observation is often cited as proof that second-wave feminism was foolish—that if women had only stayed in the home they would be happier. How reductive that is. The truth is that we’ve never really tried what those feminists proposed. Yes, women went into the workforce, but without any significant change to gender roles at home, to paid-leave laws, to anything that would make the shift feasible. If you make a new law but don’t enforce or fund it, do you get to call the law misguided?
In 2017, another major study found that the two biggest stressors for women were work and children, with a compounding effect on those having both.12 We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising—in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.
One in four middle-aged American women is on antidepressants.13 Nearly 60 percent of those born between 1965 and 1979 describe themselves as stressed—thirteen points higher than Millennials.14 Three in four women born in 1965–1977 “feel anxious about their finances.”15
For a while, I thought only corporate strivers were having a hard time managing. Then I started hearing the same angst in the voices of women with all variations of work and home life. I was shocked when a friend whom I’d never seen rattled by anything told me that in her forties she’d become so consumed by caring for her two little kids, full-time job, side hustles, marriage, and ailing father that she worried constantly about money and couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept well.
As I’ve spoken to hundreds of middle-aged women around the country across the geographic, racial, religious, and political spectrum, I’ve marveled at how similarly they talk about their lives:
Over a diner breakfast, a successful single woman in Texas told me she thought she’d have a husband and kids by now. She asked, “What did I do wrong?”
While her baby slept on her chest, a married mother of three in Oregon said she thought she’d have a career by now. “What did I do wrong?” she asked.
While scientific study of aging has increased in the past decade, the research still often skips middle age.16 Where research is done on the middle years, the focus is typically on men. The rare middle-aged-woman book usually addresses Boomers’ work disappointment or marital disillusionment17 or tries to make light of physical signs of aging, with emphasis on our necks.
The term “midlife crisis”18 is usually attributed to psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who used it in a 1965 journal article exploring how the creative expression of male artists—Dante, Goethe, Beethoven, Dickens—often changes in quality and content when they pass the age of thirty-five. “Working through the midlife crisis,” he writes, “calls for a reworking through infantile depression, but with mature insight into death.”19
In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson claimed that about 80 percent of the men he studied experienced “tumultuous struggles within the self and with the external world” in midlife.20 “Every aspect of their lives comes into question,” he wrote. “And they are horrified by much that is revealed.” They may find that they’ve given up creative dreams or sacrificed their values for a stable income—a theme taken up in countless hits in popular fiction and cinema, from the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.
As rendered in popular culture, the stereotypical male midlife crisis involves busting stuff up— mostly marriages but also careers, norms, reputations. Panic may commence when a man starts losing his hair, resulting in a frenzy to unearth college vinyl. Treatment: regular application of younger women and brightly colored motor vehicles.
There have been any number of movies and books about such men—some even played by actors who are not Michael Douglas. The Woody Allen–American Beauty–Sideways industrial complex has given us dramas in which women provide a reliably boring backdrop—the shrill wife, the tedious aunt, the sad sister—to men’s life-affirming hunger for the passionate life, which materializes with suspicious frequency in the shape of a teenage girl.
A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis does, I know, pose a dramaturgical problem. In my observation—and as many experts I’ve spoken with have affirmed—women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.
From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.
So I understand why some people consider “crisis” too extreme a word for high-functioning women experiencing what can look like merely malaise or a funk or a rough patch. When I appeared with prominent academic Susan Krauss Whitbourne on a panel this year, she said that there was no scientific evidence for a predictable breakdown in midlife and that calling midlife stress a “midlife crisis” was “an excuse for bad behavior.
“If you’re depressed in midlife,” she said, “there may be many reasons for this, the least of which is your ‘age.’”21 And yet, even Whitbourne granted that Generation X is a particularly morose bunch and that women of this generation were “very stressed out.”
I do take her point. And can we really say women are in “crisis” if, despite how they feel inside, they’re able to crank out well-structured PowerPoint presentations and arrange elaborate gift baskets for teachers on the last day of school?
My friend’s sister, Jenny, a mother of three employed in the STEM field before a recent layoff due to federal budget cuts, said she didn’t think she’d had a midlife crisis. Then she politely added: “Or does the tanking of my marriage, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and a move to LA after twenty-six years in Seattle following my aneurysm constitute a midlife crisis? If so, you can interview me.”
When I asked my friend Aimee, who lives in Baltimore, if she was having a midlife crisis, she said no. Then she said, “Wait, like a ‘What the hell have I done with my life and who am I?’ sort of freak-out? I am definitely having one of those.” While that’s probably an apt description of what many of the women I talked to for this book are undergoing, I still prefer the term “midlife crisis.” I like it because it makes what’s happening sound like the big deal I believe it to be. In my experience, Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
And that’s true enough. We are fortunate in so many ways. America today, in the global scheme of things, offers us far more opportunity than our grandmothers or mothers had. Although many women are trying to make it on minimum-wage jobs (and have a crisis not specific to middle age), the overall wage gap is closing. Men do more at home. There’s more pushback against sexism. Insert your “reason why we don’t deserve to feel lousy” here. The complaints of well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are easy to disparage—as a temporary setback, a fixable hormonal imbalance, or #FirstWorldProblems.
Fine. Let’s agree that Generation X women shouldn’t feel bad.22
So why do we?
When I started working on this project, I knew I felt lousy, but I didn’t yet fully understand why. I just knew that I was having
