Chapter Thirteen—
Seasons of a Woman's Life

Alice S. Rossi

Dedicated to S. W. S. with admiration and affection

An autobiographical essay provides an opportunity to link an early love of mine for writing and biography with contemporary intellectual concern for adult development. My years as a graduate student at Columbia University overlapped with the tenure of C. Wright Mills, and from exposure to his thinking I carried forward the view that sociology is properly located at the intersection of biography and history. Mills's views, however, were little more than a perspective on the discipline, not a theoretical framework. It has only been with the emergence of life-span development theory in psychology and age stratification and the life-course perspective in sociology that a more rigorous framework has become available within which to sift out the relative contributions of cohort membership, historical or period effects, and maturational change to an understanding of individual lives and the process of social change. Hence it is to both sharing a personal biography and demonstrating a theoretical perspective that this essay is dedicated.

The phrase love and work is commonly taken to refer to personal family life and public occupational life. This was clearly Freud's meaning when he referred to lieben und arbeiten as the chief ingredients of a full life. Sociological tradition has similarly distinguished between the family and the economy as major social institutions serving the core functions of reproduction and production to assure species and societal maintenance and survival.

To link love to family, and work to the economy, is to reinforce the conception common to the social sciences that family life is the expres-

sive setting for deep feelings and strong emotions, while work life is the instrumental setting for rational thought or physical labor. In this essay I will depart from such traditional usage to share a hard-earned insight from personal experience and intellectual efforts to understand adult development: how much work there is in loving, and how much love there is in working. In contemporary society it is in the family setting that we engage in hard physical labor, long hours of work, and considerable rational thought about how best to spend time and money, rear children, and relate to spouses. And for many people it is their work setting that triggers their most intense positive and negative feelings and commitments. I will use love, then, as a metaphor for caring, including the pain, joy, anger, and lust that motivate us, however skillful we are at disguising these limbic components of our behavior. And I will speak of work as a metaphor for efforts toward goal attainment in any sphere of life.

This is also a self-reflective essay, meaning that I will use my own life as a data base to demonstrate a sociological analysis of self in time and place. The theoretical framework is that of life-span development, and the goal is to demonstrate its utility in distinguishing the relative contributions of cohort membership and historical or period effects from the influences rooted in biosocial processes of maturation and aging.

To provide the biographic data for such an analysis, I will use the technique of life-stage vignettes, five developmental phases for the six decades of my life: birth and childhood, puberty and adolescence, early adulthood, the middle years, and a preview of old age. Following the vignettes I will go back over the biographic data to discuss the specific respects in which my experience and values have been shaped by cohort membership, historical events, and the experiences of growing up and growing old.

Birth and Childhood

I was born where I was conceived, in my parents' bed in a top-floor apartment of a brownstone town house on a one-block-long street, Alice Court. The place was Brooklyn; the time, 1922. Those four floors housed three layers of maternal kin who peopled my early childhood: a German-Lutheran immigrant grandfather and one aunt on the street floor, two unmarried aunts on the second floor, my parents and me and an unmarried uncle on the third floor. The Schaerrs and the Winklers shared the big kitchen and dining room on the half-submerged

first floor for communal evening meals prepared by my mother and aunts.

I was made to feel special in that household as the first child, first grandchild, and first niece. There was little communication between the sexes or the two older generations, however, and the only warm alliance was among the four sisters. Whatever merriment or exchange of intimacy took place was within that foursome or between me and one of the adults when they, each in turn, took me into their separate, secret worlds. Let me sketch my people for you:

My grandfather was a quiet, somber man, a socialist of a homespun variety who spent most of his life as a stonemason and carpenter on the construction of an Episcopal church in Manhattan, which to this day has not been completed. Stern with his daughters and son, he was easy and loving with me, sharing German folklore, his love of craft, and his dream of the cathedral-to-be. Like many socialists in Europe, and unlike their American counterparts, he happily blended his political and religious visions of the good society.

My Uncle Ted, gassed in World War I, was the wheezing, asthmatic occupant of a tiny bedroom across the hall from mine. A telephone lineman by day and a violinist in the Brooklyn Symphony by night, he let me peep beneath his silent persona to share his love of sound on strings and his love of the sea.

My Aunt Minna was no longer considered marriageable by herself or the family once she passed her twenty-eighth birthday. She kept the books and supervised a factory floor in a bookbindery and devoured gothic novels. She read me passages, taught me to read, and assured me a library card was a magical key to worlds beyond my imagining. She was even capable of fibbing to my mother, taking me off to see not a children's movie but a sexy one—Red Dust, with Jean Harlow—and then telling my mother she got the dates mixed up.

