In Our Prime (6 page)

These clues and others are helping MIDUS deliver information about what can be done, in addition to the oft-repeated directives to exercise and diet, to prevent, delay, or reduce both physical and mental failings.

In 2011, MIDUS researchers, funded with more than $25 million from the National Institutes of Health, geared up for a third round, in which they will check back with their subjects. In the meantime, hundreds of experts with and without a formal connection to the project continue to use the exhaustive survey data, looking to capture middle
age in cholesterol levels, white blood counts, and EEGs that dance across the page; in the number of hours each week that people work, exercise, have sex, run a vacuum, and help with their children's homework; in the pills they consume, the pounds they gain, and the vacations they take; whether they are black or white, straight, gay, or transgendered, rural or urban dwellers.

To get a glimpse of what the middle decades were like before they were genetically mapped and neurologically monitored,
you can travel to
the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, where the four enormous river and landscape paintings in Thomas Cole's landmark 1840 series,
The Voyage of Life,
hang. Cole, the influential founder of the Hudson River School of painting, depicted the familiar metaphor of life as a journey through different seas: Childhood, represented by a plump infant; Youth, by an androgynous-looking teenager; Manhood, by a strapping, bearded figure (illustration on
page 15
); and Old Age, a seated, white-haired man of 70 or more. These four broad categories, popularized in journals and schoolbooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflected the way men and women viewed themselves.
The young have “vigor and firmness,”
an orator told the crowd at the 1825 groundbreaking for an Ohio canal, manhood is endowed with “strength and firmness,” and old age “confers wisdom.”

For early Americans, middle age did not seem worth discussing or formally labeling. “
It appears, in fact, that
they did not regard this interim period as distinctive at all,” the historian John Demos writes. “Instead, the middle years represented for them simply the full flowering of human capacities. Someone in his thirties, forties, or fifties was a fully developed person—a norm against which childhood and youth, on one side, and old age, on the other, could be measured as deviations.”

A man's landholdings and economic resources were at their greatest in midlife, and his position in political councils or the church was firmly assured. His wife ruled over her home, children, servants if she had them, and other family members, while overseeing any farm or retail business.
Popular illustrations sold
by Currier & Ives in the 1850s
depicted life in decade increments “from the cradle to the grave” (as in the frontispiece). At the top of what could have been a five-tier wedding cake was the fiftieth year; on the layer just below sat the fortieth year on one side and the sixtieth on the other.

When most knowledge is handed down through word of mouth rather than widely available in print, seniority is an advantage and an aspiration, and the experienced eye and touch of the master craftsman are essential.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, young people strove to look older to give an impression of credibility and authority. The fashion of the day favored powdered white wigs, beards, and tailoring that emphasized narrow, rounded shoulders, and broader hips and waists to project an appearance of maturity. The elderly's insight and experience were all the more valuable given how few there were—less than four percent of the population was over 65 in 1850—like a white Bengal tiger amid a streak of orange-and-blacks.

One might occasionally hear the term “middle age,” but it had no significance beyond a mere chronological measure.
As the historian Howard Chudacoff
concludes in
How Old Are You?,
his study of aging, “Before the 20th century, middle age was seldom considered as a separate time of life.”
The word “midlife” first appeared
in the dictionary in 1895, when Funk & Wagnalls defined it as “the part of life between youth and old age.”

Aging in Cole's day was still conceived of primarily as a spiritual progression. In each of his detailed and naturalistic landscapes, an angel hovers above the traveler's boat on the River of Life, shining a light through blackened clouds during Manhood's rough sailing or closely guiding Old Age toward heaven, his eternal home.
References to the various
“ages of man” can be found in earlier texts, but were largely unknown by the general population. They were the theoretical constructs of Byzantine and medieval scholars who divided the life cycle according to grand abstractions. The stages have at various times numbered four (twenty-year segments) to correspond with the seasons, twelve for each of the astrological signs, and ten for the number of decades in a hundred. Texts from the Middle Ages, for instance, frequently counted seven ages to match the number of planets known at the time: infancy, childhood
(till 14), adolescence (which could last till 30 or 35), youth (till 45), senectitude (halfway between youth and old age, when a “person is grave in his habits and bearing”), old age (till 70), and very old age (“when the old man is always coughing and spitting and dirtying”). The divisions served as a reminder of the link between man's destiny and the planets, not as a guide to daily life.

Prior to 1850, age was rarely used to measure status
or grant entitlements, endowing someone with the right to drink, live independently, or drive a carriage. There were no legal standards for becoming an adult, no clear demarcation between a juvenile and a full-grown criminal. Age was not an essential ingredient of one's identity. Most Americans seemed either not to know or care very much about their precise age.
Thomas Cole's eulogist
cited the wrong year of his birth.

Such a mistake was not unusual in an era when birthdays were seldom celebrated with great fanfare.
The term “happy birthday”
did not appear with any frequency in English-language books until after the Civil War. Receiving a card to mark one's entrance into the world would have been as odd as being congratulated for growing out of a pair of shoes.
The practice of sending cards
began in the 1870s and 1880s, when Christmas card producers retrofit leftover holiday postcards with birthday greetings. Cards created exclusively for the occasion did not appear until the twentieth century.

