It’s Time For Women To Reclaim ‘Midlife Crisis’ As Theirs
It never was about men, sports cars and younger babes, and it isn’t purely negative either.
Mention “midlife crisis” and it’s bound to bring up visuals. A balding man in a red sports car with a much younger woman in the passenger seat? Maybe.
But according to Susanne Schmidt’s 2020 book Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché, the real midlife crisis was — well, her book’s title spells it out — about women, not men, cars and younger babes.
Midlife was a time when women could embrace this new phase of their life — the post-menopausal zest, as anthropologist Margaret Mead called it — and shape the rest of their life when they no longer had young children to attend to. (We won’t get into how many women didn’t have children, by choice or chance, and how that has marginalized them, but this was an era when women were expected to be wives and mothers, and so this is what we have to deal with.)
In a review of Schmidt’s book, The New Republic notes:
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…