My Aunt Martha was lively and gay, in love with a garage mechanic from New Jersey. I loved to watch her primp before her mirror on nights she saw her Charlie. On rare occasions I was permitted to go with them on daytime dates. No delight exceeded those excursions. I sat in the rumble seat of Charlie's Ford watching them exchange glances and listening to their high-pitched laughter, or accompanied them on walks on the boardwalk at Coney Island or Jones Beach, feeling the current

running between them through me as each held one of my hands; they gave pleasure squeezes I happily passed on from one to the other when something struck them as funny, which seemed to happen with great regularity.

The oldest of the sisters, my Aunt Anna, was scrappy and bossy, with a precarious hold on the affections of her sisters and myself. She was the chief housekeeper and cook until her marriage. In that household, headed by my widowed maternal grandfather, it was the daughers who took over the duties of their mother after her early death at forty, whereas in the household headed by my widowed paternal grandmother she herself assumed the breadwinner role by taking in four boarders, doing their laundry, and cooking meals for them as well as the three sons and a daughter still at home.

My father was quiet, strong, and moody, an experimental machinist inordinately proud of his machines and his skill in creating equipment for scientists at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. His great gift to me was a belief that I could do or be anything I set my mind to, and he defended me against family scoffing when at six I wished to be a chemist, at fourteen a poet, and at twenty-two a sociologist.

My shy and yielding mother, the hub of my world, was in perpetual fear of displeasing either her father or her husband, but for me she radiated warmth and the pleasure she took in food, fabric, and flowers, a triad of cooking, sewing, and gardening that has been a common ground between us for more than fifty years.

Except through me as a go-between, my people had little to do with our neighbors, of whom more were Catholic than Protestant, more Irish and Italian than German. My first playmates were Irish Catholic girls. We screamed in terror when our fathers had a fist fight during the Al Smith presidential campaign in 1928, then followed suit the next day with a fight of our own for reasons we could not fathom. School was an ancient, overcrowded, red brick building, most of whose students came either from a black ghetto or an enormous orphan asylum a block from the school, a frightening place with jagged glass in the cement top of its brick walls. My first friend at school was a black girl I was made to share a seat and desk with as punishment for misbehavior in first grade. (If blacks misbehaved they were made to stand in a corner, whereas whites were made to sit with blacks.) We both knew neither of us would be welcome in the home of the other, but we walked to the corner of

each other's block many times to glimpse the place that held the good friend and to prolong our endless talk.

I did not know it for a long time, but I have drawn deeply from that early world of kin and the ethnic and racial diversity of my neighborhood. And I learned early how different men and women were when alone or in mixed company. By day my aunts and my mother seemed lighthearted and merry, lingering over lunch, laughing with the canaries in the sunlight, sharing their hopes and woes. By night they turned into shadowy figures serving the food and giving silent assent to all that the men said. My grandfather and father ruled the big table under its apples-and-pears Tiffany lamp, snapped commands, showed no pleasure, and gave no thanks. Yet these were the men who shared, when alone with me, their love of texture—of wood, marble, metal, pansies. When I carried an observation from one side of the gender barrier to the other, the grown-ups stared at me in disbelief: "Your grandfather couldn't have said that!" my aunt would pronounce firmly; "Your mother really didn't say that!" said my grandfather equally firmly. They all concluded, with sad shakes of the head, "Alice has a vivid imagination." So in time I learned to keep things to myself.

But that world did not last. In 1930 it collapsed around us. My best friend's father committed suicide, my uncle was laid off, and my father could hardly make his payroll. The men scowled and withdrew into silence and drink. The women frowned and cried. The grim decade of the Depression had begun. We moved away to where no canaries sang, no aunts or grandfather brightened my days, and my childhood ended—at eight.

Puberty and Adolescence

The deeper the family slipped into hard times, the more my father drank and the less we had to eat. My mother skipped lunches and became a janitor in a four-family building, shoveling coal into a greedy furnace and lugging a dozen cans of ashes up treacherous stone steps twice a week. She sewed lovely things for a rich doctor's wife and her friends. Men did not have enough work, and women had too much work. As a girl and an oldest child (by now with a younger brother and sister) I was swept into my mother's work. When not in school, hours were given to scrubbing clothes and floors, ironing, and doing household shopping. Shopping meant a five-mile walk each week to scattered stores with low prices: the butcher, the dairy, the German pork store, the bakery for

day-old bread, and, once in a while, the Nabisco factory for broken crackers at bargain prices.

