Free Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job by Elizabeth F. Fideler

belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege—my privilege—to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

    Without reviewing the history of marriage and family, let’s hark back to the decades when my survey respondents were coming of age, finishing college or graduate school, marrying, raising families, and building their careers. For some, this was in the 1950s, for most it was in the 1960s and 1970s. It was commonly accepted then (and to some extent still is) that men defined themselves in terms of their work, gauging themselves and being gauged by their ability to be good providers. Barbara Ehrenreich put it more crudely in 1983: “God gave women uteruses and men wallets.” 4 That was twenty years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared and women were supposed to be liberated, but Ehrenreich saw that they were still to a large extent economically dependent on men. The adult male was still expected to shoulder the responsibility of supporting a wife and family. A man who took pride in his wife not having to work might feel inadequate if she did have to get a job. (I know this from my own experience. When both of our children were in elementary school and I broached the subject of getting a job, my husband’s initial reaction was negative. Couldn’t I be content to play tennis and do other things while the kids were in school? Fortunately, this line of thinking was momentary. College teaching was paying him considerably less than a decent salary, and we clearly needed the second income.)
    A few years earlier, Erik Erikson’s stage theory of adult development helped to shape the seminal work of psychologist Daniel Levinson and colleagues, who described overlapping eras in a man’s development and the characteristics of each. 5 Within the life cycle they found that “A man’s work is the primary base for his life in society. Through it he is ‘plugged into’ an occupational structure and a cultural, class and social matrix. Work is also of great psychological importance; it is a vehicle for the fulfillment or negation of central aspects of the self.” 6 In a parallel study of female development conducted with his wife, Levinson found “gender splitting” in many forms, for example, “the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, with its distinction between the male husband/father/provisioner and the female wife/mother/homemaker; the linkage between masculinity and authority, which makes it ‘natural’ that the man be head of household, executive and leader within the occupational domain and predominant in a patriarchal social structure.” 7 Although Levinson noted that the traditional patterns were already changing and eroding at the time of the second study, he felt that satisfactory new ones were not yet available to replace them.
    Levinson and his fellow researchers did not study men (or women) beyond the middle years, however. Thus, they could only speculate about later and late-late adulthood, believing the senior years were often characterized by a man’s bodily decline, responsibilities reduced, recognition lessened, and authority and power diminished in both the family and work settings. They did not hesitate to declare that “there will be serious difficulties if a man holds a position of formal authority beyond age sixty-five or seventy. If he does so, he is ‘out of phase’ with his own generation and he is in conflict with the generation in middle adulthood who need to assume greater responsibilities.” 8 That opinion from thirty-five years ago still has some traction today among employers and among younger workers who think older workers are clogging up the