical fluke, the representational legacy left for future women at midlife will prove a treasure...
...But I want to bring some news from the front...
...They're doing badly enough...
...One way or another, at around age fifty many women and men are being forced out— out and down, into lower paid or part-time work, subemployment...
...These categories are used to keep the labor force divided and its workers in competition...
...In the nineties, it is becoming impossible not to notice the invention's disconcerting changes...
...Setbe, in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) keeps her family alive as a cook while she gets a ghost out of the house, the figure of the daughter she felt compelled to murder eighteen years before...
...so do well-trained experts...
...I wanted to find out what "information" each reader would absorb about "midlife women" just by casually perusing whatever newspapers, magazines, and journals she ordinarily received...
...There were numerous positive "role-modeling" images, starting with Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...I wish I didn't have to argue that this is not trivial...
...Lawrence Goldstein (Michigan University Press, 1995...
...I can't retire...
...I begin with the Wonderful Midlife Woman on the Pavement...
...Being aged by culture begins as soon in a new life as adults first mention the subject: "You're not old enough to do that yet," or, shortly afterward, "You're too old for that now...
...Meanwhile, I believe the age-valorization accomplished by feminism can be a model, and must be...
...Age is proving to be a very useful discriminator, joining race, class, and gender...
...Age discrimination is a solid lid: there is no way up...
...We read mostly novels...
...She was hired by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in a sting to test whether a woman her age could get a job in retailing at $6.00 an hour in competition with a younger woman...
...It is an urgent issue...
...nobody is totally immune to sexist ageism...
...When the most privileged groups (save for the top 1 percent to 10 percent) are vulnerable, what can stop the drive to the bottom...
...Am I correct in fearing that the men who believe similar messages about lifecourse empowerment are few, and that, within the male left, anti-ageism is simply off the screen...
...Before seniority crumbles, who will use the power now available to publish or broadcast these issues, frame the questions in the right way—at least let the conversations start...
...women are dropping from high places too...
...Since the mid-seventies, the culture has been blessed with conditions favorable to transvaluing the imagery of midlife women...
...She said she was forty-five...
...Fifty is a drastic downward turning point for full employment for men too...
...There were some firsts...
...For the ordinary person, once the first shock is absorbed, it is much easier to see and accept the cultural elements in midlife aging than in the aging of the elderly...
...in some, rising out of poverty...
...Eighties fiction provides a range of options for imagining one's way into postmaternity and work...
...only 60 percent of those five years older do—a nineteen-point drop in the group of the most privileged.' And these data come from 1987-1988, before the recession and downsizings of the nineties...
...It hides the desperation...
...Does this make us crazy or enraged, passive-depressives or outraged activists...
...Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury shows Rick Redfern suffering out loud on his fortieth birthday, buying wrinkle-remover and hair-cream while his little girl asks him, "Daddy, are you going to die...
...Their study uses the 1987-88 National Survey of Families and Households...
...the glass ceiling can be pried open by affirmative action...
...The menoboom was in full sway, producing gruesome anecdotes and making menopause so public that no one of a certain age could blush anymore without knowing that others had received a signal about her bodily fluids and her fearful future...
...I'm scarcely into my middle years...
...We need to get beyond statistics, into the phenomena of middle-ageism, culture, politics, and pain...
...3 The ratio for women is probably worse than one in four...
...The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession 199495," Academe (March-April 1995), p. 13 and n8...
...If the feminist left has better integrated cultural concerns into its other interests than the male left, as some of us believe, perhaps this is why...
...A broad, published conversation began among major women novelists, themselves aging within feminism...
...The genre teaches readers psychological development and countercultural resistance...
...In 1994 a handsome woman appeared on television news in the Boston area: poised, energetic, well-groomed, with healthy body language— the kind of midlife woman who looks competent whether she's selling Tupperware or bonds or simply walking across a street...
...not hiring her was a cultural decision...
...The age impact of discourses and practices is not invisible...
...A precariously employed fifty-fiveyearold divorced woman I know is furious...
...Bridge redoes this dirty work...
...It was dismaying to turn to mainstream socalled nonfictional discourses...
...Middle-ageism in general threatens to reduce the power and earnings of the entire workforce, viciously curtail the American Dream, and embitter our image of the life course...
...No one can properly study "aging" who goes on naively believing that it is a natural process that has no history, no politics, and no future...
...That was important news—coming to us because of activism in women's health care, political pressure on the National Institutes of Health...
...2 The data come from Larry L. Bumpass and William S. Aquilino, "A Social Map of Midlife," MacArthur Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, March 1994, Table 55...
...How can we explain the screwy lack of synchrony...
...Although the surveys are sometimes dubiously motivated, I believe they capture a phenomenon produced jointly by the civil rights and women's movements' political and economic successes and their allied fictions...
...Age discrimination at midlife is almost a silent given in America...