The one advantage of our numerous household moves was the schools I attended. Declining neighborhoods from which many had fled even before the Depression meant lower rent for our apartments but also schools with small classes, and teachers who poured their talents and hopes into fewer students. In another era some of my grade-school and high-school teachers would have been college teachers, so I was the beneficiary of their considerable knowledge and fallen hopes. As a proud possessor of that magic key, a library card, a highlight of my week was a two-mile skate to the nearest library. I devoured my weekly ration of five books as my aunt had done before me, in hours stolen from the night. In my case a book, my head, and a night lamp were huddled under a heavy flannel bathrobe to hide my reading from the disapproving eyes of my mother. It was years before I understood the fear of losing her daughter that lurked beneath my mother's suspicion of what she called my "reading and scribbling."

I reached my present height at twelve, towering over my classmates, the last in line marching into gym or auditorium, defensively tough, secretly tender. My dream of public stardom was doomed by a tendency to blush, so I was the behind-the-scenes producer and director of plays, and later the playwright as well. My sixth-grade triumph was a production of Alice in Wonderland, complete with crepe-paper costumes I made for all fifteen characters. My only terror when the play was put on in half a dozen schools in the borough was having to come on stage to take a bow after the performance. But beneath all that local limelight I was frustrated, a never-to-be star of the show, like Lewis Carroll's Alice.

In high school I found wider scope and at least some souls who shared my passions. I edited the newspaper, served in the student senate, was president of the poetry club, and dared to dream of college. Summers were spent in my aunt's bookbindery at a wage of twelve dollars for a forty-eight-hour week. Innocent dreamer that he was, my father assured me I could attend any college of my choice. "What's the best one?" he asked. Not knowing, but remembering a novel with a college setting, I promptly said "Vassar College." It took very little inquiry about cost to land me in tuition-free Brooklyn College, not Vassar.

I entered college a literature major but quickly shifted to sociology after one semester with Louis Schneider as my teacher. An incipient rationalist, I checked out this shift in major by taking the Strong Interest Inventory Test. The college counselor told me I scored exceptionally

well on both art and science. In some puzzlement he concluded, "Well, maybe a social science is a good middle-of-the-road compromise!" And so it has been, though if the truth be known, I hungered to be an artist and a scientist. As well as a sociologist, of course.

My late development provided a psychosexual moratorium in adolescence, during which studies, athletics, and same-sex friendships filled my days. But when it came, the moist fire of sex threatened to overturn my intellectual interests and would have done so had I not moved in a radical student subculture that espoused some measure of equality between the sexes. Even so, I made fearful mistakes. After a tragic first affair that ended with my lover's death in a car accident, I remet and married a former economics teacher twelve years my senior. Adolescence ended with a premature marriage at nineteen.

Early Adulthood

War was declared against Japan and Germany a few weeks before the marriage, and by the spring of 1942 I withdrew from college and spent several years as an army wife largely in southern towns—Anniston, Columbia, Raleigh, Jackson—and then in Washington, D.C., and Trenton, New Jersey. My first trip South was to Anniston, Alabama, where, with my head full of antebellum novels, I expected to find women in dainty dimity and white gloves and carrying ruffled parasols. It was a culture shock to find my first landlady in black satin, highly rouged, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, on her way to her job as an "entertainer," as she put it. I was a civilian replacement first at an airbase and then at a prisoner-of-war camp, and a child tender in a municipal day-care center for factory women's children in Jackson, Mississippi. I sold fabric by the yard to poor whites in Alabama and worked for Soviet engineers in Washington, processing lend-lease shipments of petroleum products to the Soviet front. I even delivered a black baby in South Carolina, when I volunteered to find out why my landlady's "girl" did not show up for work and found her alone in advanced labor.

After the war I returned to finish college and moved on to graduate study at Columbia University. Though I did not define it as work at the time, I also spent two painful years trying to salvage a marriage and then adjust to its failure. After several foolish affairs I finally grew up secure enough to form a new and good marriage, at twenty-nine, to a man my own age. This has been a lasting love, with sparks in the mind, shared tastes of palate and politics, a spicy difference in intellectual flair,

a mutual love of hard physical work—a heady brew still potent after thirty-five years. With a degree behind me, I also tasted the pleasure of being paid for what I wanted to do anyway—work with books and ideas and typewriter. Still under the influence of the manual-work ethic from my Lutheran kin, I was dismayed while on a first professional job to calculate what I cost my employer by dividing the number of pages I wrote in a year (600) into my annual salary. The cost per page was so high, in my judgment then, for doing something that yielded so much intrinsic reward that I was convinced my boss Alex Inkeles must have considered me a poor investment.

