This was a happy position to be in: The magazine was an incubator for new styles of journalism and feminism alike (Gloria Steinem, a friend and contributor, launched Ms.
New York magazine emerged from the Tribune, and Sheehy was among its first editors. Born in 1937, she was a student of the anthropologist Margaret Mead before beginning a glittering career in journalism at Cosmopolitan and the women’s section of the New York Herald Tribune. The story of the midlife crisis begins with Gail Sheehy, one of the pioneering journalists of second-wave feminism. This was part of a society-wide assault on the prospects of women, and especially middle-aged women. A generation of male scholars and writers labored to transform the midlife crisis into a misogynist ideal for men bored by their cars and their wives. And yet, as they so often do, men rushed in and ruined it. The midlife crisis was meant to offer a way to rethink the gender hierarchy of an earlier era: It was designed, especially, to allow women a chance to rearrange their lives at midlife, once the tremendous burden of child-rearing had passed. And yet part of the answer is more specific and concerns the specifically feminist origins of the idea. Today’s middle-aged people have been dealt a bad hand by history.
What happened? Part of the answer is, of course, structural.
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The discussion now, as in Ada Calhoun’s Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis(2020), is largely about the crises of debt and care that are overwhelming Generation X-certainly not about midlife as a site for spiritual and professional renewal.
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