...Respect in America as one becomes middle-aged is dependent on these curves, these peaks...
...only 44 percent in the five years after that—a drop of twenty-five points, the biggest five-year drop for any group, male or female...
...An AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) sting used résumés of women and men whose age could be inferred as fifty-seven, versus those of people aged thirty-two...
...514 • DISSENT...
...The first visible victims were young black workingclass men...
...How, given the unconscious ageism of the media, the rightward politics of the nation, and the power of global enterprises, can collectives with an anti-ageist agenda produce change...
...There are millions...
...I expect readers share her shock— but perhaps we are not surprised...
...The power FALL • 1995 • 513 Middle-ageism of the women's movement has been implicitly grounded on having achieved economic gains...
...It's something they tame people with...
...Fifty seems to be a turning point, in one large and important study that disaggregated the data by age, gender, race, and education...
...Some didn't even take her résum...
...In a state unwilling to provide universal health insurance and allied to powerful medical and insurance interests, a great deal of ageist culture goes to show that "Women never die, they just cost more...
...If midlife men join, finally convinced of mutuality of interests, what would induce younger men to join...
...Economically, the midlife can be the most critical part of the life course...
...In feminist eras like our own when ages over forty can be broadly represented as "wonderful," she was instantly recognizable as one of the wonderful midlife women...
...Nobody is untouched by feminist representation and social change...
...And surveys show that many women are in synch with the empowering images: they have good self-esteem, they're not afraid of aging...
...They may need to care also for older relatives, help adult children...
...Normal reading" was a crucial component of the task...
...That was a rehearsal for the unorganized whitecollar classes...
...Older job applicants are likely to confront age discrimination one of every four times they apply for available jobs," estimates AARP lawyer Cathy VentrellMonsees...
...FALL • 1995 • 509 Middle-ageism Men's earnings peak between forty-five and fiftyfive, women's between thirty-five and forty-five...
...Given that the midlife members of so many of these constituencies are secured from threatened disasters by "seniority"—the ownership of tenure or apparently unassailable professional standing or the equivalents—will the conversation even begin...
...q Notes Paula Rayman, Kimberly Allshouse, and Jessie Allen, "Resiliency Amidst Inequity: Older Women Workers in an Aging United States," in Women on the Front Lines: Meeting the Challenge of an Aging America, ed...
...Comprehensive discussions about the new economic order have to state fully the remorseless power of middle-ageism...
...Women more than men have been writing novels about protagonists who grow as they age in ways that often do not rely on class privilege and money—who overcome bad fate, survive with courage, refuse self-pity, or actually move forward in some wished-for direction...
...Generation X already feels it's racing against time...
...The movement cannot focus on gains for younger women assuming that these automatically translate into gains for the same women as they age...
...Those already climbing the ladder as well as those who are beginning to move their feet up, often find the rungs broken...
...The novels are about spiritual triumphs and moral developments potentially accessible to all...
...1 It's crucial to know what is now happening to women in the forty to fifty-four slot, a conjuncture of readiness, ability, and need...
...Lured by its alleged and temporary riches, the age-class is being lulled into disregarding the economic disasters that everyone knows about and fears...
...We can expect that it will take enormous efforts of concientizaciOn to uproot damaging "too old" fictions, to keep alive the counter-fiction of the wonderful woman and to invent liberating counter-fictions for midlife men...
...A new federal player was given the kind of unofficial amnesty that men in power typically obtain: Janet Reno after Waco...
...Many of us are the products of empowering profemale fictions: that a female collective can bring personal and social change, that social justice is worth working for, that the future is likely to be better than the past, and therefore, that it is probably better to be older than younger...
...By the end, Patricia had been told there were no jobs or turned down by every retailer...
...African-American men as a whole don't drop then but suffer a drastic drop, of twentytwo points, five years older...
...But while internalizing and reproducing them, people act as if the consequences were trivial and the sources of midlife ageism unalterable...
...There are not enough good jobs in the declining North American empire for the available workforce...
...The phrase encapsulates the situation of many women...
...We all have to push a nonsexist nonracist anti-ageist agenda, as we try to cope with this overwhelming new situation...
...Bridge ends up on the last page trapped in her car, in her garage, in the middle of winter, with no one likely to inquire what has become of her...
...as the boomers retire, the ratio of parttimers and adjuncts increases...
...we know we're going to live a long time...
...In Safe at Last in the Middle Years I called the resulting productions "midlife progress novels...
...Domestically, most of the negative images came in the health news...
...if so, statistically, her economic prospects would be worse...
...What fictions would empower midlife men, and what would cause men to write them...
...I'm not middle-aged...
...Free of child-care conflicts, prepared to work harder than a first-time entrant, with proven life skills, they should be desirable employees...
...It was a clearcut test of the firms' ageist hiring practices...
...They're able to work full time because they 508 • DISSENT Middle-ageism are "postmatemal...
