Free In Our Prime by Patricia Cohen Page B

history of middle age in America, Cohen shows us that our middle years can be years of prestige, autonomy, and confidence—the best years of our lives.”
    â€”Tina Rosenberg, author of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World
    â€œBefore allowing yourself another distressing look in the mirror, I recommend Patricia Cohen’s magisterial new book on the social construction of middle age. Cohen moves seamlessly from the origins of the concept to the newest scientific findings, all the while sustaining a fascinating narrative.”
    â€”Juliet B. Schor, author of Born to Buy and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy
    â€œPatricia Cohen deftly examines the shifting definitions of middle age. She demonstrates how TV, movies, and advertising have shaped us. Most intriguing of all is Cohen’s critical assessment of our huge self-help industry and its ability to manipulate midlife anxiety. In Our Prime is an important book, fascinating, gorgeously researched, and extremely readable.”
    â€”Patricia Bosworth, author of Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman

F rom the New York Times reporter whose beat is culture and ideas comes a fascinating, revelatory, and timely social history of the concept of middle age.
    For the first time ever, the middle-aged make up the biggest, richest, and most influential segment of the country, yet the history of middle age has remained largely untold. This important and immensely readable book finally fills the gap. In Our Prime is a biography of the idea of middle age from its invention in the late nineteenth century to its current place at the center of American society, where it shapes the way we view our families, our professional obligations, and our inner lives.
    Patricia Cohen ranges over the entire landscape of midlife, exploring how its biological, psychological, and social definitions have shifted from one generation to the next. Middle age has been a symbol both of decline and of power and wealth. Explaining why, Cohen takes readers from early-twentieth-century factories that refused to hire middle-aged men to twenty-first-century high-tech laboratories where researchers are currently conducting cutting-edge experiments on the middle-aged brain and body.

P ATRICIA C OHEN has been a New York Times reporter for thirteen years. She has also worked at The Washington Post and Rolling Stone . Her stories have led to numerous television and radio appearances. She is also a regular participant in the “TimesTalks” series and New York Times podcasts.
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Age 50 marks the highpoint of a man and woman’s life in these 1850 prints by Currier & Ives.



For Alexander,
who proved that middle age is the best age of all

A man in middle life still feels young, and
age and death lie far ahead of him.
    â€”Carl Jung (1921)

IN OUR
PRIME

Part I

The Invention of Middle Age

Part II

Middle Age Is Rediscovered

Part III

The Midlife Industrial Complex

15
In Our Prime

    The New York Times headline that greeted the first MacArthur report on midlife, 1999
    Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
    â€”G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906)
    T he standardized sequence of life stages that Frederick Taylor helped inaugurate and that encouraged previous generations to move out, marry, and start families on schedule has lost much of its force. The loud tick of the social clock has been drowned out by a raucous concert of individual timepieces. In the early