THIS book is good news if you are interested in putting another ten into your life. It cannot make you live longer, but it does make you long to live. For those who read Sheehy's Passages and enjoyed it, this experience will prolong that enjoyment.
The book commences immediately, on the inside of the cover, with a colour map - that charts the book's structure in a simulated board game. After surfacing from the pool of the Tryout Twenties we skate from the Turbulent Thirties into the Flourishing Forties, being challenged to negotiate the "Little Death" of first adulthood. We pioneer through mid life in a covered wagon, crossing mountains into the Age of Mastery and the Flaming Fifties. Here we deal with the twin crises of Mortality and Meaning, and Menopause for women and "Menopause" for men - the pits that peak to an Optimism Surge. A Japanese bridge - accesses Passage to the Age of Integrity and the Serene Sixties - and the life game is barely half over.
Sailing on the Sea of Coalescence, we merge on the Sexual Diamond, ride the dolphin of Active Risk and navigate to Mature Love. From the ship's prow our telescope produces visions of the Sage Seventies, the uninhibited Eighties, the Nobility of the Nineties and, wait for it, the Celebratory Centenarians. This is obviously not a journey for the faint hearted.
To map our lives across time, Sheehy posits the five generations, comprising birth dates from 1914-1980, that now occupy contemporary adulthood. She concludes that the particular entry point where each of us engages with our culture's history has a major influence on our choices and attitudes. Naturally, I was unable to resist focusing on the Liberated Generation of the Baby Boomers of 1946-55 and Freedom's Children of 1966-80, of which I and my children form a part. We all love to read about ourselves, and this book is the opportunity.
I discovered that, as a baby boomer, I am driving the engine of the revolution of Second Adulthood - one boomer will turn 50 every 74 seconds for the next 20 years. My daughter's group has its own revolution - 90 per cent of young women between 16 and 24 have some level of academic qualification. In 25 years the numbers who live together before marriage has swelled from six per cent to 60 per cent, while the gender gap in opportunities for promotions is almost zero for women under 25 in Britain today. What they do face are epidemics in adolescent suicides (quadrupled in the last 25 years), teenage pregnancies and AIDS. Outside of war, no other generation has had to confront its own perishability until its forties.
The research is extensive, impressive and detailed, and requires six appendices, notes and bibliography that all contain a wealth of information. This edition has been specially supplemented with British statistics and the text is peppered with hundreds of these thought provoking gems. There are now more female solicitors under 30 than male; what are the implications for society where women exceed a critical mass in the profession that has traditionally services big business, banking and politics? The number of women earning more than their partners has trebled from one in 15 in the early 1980s to one in five in 1995. If this rate of increase in the financial independence of women persists, what are the cultural implications for the institution of marriage?
Such questioning analysis, with fewer lengthy case histories, could only have added to the value of this book. For example, "menopause is not an issue in China where they revere old age and have no word for `hot flushes'." Why, then, does Sheehy uncritically describe the menopause as a "crises" and a "pit" in the West? This kind of labelling can induce self fulfilling prophecies. Her conclusion that "given further evidence of the cross cultural phenomenon of post menopausal zest, the surmise must be that it is not about socialisation", seems a non sequitur. Discussion of why the apparently socially constructed male confronts "menopause with concerns about hair loss and how to stay valued at work and in bed, instead of being valued as a male human being, would have been fascinating.
Nonetheless, Sheehy expands in 5001 pages what George Eliot said in one sentence: it is never too late to be what you might have been.