...We seem to be in an era when capitalism and patriarchy are silently clashing over seniority...
...That "aging" connotes "old people" is now a clear mystification, implying as it does that nobody under sixty-five is subject to pejorative age hierarchies, characterizations, status losses, and job bias...
...Age studies can use the midlife to complicate the definitions of "aging" or "age...
...She is at risk even with education and a solid résumé behind her...
...Why should postmodern capitalism let patriarchal midlife privilege endure if it gets in its way...
...5 See my "All Together Now: The New Sexual Politics of Midlife Bodies," The Male Body, ed...
...the more we investigate, the more it reveals itself to be a preponderantly "cultural" phenomenon...
...The media slight labor news, and even within labor news the ordinary wonderful midlife woman does not cut a big figure...
...The twenty-two-year-olds had frequently been offered full-time permanent jobs with benefits and ladders...
...As industries strive for "efficiencies," other categories will be marginalized, by whatever discriminations lie at hand...
...Being out in the job market in the nineties is a special hell for "older" people...
...And there's a war going on in midlife women's psyches, between an achieved sense of confidence and improved status and a fearful sense of danger and decline...
...In terms of status, women seemed to be doing okay...
...Patricia wasn't going to cost those companies more than Becky...
...Aging at midlife is not biological...
...Midlife free-falls in full employment should be alarming even before we know exactly how different people leave full-time work or what they find to do for a living afterward...
...Healthy, vigorous people lose jobs...
...But menopause discourse wasn't the popular culture story that most shocked the seminar participants...
...Tenure is under attack in universities, in the silent practices of the twotier system (part-time vs...
...In the medical profession, senior physicians perform under the supervision of accountants...
...Midlife Muscle Midlife women may prove to be a stubborn and difficult target of postmodern scarcity...
...Many of those rising in the middle-class now hit the "glass ceiling" prematurely...
...The course was called "Midlife Heroines...
...Journalist Kate Armstrong 512 • DISSENT Middle-ageism in Margaret Drabble's The Middle Ground (1980) has internalized the stereotypical idea that a woman who has no child to raise is useless, but she overcomes this adverse self-judgment with new work...
...Without exactly knowing it, feminism transformed our "aging" into "maturation...
...Such representations are in no simple way realistic...
...Yes, I've been age-harassed, who hasn't...
...Perhaps we should call it the lead ceiling...
...Seventynine percent of women college graduates have full-time work between ages forty-five and fortynine...
...full-time), as fewer young people are invited to enter on tenure tracks...
...One basic tenet of age studies is that the "midlife" adds another unexpected class to the mix, an age-class...
...Theorists and activists need to try to give urgency to antimiddleageism...
...But not enough people use civil law remedies...
...Carol and the computer consultants were relatively expensive—but it's at least as relevant that in cyberjobs youth is king (the average age at Lotus is thirty-four...
...The joke is an extraordinary example of early childhood training in age lore, and of the contradictions midlifers are expected to ignore: We can be sure we're "aging" horribly...
...The way we talk about age needs theoretical scrutiny...
...This factoid has prevented even experts from seeing that fifty is a dangerous age for growing numbers...
...The more we study "the midlife" as it is spoken of now, the more clearly we see that it is a set of fictions...
...I'll give one brief example of how novels teach women to treat their own "postmatemal" phase...
...The midlife woman told me later that she was shocked and humiliated, and had become much more anxious about beginning her own real This essay is excerpted from a forthcoming book called Cultural Combat: The Politics of the Midlife, 1995 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, to be published by University Press of Virginia...
...The dream of later, higher peaks has been shared more widely in the last thirty years, by African-Americans, women of all races and ethnicities, immigrants...
...How can we try to control—or at least resist—popular representations of midlife...
...Women may find themselves newly divorced, with no alimony and no work history...
...Economic forces multiply representational forces to make any subject liable to be labeled "aging" or "too old" at ages that should be the prime of life...
...The average woman is armored, although probably not as well as she thinks That ageism reaches into the culture everywhere, she gets more convinced every day...
...They have to be demonized or marginalized so victim-blaming can occur...
...Some in "two-income households" are married to midlife men whose incomes have dropped or vanished...
...The new unemployables are not being thanked, as Claus Offe suggested they should be in a recent essay in Dissent (Winter 1995...
...In one interview where the interviewer asked illegal questions, he was her own age...
...Men earn more...
...What adjustments must we make in theory when solid representational advances bring personal empowerment in lieu of economic gains...
...Each participant clipped out everything she found about midlife women in the course of her normal reading...
...Sixty-nine percent of black women in the five years after age forty-five are employed full time...
...Yet in the postmodern economy, whatever the wonderful woman has achieved of inner strength and midlife wisdom, not to mention work experience, may not avail her at the painful moment of the job search or at other crucial moments in work life, such as deciding whether to join a protest or a strike...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
