Hall and Bourne were addressing a lettered audience. Their warnings about the failings of middle age among society’s leaders, professionals, and artists were preceded by another champion of youth, however, the doctor and neurologist George Miller Beard.
The Fixed Period
Beard was much more interested in “brain-workers” than in the “muscle-workers” who fascinated Taylor. Resources and expertise were abundantly expended on the simple, straightforward diseases of the poor and working class, Beard noted in his 1880 treatise on nervous exhaustion. He decided to devote his expertise to “the miseries of the rich, the comfortable, and intelligent,” which have remained “unstudied and unrelieved.”
An engraving of Beard made at his 1862 graduation from Yale shows a handsome face with thin hair combed flat to cover a receding hairline, neatly trimmed muttonchops, and soulful eyes. He served as a medical aide during the Civil War and then attended medical school at Columbia. Mostly forgotten today, he acquired worldwide fame in his day for popularizing the term “neurasthenia” to refer to the nervous disorders, generally a mix of fatigue and depression, that afflicted “nearly every brain-working household” in the country’s industrial centers. (The revered Harvard psychologist William James dubbed neurasthenia “acute Americanitis.”)
Beard believed nervous breakdowns resulted from a dwindling of the electrical energy or “nervous force” that carried messages from the brain to the body. His favored treatment was electrotherapy, which he offered soon after he got his medical degree in 1866. A cathode attached to a large generator was placed under the patient’s feet or rear while the doctor held a damp sponge in his hand to conduct the electrical current. A flip of the generator switch and a jolt of electricity was applied to the suffering organ: the chest for a weak heart, the womb for menopausal pain, the penis for impotence. Beard’s vocal and enthusiastic endorsement of electrotherapy prompted one doctor to label him “the P. T. Barnum of medicine.”
Middle-class Victorian women were known to suffer from nervous hysteria well before Beard came onto the scene. Their supposedly delicate constitutions were easily overstimulated by urban hustle and bustle, which led to anxiety, sleeplessness, erotic fantasies, nausea, headaches, and fainting spells. Appearing on the witness stand at the 1883 murder trial of a woman in New York, various experts testified to the plague of hysteria among women. “Women educated in convents and brought up where they do not come in contact with the world are especially subject to hysterical manifestations,” noted the state’s consulting medical examiner at asylums. Alice James, William and Henry’s sister, suffered through such frequent bouts that she spent much of her time in bed and wrote often and longingly of her desire for death. Beard indicted “the mental activity of women” as a cause of neurasthenia, but he argued men were newly vulnerable because of the modern ills of “steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph,” as well as rigid schedules, required punctuality, and omnipresent clocks. Neurasthenia was the male version of hysteria.
In 1881, just as Taylor was inaugurating his time-and-motion studies at Midvale, Beard published American Nervousness, a mix of clinical observation and philosophy intended for a popular audience. Included in the book is his study on the link between productivity and age. Whereas Taylor measured output in minutes and seconds, Beard used years.
The longevity study was part of Beard’s attempt to rebut the popular notion that indoor intellectual activity was damaging to one’s physical health. He investigated how long brain-workers lived, as well as when they produced their most significant accomplishments, compiling lists of “the greatest men in history”—Byron, Shakespeare, Mozart, Napoleon, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren—to “determine at what time of life men do their best work.”
His conclusion was that “seventy percent of the work of the world is done before 45 and eighty percent before 50. . . . The best period of fifteen years is between 30 and 45.” Creative work has an even earlier expiration date, with the best accomplished between 25 and 40. To illustrate the results, Beard drew a graph titled “The Relation of Age to Original Work,” which showed a steep, Everest-like ascent to age 40, followed by an unbroken downward slope till death. In this off-center bell curve, the second half of life was an uninterrupted slide from the apex. Beard considered his findings to be evidence of a “law.” “The year of maximum productiveness is thirty-nine,” he declared. As if celebrating an anniversary, Beard assigned a material to each decade of life. The golden age was between 30 and 40; silver was between 40 and 50; iron between 50 and 60, and tin between 60 and 70. The years between 20 and 30 were the brazen or brass decade.
Beard was preoccupied with quality, not quantity. Men may do more work after age 40, but their most original and creative work was already behind them. “In loneliness, in poverty often as well as under discouragement, and in neglected or despised youth has been achieved all that has advanced, and all that is likely to advance mankind.” Beard dismissed the notion that the elderly had any special wisdom: “When an old man utters great thoughts, it is not age, but youth that speaks through the lips of old age.”
Beard’s theory was proved correct at least as far as his own life was concerned. He caught pneumonia and died in 1883 at the age of 44.
This idea of a limited number of constructive years was satirized by Anthony Trollope in his 1882 novel The Fixed Period, in which the young founders of the island nation Britannula mandate that before turning 68, a man will happily agree to be euthanized to avoid the decrepitude and expense of old age. The problem arises only when one of the original supporters finally turns 67 and realizes he is not quite ready to accept the “honor” of being chloroformed after all.