But the joy of that work paled beside the miracle of birth and the powerful bond of flesh and heart that came with parenthood. Always greedy for experience, I had three births in four years in my middle to late thirties. With the love came the work of parenting, the unrelenting hours that squeezed out thought and spirit, all made particularly taxing because of the superwoman standards I imposed on myself: perfect wife, mother, hostess, gardener, and college teacher, all held together by a fragile scaffold of nursery schools, housekeeper, luck, and physical strength. The price I paid was insomnia and neuritis misdiagnosed as arthritis, and the cure was giving up part-time teaching and taking on a full-time research appointment.

The Middle Years

At forty we fell in love with a house in Kenwood, a neighborhood just north of the University of Chicago. It was huge, ugly, Victorian, but beautiful in our eyes: a dream of grace and space come true. It prompted the purchase of a floating blue chiffon gown for a housewarming party and dreams of children's weddings within its spacious rooms. But that Victorian shell held five complex, changing creatures within it: an anxious, overextended research administrator; a harassed, torn, and puzzled woman; and three small people struggling for room in our lives while flexing and testing who they were.

I also underwent the painful experience of being fired by an anthropologist when he saw a good thing in a study I had designed and fielded. Since his title under the grant was as principal investigator and I only a research associate on the payroll, the dean told me the anthropologist was "valuable university property," whereas I was expendable. It was my first consciously defined experience with sex discrimination, and it began a slow burn that gathered momentum and was gradually trans-

muted into my first feminist publication (Rossi 1964). I spent a year on that essay, with blisters on my mind from the struggle to unlearn the functionalist theory I had swallowed whole during my graduate training in sociology and to distill and transcend my personal experiences. The six-draft germination of that essay was a far more painful birthing than the three natural childbirths that preceded it, and its publication in 1964 was a turning point in my personal, political, and professional life.

I withstood the pressure against political activity from my academic colleagues by plunging into abortion law reform in Illinois in the early 1960s and helping to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in 1970. I took special pleasure in following in John Dewey's footsteps as national chair of the reactivated American Association of University Professors (AAUP) committee on the status of women in academe. Professionally I shifted from such topics as voting behavior, intergroup relations, the sociology of occupations, and the Soviet social system to the study of gender roles, family structure, academic women, and social movements. I indulged my love of biography and history for two years while working on The Feminist Papers (Rossi 1973). Politics and research were also a stimulating combination in editing the Russell Sage Foundation volume on Academic Women on the Move (Rossi and Calderwood 1973) and writing Feminists in Politics (Rossi 1982), a quantitative panel analysis of the first national women's conference.

Along the way, following a wrenching move from the Kenwood home we loved to a Baltimore home I disliked, I shifted from the uncertainty of research appointments on soft money at Johns Hopkins University to the challenge and security of teaching women at Goucher College. I look back now with a mixture of self-admiration and horror at the pace of those years in the early 1970s: teaching seven courses a year while chairing a department; lectures and political obligations that had me in a plane thirty-two times one year; and two books in process. In addition to these political and professional commitments, we were coping with pubescent and adolescent children, then experimenting with vegetarianism, hippie culture, sex, and an alternative school, and I was trying to cope with the erratic mood swings of an early menopause. Winding-up adolescents and winding-down parents make for domestic sparks. It was this personal insight that led to a study of parenting and aging in the middle years, in which I tried to explore what difference a mother's age made for her relationship to an adolescent child (Rossi 1980a, 1980b).

I learned a bitter lesson in those years: it is far easier for a woman to add to her level of participation in parenting and domestic management than to reduce the level of participation that has been in place for a long time. In retrospect it seems a miracle that the children and the marriage survived those years intact. Had we still been riding the crest of youthful narcissism, that fragile family might have collapsed and fragmented. At twenty-five we are immortal, and impulses are apt to burst their containment. At forty-five caring is more likely to mean a restraint on impulse, and a hard working-through of an impasse in a relationship of long standing.

So it was, and so it is. In the calmer waters of one's sixties, time is telescoped and life in and for itself more precious than ever before: each day to be savored, from work at a desk or lectern, to time snatched for gardening or sewing, to pasta and Soave at day's end. For city-bred people like me, living in a small town in western Massachusetts is a source of daily wonder: after fifteen years, I am still startled to see a setting sun slip below a mountain ridge from my study window.

