Uncharted waters of women's middle years

"NATURE," novelist Fay Weldon was quoted as saying the other day, "renders you nubile so you can have babies, then throws you away like a withered husk". The "withered husk" view of women in their middle years was given shrill voice in The Change (1991), Germaine Greer's account of the menopause years, driven in large measure by her own cheerless experience.

However in Secret Paths, Terri Apter's radical and most compelling study of women in their 40s and 50s which is published this week, the black clouds of elemental, unavoidable suffering are kicked away. Not only does Apter challenge Greer's negative view of the uncharted waters of those middle years, she offers a compass to steer by. Backed by research based on the experiences of 80 women in England and the US who were interviewed over four years, Apter concludes that tar from being the end of a woman's productive life, these years are a springboard for extraordinary and positive change in which the menopause has only a minimal part to play.

"Clearly Greer's book speaks to a lot of women, but it also threatens and silences a lot of women, the way in, which her voice said here are women and she had scenarios, which she didn't identify. So my book is partly an answer to that kind of popular writing. You've got to get real women's voices in there and I had to have a real sample, a real procedure and real method of listening to these people."

Unlike Greer, Terri Apter has no feminist agenda. Indeed she does not classify herself as a feminist. She is "a social psychologist working in the field of women's studies". While the feminist firebrands of the early 1970s were advocating their own, highly personalised recipe for women's emancipation, Apter was quietly getting on with her life, first as a novelist, then as an academic, wife and mother, doing the best she could, juggling babies and career along with everybody else.

Now in her mid-40s, Terri Apter speaks hesitantly, like the measured American academic she is. She arrived in Cambridge 25 years ago, read Philosophy, married a fellow student, and bar academic interludes in Washington and California - never left.

"I thought I was post feminist. It wasn't until I had children that I realised how embroiled I was in the women's plot and how problematic and difficult it was to combine work and family. I was fascinated by the number of women in Washington who were very career minded but also stressed out of their minds by nanny problems, by child problems, by fatigue. They talked about sleep like a hungry person talks about food."

It became the basis for her PhD. Then came Berkeley, California, "where I became affiliated with the clinical psychology department", then back to Cambridge, and a fellowship at Clare Hall.

The lives of most women now in their 40s and 50s are dramatically different from those of their mothers, most of whom claim to be quite content with their lot and thus can offer no pointers to the way ahead. "They have so much invested in not regretting what they did, so they will say to us `You don't understand that's what we had to do, there was no way out.' Of course there were exceptions, but they had to take a lot of social flak. Our generation is just filled with a sense of possibility and therefore anxiety and regret at whatever we do."

It is this regret at missed opportunities that makes the 40s so difficult for today's women, and the regrets differ depending on the route taken. Apter identifies four distinct groups:

. Traditionalists - women who opted for husband and family, and whose identification with her husband's ambition silenced her own needs" who reach midlife feeling "outmoded and underpowered".

. Innovators - career women, with or without children, who chose to "ride the crest of the wave of change"; they had "stormed the male preserve and sought success on men's terms, yet discovered at midlife real resistance to the male culture of the workplace".

. Expansive women are under achievers, late developers, or those whose lives are thrown into free fall after a divorce who "felt they had lived their lives in a narrow corridor

. Protesting women are those who were forced to grow up too quickly, who, due to the death of a parent or a too early pregnancy, feel cheated of their youth, "having been forced to behave responsibly, sensibly and consistently at a very early age

"I think I saw myself in early W adulthood as an `innovator' woman," Apter explains. "I ought that what mattered to me most was my career, whatever that was going to be.

"I started out writing novels. I did publish two novels, but I didn't have a splendid career. I didn't feel I was developing. But then I became a traditional woman. But I didn't know quite how forceful motherhood is. I had no idea. I thought `I'm old enough to be responsible, I'll be a responsible parent'. I didn't know how enormously vulnerable you became when you cared about them so much. Leaving them in the care of someone else seemed at the time just fraught with danger."

The dilemma of the woman reaching midlife was not addressed by the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. "The movers were young, and just identified with their own concerns and thought that their lives would be so totally different that there was no point. However intelligent they were and however closely they looked into women's eyes, they still had that young person's disbelief that they were going to be us, or we were going to be them.

The change in the pattern of women's lives we have seen over the last quarter century is as much reactive (economics), as proactive (feminism). "In the 1950s, the man could earn a family wage. That is not to be expected now and jobs aren't so secure and thus it is better to have two people working."

Neither does she believe that the crisis that women face in their 40s is hormonal. "I couldn't relate any of this to menopause." Wherever you are in your gynaecological pattern, she discovered that "when you hit 50 you are much more accepting".

"I think that there's a cultural notion, sometimes it's actually being 40, or Just being in one's 40, that you realise `I am all grown up now. Things are just not going to get better by themselves, and I have to take responsibility. I can't go on saying `Oh I didn't do that', or `I'm this way because of my mother, sister, father or my school'. You know that's not going to get you anywhere. There's this idea that you really have to take account of yourself and a very strong awareness that there are decades ahead but they're not endless anymore.

"So the question is how can I make use of that time? And I think you then have that looking-back time, where you can see the patterns of your life. It is very important for women to see these patterns, not only general patterns but what it is in themselves, what they are capable of doing, what they want to do.

"It is very difficult at 20 to identify what it is you want to do. You have a whole set of goals, and some of them are genuine but some of them are also borrowed from parents and teachers and friends and you have to find out whether a very high-powered career is something you want. You may think it is, you may feel sure it is, but you don't even know what it feels like doing that sort of thing.

"The greatest change in the decrease of what I call the shadow voices, `the voices of those whose approbation we seek', occurred between 44 and 49 and I could hear the difference very early on, between the women in the early 40 and those in their early 50s." It came as a surprise. "When I first heard it, this very clear difference, I didn't know if it was a developmental thing or a generational thing. But four years on I could tell there really was a change in the individual women."

ONLY seven of the 80 women Terry Apter followed through four years of their lives failed to harness the crisis period of their middle years. "At some stage of their early lives they all had a sense of things going easily and swimmingly and suddenly they didn't develop and they couldn't see why." They were women who had experienced success "without understanding the mechanisms to achieving it and not knowing that there might be mechanisms to achieving it again".

Apter believes that even ageing - the craven fear of losing their looks which many women are so ashamed of (their "mother's ghosts") has a positive role to play.

"I think what women in their 40s do is actively resist it and that's part of what helps them along that psychological development. Because they have to resist as never before the social image of themselves, and it gives them some kind of strength."