Trollope’s fixed period intrigued Sir William Osler, the most influential and revered physician of his era. After deciding to leave the medical faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1905 at the age of 56, Osler gave a speech declaring: “In the science and art of medicine there has not been an advance of the first rank which has not been started by young or comparatively young men. . . . [The] effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of 25 and 40 years—these fifteen golden years of plenty.” In comparison, “men above 40 years of age” are useless. As for those over 60, there would be an “incalculable benefit” in “commercial, political and professional life, if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.” Leave and make room for younger men, he advised.
Reports of Osler’s joking references to a Trollope-style solution sparked outraged editorials and letters. Newspapers responded with tales of the vigor and productiveness of older people. In published replies, the doctor took pains to emphasize that his comments regarding euthanasia were facetious, but he remained steadfast in the belief that “the real work of life is done before the fortieth year.”
On the issue of aging, the scientist’s view meshed with that of the businessman. Since older people were seen as having less energy and capacity, they had to be moved along to make way for the younger and more fit, just as Darwin’s evolutionary theories, first published in 1859, suggested happened naturally.
Census reports before 1900 reveal that a growing number of people started to hide their entry into middle age. In eighteenth-century America, the added value of maturity and experience frequently caused young men and women to pretend they were older. People tended to round up their age to the nearest five or ten years. By 1880, however, Americans were rounding down. More and more, people were reluctant to admit they had turned 40, 50, or 60 and repeatedly told census takers, who grouped individuals according to decade, that they were 39, 49, or 59.
In reality, the view of midlife generally depended on one’s class, ethnicity, and sex. Laborers most frequently tried to mask their true age in order to keep a job or get a new one. A 1904 article in the New York Times entitled “Youth Crowding Out Even Middle Age” noted that the “best customers for hair dyes are sometimes the working men,” especially in the machinery and building trades, “where
there is constant muscular exercise and where men age quickly.” Henry C. Hunter, secretary of the New York Metal Trades Association, said, “When mechanics become middleaged, they have to take less remunerative positions.” Boilermakers, deaf after a few years from the noise, were let go because they were unable to hear directions as well. “There is no disguising the fact that a man of 40 is not worth as much as a man between 20 and 30,” an official from the bricklayers union lamented.
The burdens of manual labor and poverty were what prematurely aged men and women. As the Times noted in its story: “There are plenty of gray-haired railroad Presidents and gray-haired men in other high positions, where years of experience are looked upon as a valuable adjunct to brains, but gray hair is a fatal obstacle to a mechanic in search of employment.” Men like Osler may have talked about the need for an influx of younger “brain-workers,” but few of them were actually pushed out. Men solidly in middle age dominated office suites and the professions, gaining respect with the years. Osler, after resigning from Johns Hopkins, accepted the Regius Professorship of Medicine at Oxford University, considered the most prestigious appointment in his field, a post he kept until his death in 1919 at age 70. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who disdained contemporaries who failed to produce a major work by 40, served on the Supreme Court for thirty years before finally retiring in 1932 at age 90.
Magazines and newspapers with large numbers of middle-class subscribers like Ladies’ Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, The Cosmopolitan, and American reaffirmed that power accrued to those in their middle years. In a revealing study of fiction in 1890s periodicals, the sociologist Martin U. Martel concluded: “For both men and women, the middle-age period is the time of greatest independence, respect, esteem, prestige and social involvement . . . a time of active involvement in the affairs of the young.” Out-of-touch parents and mocking teenagers were absent. “Middle-age is a central phase of life.”
Newspapers reflected similarly positive attitudes. In 1905, the same year Osler gave his speech, the Gainesville Daily Sun declared that middle age “would seem actually to have stepped backward and marched alongside of youth. There is a jauntiness, a buoyancy, an elasticity, about the middle age of today at which our fathers would have shaken their heads as unseemly.”
A Woman’s Middle Age
The invention of middle age turned out to have a wonderfully liberating effect on privileged and professional women, initially filling their middle years with unaccustomed promise.