Looking Ahead

Now, well past the meridian of life even with greatly extended life spans, I feel no impulse to rest or retire. I have an image of a retired self that is outrageously eccentric: a figure in a purple cape with a walking cane. But at the moment I continue to struggle with the question, How have I managed to come this far on life's path and still be so far from the achievements I dreamed possible at thirty? There are half a dozen studies I wish to do and at least three books I want to write.

But I also want to have time and space to indulge two other passions, one new and one old. The new one is watercolor painting, begun in 1980. I want to capture the essence of New England rocks, shells, and flowers as Georgia O'Keeffe caught the essence of the desert Southwest in bones. The old passion is clothes design and sewing: for the past several years I have made children's clothes, tailored silk blouses, and placemat sets under my own label for sale in a local boutique.

My dream of the good life after retirement is not stopping work but letting the day structure what the work will be: separating an iris clump, drafting a paper, exploring an image in watercolors, discussing a new idea with Peter, testing it on the computer terminal, making a crème caramelle. To borrow a lovely phrase from May Sarton, I shall strive for a life in which "the day shapes the work, and not my work, the day."

This ends the five vignettes. Much has been left out, of course: my paternal kin, my brother and sister, my friends in adolescence and adulthood, teachers and peers who were important mentors. But I think I have touched on the central facts of early family, marriage, and parenting and the broad contours of career and political involvement, and I have tried to be honest in communicating the passion and pain along the way.

But enough of biographic profiles. What can we do with these data from a sociological perspective? What elements of this life reflect the time and place in which it was lived? What are its unique, what its common, features? A life-span perspective will help us distinguish between the effects of maturation, cohort, and historical period (Baltes and Schaie 1973; Bengston and Troll 1978; Neugarten and Hagestad 1976). It also moves away from the psychological premise that humans are essentially formed by the time they reach the age of ten or so. Instead it makes two important assumptions: (1) social structural characteristics of early family life are more predictive of adult personality and values than the psychodynamics within the triad of mother, father, and child; and (2) development is a continuous process at all stages of life, subject to change from the impact of historical events and the institutions that hold us in their grip during our adult years (Brim and Kagan 1980; Riley 1979). I will try now to tease out the major elements of cohort, period, and maturational effects from the descriptive biographic vignettes.

Cohort Characteristics

A great deal is known about the cohort I belong to—the birth cohort of the 1920s—as a consequence of several longitudinal studies begun with child subjects during that decade. Best known in sociological circles is Glen Elder's Children of the Great Depression (1974). Other cross-sectional studies on middle-aged adults in the 1970s are also based on research subjects from my cohort (Gould 1978; Levinson 1978; Lowenthal et al. 1975; Rubin 1979; Sheehy 1977; Rossi 1980a, 1980b). Such studies, however, were either of subjects living on the West Coast (Elder, Gould, Lowenthal et al., Rubin) or of men (Levinson). None were conducted on East Coast families like the one I grew up in. Hence there is no hint in most of these studies of grandparents, aunts, and uncles of the subjects who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. The chances are that these relatives were somewhere in the Midwest or East rather than the West.

Yet the fact of having spent the first eight years of my life in an extended-family household had important consequences. I was a third-generation child in a lineage that emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles were colorful, important figures in my life, as they were in the lives of others of my cohort in eastern cities; if not living together, they were often close by in ethnic neighborhoods. As Hansen noted long ago (Hansen 1952), grandchildren often wish to know what their parents want to forget about their ethnic and national origins. Neither of my parents could understand my fascination with stories my grandparents told about their childhood in Germany and the adventure of emigrating to the United States. At my urging, my grandmother told the story of her crossing the Atlantic several dozen times, until the image of her red-cheeked, blonde-braided, seventeen-year-old self, organizing dances for sailors and young girls in steerage (ever the managerial type!), became as sharply etched in memory as any childhood experience of my own.

A household of three adult men and four adult women for a first child, grandchild, and niece also had important consequences: my affection was diffused among them, not concentrated just on two parents. Predictably I was a very adult-oriented child, but my image of the adult I could become had an openness to it because of the sharp differences among the women and men who provided daily models: my mother's disapproval of reading was countered by my aunt's love of books; my grandfather's objection to his son's "fiddling" was countered by his unique emotional accessibility to me. With all those loving adults around me, I felt no rivalry when my brother was born when I was three, though I did when my sister was born when I was eight, for by the time of her birth the number of adults in my daily world had shrunk from seven to two.

