What has almost entirely dropped out of sight is that the midlife crisis was initially a feminist idea that became popular in the mid-1970s. Back then, “midlife crisis” described how men and women abandoned traditional gender roles: Approaching 40, women re-entered the world of work, while their husbands stepped in to help at home.
But in the years since then, the tale of the midlife crisis has come to focus on men in a way that bolsters gender hierarchies, rather than challenging them. Indeed, the male midlife crisis has been used to limit women’s rights and advancement.
It was the Yale social psychologist Daniel Levinson who presented one of the earliest formulations of the male midlife crisis, which circulated widely in the media and professional psychological community. In 1978, he published The Seasons of a Man’s Life, based on a study of 40 men between 35 and 45 years old, mostly white and educated. It depicted the “midlife decade” as a period of change, during which men reinvented themselves. The book’s key case study, “Jim Tracy,” was a vice president and general manager at a Connecticut-based arms manufacturer. After a series of sexual escapades, he divorced his wife and married a younger woman, then left the corporation to open his own business. Levinson held that such a “mid-life transition” or “mid-life crisis” (a term coined by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, but not widely used until 20 years later) was a universal feature of human life, shared across social and cultural differences.
However, Levinson made an exclusion to the concept: He did not study women’s lives, interviewing the 40 men’s wives only to learn about their husbands. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, the psychologist’s description of the male midlife crisis was closely tied to his understanding of women’s roles: At a time when the women’s movement was widely popular in the United States, influencing public opinion as much as social policy and legislation, Levinson opposed the transformations in women’s lives. He used psychological research to bar women from changing their lives.
In Seasons, Levinson emphasized the importance of marriage to a man in his twenties and early thirties. He used the term “special woman” to describe the devoted at-home wife and mother who helped a man to become successful, or, in Levinson’s terms, fulfill his “Dream,” a concept borrowed from the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. If the “special woman” had a job at all, it was as an unmarried woman seeking a husband, or in an occupation such as teaching or nursing “where she is appropriately maternal, sub-ordinate and non-competitive with men.”