Women had started to carve out a more distinct identity in the public sphere after the Civil War. Those who became active as the fighting raged—raising money, nursing soldiers, and wrapping bandages—later channeled their efforts into urban reform. They were generally not radicals or social activists but, rather, traditionalists who saw womanly virtue as a counterweight to the corrupt and selfish world of men. These midlife matrons discovered that their new social roles brought them unexpected personal fulfillment. They formed temperance societies, settlement houses, and cultural clubs, reformed fallen women and young urban gang members, and worked to assimilate the swarms of strange (and, in their eyes, somewhat distasteful) immigrants. A number of these reformers became professional teachers, educators, nurses, social workers, journalists, and community and labor organizers. As the middle class was expanding, the availability of factory-made goods eliminated the endless cycle of sewing, planting, washing, canning, and soap-, candle-, and butter-making. Untethered to the house, the demands of subsistence living, and unending childcare, more and more women discovered a new phenomenon: free time. They busied themselves with good works and demonstrated their productivity in a different venue. “The needs of the world are endless and the middle-aged woman has usually more leisure to devote to them than has a woman of a younger period,” an 1889 column on middle age in Harper’s Bazar declared. “Who shall placate the querulous inmates of that somewhat forlorn hostelry the Old Ladies’ Home. . . . Who shall so compassionately guide the orphan and look after neglected childhood and carry on the manifold work of churches and clubs as the woman not yet elderly, but still not young.” The female activists and innovators that we remember today, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Jane Addams, and M. Carey Thomas, hit their prime in their 40s or 50s. Indeed, middle-aged women remained the mainstay of reform efforts and clubs like the League of Women Voters well into the 1960s.
Whether they worked in a factory or an office, some women brought home money and a dollop of economic power, possibly for the first time, in their middle years. (In 1900, about a fifth of the female population worked, accounting for eighteen percent of the labor force; about half of those worked as maids or servants.) As the writer Gertrude Atherton reminded readers in an 1891 newspaper article: “Money is a controlling force in married life. . . . When a woman finds that she too can make it, her self-respect becomes colossal and quite swamps the little she has left for man.” Magazines recounted stories of middle-aged mothers pursuing lifelong dreams. A 45-year-old who had always wanted to be a physician was finally going to medical school. Another went into business despite the protestations of her family and friends. Martin Martel, the sociologist who analyzed 1890 magazine fiction, noted, “The standing of the middle-aged woman in many ways is higher than that of the man.” She is expected to be “a reservoir of emotional strength and fortitude . . . the possessor of a complex body of knowledge and skills brought to fruition over many years of experience.”
Between 1890 and 1920, the years encapsulating the Progressive Era, a feminist wave helped promote what was popularly referred to at the time as a “Renaissance of the Middle Aged.” Those thirty years “seemed to be the Eldorado for the middle-aged woman, both in social and business life,” a letter writer to the New York Times noted. “For her mere sex, she was shown just as much consideration as the young girl, no work was refused to her on account of her years, nor did her sex or age bar her from taking an active interest in politics, science, social work, and business long before women obtained the right to vote.”
One reason was that suffragettes, split over tactics since 1869, reconciled in 1890 and created a formidable women’s rights movement. Feminist successes expanded opportunities for middle-aged women at a time when their male counterparts saw their economic options shrink, a scenario that was replayed in the twentieth century. The frail Victorian girl, prone to bouts of fainting, became vigorous and authoritative in her middle years. The “New Woman,” a term that Henry James initially popularized, strode onto the urban scene in the 1880s and 1890s. This modern creature, a product of bourgeois affluence, was likely to attend college, wanted to compete with men on equal terms, and was willing to postpone, or even forgo, marriage. In 1906, a British writer observed in the New York Times that “old maids” no longer existed: “The majority of New York’s spinsters past 30 are bachelor women.” Newspapers outside large cosmopolitan areas also observed the phenomenon. The Gainesville Daily Sun informed its readers in 1905 that “the lament of many a matchmaking mamma is that the most dreaded rivals of her darling are not to be found so much among the girls of her own age as among women who not many years ago would have been relegated to the ranks of hopeless old maidenhood. The fact is that the middle-aged lady of today is much younger in manner and tastes.” Whether or not mammas were thrown into a panic worthy of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett, among women who attended the newly endowed women’s colleges and then pursued professional careers, the average age of marriage did rise.
In middle age, these women wielded social power as well. “Today the most influential factors in social life are the women of fifty and over,” Mrs. Wilson Woodrow informed The Cosmopolitan’s readers. “The professional woman of 50” was “at the very zenith of her powers.” Vital middle-agers also proved the fallacy of so-called experts who warned women in midlife against sexual activity. Edith Wharton, after suffering through a sexless marriage for more than twenty-eight years, discovered the ecstasies of sex at 45 with her frie
nd, the mustachioed cad Morton Fullerton. “I have drunk of the wine of life at last,” she wrote in her 1907 journal. “I have known the thing best worth knowing. I have been warmed through and through and will never grow cold again.”
Menopause, which was often considered the end of a woman’s utility in men’s eyes, was celebrated by Anna Garlin Spencer in Women’s Share in Social Culture (1913). She pronounced menopause the beginning of a “second youth,” when “nature gives a fresh start and a fresh balance of power.”
Successive generations of New Women helped feminism find a more stable foothold before they won the right to vote in 1920. In the years immediately before and after World War I, women managed to push their way into business, medicine, college classrooms, sports fields, and politics in numbers that were not reached again until the second feminist wave in the 1970s.
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