For women, adulthood was one long, undifferentiated stretch of mothering with scarcely any leisure time.
Mothers gave birth
, then gave birth again, and again, and again. In 1800, the average woman had seven children and spent seventeen years either pregnant or breastfeeding, although without antiseptics, anesthesia, or antibiotics, there was barely a parent who escaped burying a child. Giving birth often left women severely weakened or disabled.
A prolapsed uterus was
treated by hanging the new mother upside down from a ladder in the hopes that gravity would push the womb back in. The image of the sickly middle-aged woman finds its way into Emily Dickinson's poem “I Cannot Live with You”: “Like a cup / Discarded of the Housewife, / Quaint or broken; / A newer Sevres pleases, / Old ones crack.” With so many births, a mother could end up changing her own child's and her first grandchild's diapers
simultaneously. By the time all the children were grown, she was well into her sixth decade—or more likely dead.

Most men grew up on or near a farm and stayed there. Often they were married for several years before their fathers finally deeded them a parcel of land. With so few choices, the psychological questions that we now associate with a midlife crisis—Did I choose the right career path? Did I accomplish what I set out to do?—did not arise.
And the soulful encounter
with death that today marks the middle-aged man's awareness of his own mortality would have seemed oddly incongruous in a society where fifty percent of all deaths struck children 15 and younger.

Stark differences between generations did not exist. Families were large and spanned a wide range of ages. On the farm, everyone worked for as many years as possible. At about age 5, children were given daily chores. Most were expected to handle a full load by the time they entered their teens.
Adults worked nearly eighty hours
a week for as many years as they could. The one-room schoolhouse had no space for age-divided grades, while ad hoc schooling with time out for harvests severed any links between ability and age.
Sunday church services
, dances, revival meetings, and quilting bees engaged young and old. As for homes, they were small and crowded. A large family could live in a one-story log cabin with a clapboard floor and a loft for the children's bed. The kitchen, dining room, parlor, and bedroom might occupy a single room less than twenty-four feet long. There was no physical or psychic space to separate work from play, public from private, or young from old. No one had a room of her own.

Forming a group identity outside one's immediate locale requires a connection to the larger world, a kinship with others in the same position. But most early Americans' information about what existed beyond their front door was constricted. In 1850, eighty-five percent of the population lived in rural areas; cities were small, with less than half a million residents.

In these years, knowledge tended to stretch no farther than a neighbor's farm, or perhaps the nearest town. Distant communications were carried hand to hand. Once settled, few souls wandered far from home.
Women outside cities
who left written accounts of their lives
frequently spoke of loneliness and hard work. “It was beautiful to look at, but lonely in the extreme. We were nearly a mile from the nearest neighbor,” wrote Virginia Ivins Wilcox, who settled with her husband on a ranch outside Petaluma, California, in the 1850s. Mountain lions, coyotes, and rattlesnakes greeted her on all sides. To buy fresh vegetables, her husband had to drive his ox team fifteen miles. Mary Murdock Compton, one of the millions of Irish immigrants who flooded America in the mid-nineteenth century, led a similarly insulated existence. After marrying, in 1860 she moved with her husband to a cattle ranch by the Sacramento River. The nearest town, Chico, was nine miles away. The post office in Fall River Mills, visited only when supplies were needed, was a five-mile trek and the only source of news. Grizzlies and wildcats were much more common than human beings. “Mary often said that during the 11 years she lived there she was in Chico about twice,” her daughter-in-law noted after recording Mary's oral history years later. “It was not really necessary to go into town often since much of what they needed they made or produced at home.” Mary, like women throughout the mostly rural nation, “did all of her own housework, including cooking, baking, washing, ironing, mending, and making practically all the clothes that they wore.” So did Mary Ann Hafen, who lived in Utah in the 1860s and, in addition, took on the backbreaking work of picking cotton to earn extra money.

Did these women think their lives were unusual? Did they identify more with middle-aged women who lived in cities hundreds of miles away or with the newly married wives or grandmothers nearby? Could they imagine their days freed up by factory-made clothing and store-bought food? Perhaps. But they were not bombarded by advertisements, articles, or films warning about deepening facial lines, or parading products and luxuries, homes and lifestyles different from their own. Indeed, they may not have owned mirrors, which didn't become a staple household item until factories manufactured them in great quantities later in the century.

To form a generational identity, middle-aged women and men need to share experiences and cultural touchstones.
Today, a 50-something reader
instantly gets the joke in Christopher Buckley's novel
Boomsday,
when the Association for Baby Boomer Advocates lobbies for giant flat-screen TV subsidies, a cosmetic surgery benefit, and a federal acid reflux initiative. The relative isolation that prevailed in most parts of the United States in Mary Compton's day undermined the creation of a common sensibility of middle age. That remote life is highlighted by her memory of a special trip the family made on the Fourth of July in 1870 to see the big parade in Chico. “
Just as they neared the
railroad crossing, they heard the locomotive whistle. They whipped up the horses and approached the crossing just in time to see the train steam into Chico. It was the first train the children had ever seen and the first passenger train to come to Chico.”

What Mary Murdock Compton did not realize during that carriage ride to Chico was that in America's booming urban centers the idea of middle age had already begun to form amid the onrush of scientific, industrial, and commercial progress. Within another decade or two, middle age would be transforming the way adults like Mary thought about the world and their place in it.