A child in an isolated nuclear household cannot observe male-female relationships in the courting and honeymoon stage of a marriage, whereas I had exposure to the very positive image of my aunt's courtship. I also saw meaning in the lives of unmarried adults, and I had the opportunity to observe same-sex adult relationships at close range. Of special importance was the daily exposure to the four sisters' alliance, the key solidary force in the household. A superficial observer of my extended family might see a patriarchy with repressed and exploited women, but I knew in my bones the power of sisterhood as a kinship, not a political, phenomenon. There was no doubt some repressed anger in the women, and indeed my mother has been happier as a widow for

the past twenty years than she was for most of her life as a wife, but I am speaking here of a child's experience. I also knew the tender underside of patriarchal males, the passion and pride in craft, and the love for a girl child beneath their barked commands to wife, daughters, and sisters. Clearly I was the recipient of a superdose of love and trust during those early stages of life.

There is also an androgynous quality to the manner in which a firstborn child is treated, perhaps particularly a firstborn girl. Few limits were imposed on me because of my sex, as they were on my younger brother and sister. No one said I could not learn to use tools or play a violin or move out into the world beyond the house and neighborhood. I was sent to shop at a neighborhood store at three, clutching a penciled note over the coin to give the grocer. At five I was taught to use a saw and hammer by my grandfather, along with a knife and needle by my aunts and mother.

The most lasting influence of that early household, and a mark perhaps of my cohort, was the work ethic it lived and breathed. If it is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well; If you start something, you finish it—those sayings were drilled into me as family homilies. Mine was a secular family that attended church only for marriages, christenings, and funerals, and the household god was labor. To learn to sew at the age of four, my mother gave me a square yard of muslin with two dozen rows of different sewing and embroidery stitches down one side, each two inches long, rows I was required to complete over the remaining thirty-four inches to master the stitches. Praise was given only for a job done with exceptional skill, not for any ordinary performance, and never if it was not done in the expected time, for dawdling was taboo. I still have difficulty giving praise to my students except under similar circumstances of exceptional performance in a reasonable period of time.

Another value I internalized was the importance of women's work. Few of the homes in my kin network would have survived without the labor of the women. One simply could not afford to waste or spoil food, scorch a shirt, or discard a torn sheet. It was my mother's strength and capacity for hard work that kept my own family intact through the Depression, as my widowed grandmother had kept her sons away from poolrooms and saloons, while the older men in the family and neighborhood were apt to crumble under economic pressure into quarrels and drink. Years later it was with a shock of recognition that I read Harriet Martineau's 1837 judgment that American women were soft under

affluence but showed their strength under adversity (Martineau 1837). This observation was clearly applicable to the Depression, as it is today to so many impoverished black communities. It did not take a feminist awakening for me to acquire pride in women's strength and abilities.

Period Effects

Three major historical events were of profound influence in my life: the Depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the renascence of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

Much has been written on the impact of the Depression on families and individuals. Indeed, there is renewed interest in the topic because of the structural unemployment facing the nation in the 1980s and the financial stress that is growing in the international economy. Reference-group theory applied to intergenerational relations is of particular help in illuminating this impact. My immigrant grandparents had little sympathy for the dashed hopes their children experienced under the weight of the Depression, for they had known far harsher poverty in Europe, compared to which any American experience seemed very mild.

In addition, immigrants are self-selected from their national stock and families, spunky enough to leave a known world for an unknown one. Their children were more diverse, including the timid along with the bold. My second-generation parents never fully recovered either economically or psychologically from the Depression years, and their achievements fell far short of their youthful dreams. By comparison, my generation came to adulthood with more education and entered an expanding, affluent economy, so we could more easily fulfill our aspirations and exceed those held for us by our parents. I worry that my students in the 1980s may face the dashed hopes that marked my parents' generation.

The concept of relative expectations also illuminates my father's confidence that I could become anything I wished to be. In fact, I did not gain this insight until writing this essay: what I experienced as great confidence in me as a young person requires the qualification that my father's message reflected the narrow horizon of choice he could even imagine for me. He harbored no hopes of my becoming a senator or a professor. His conception of a chemist was a laboratory technician or bench chemist; of a poet, someone who scribbles in her spare time; of a sociologist, someone who belabors the obvious. Under the influence of my teachers and mentors my range of choice exceeded anything in my

father's imagining. Had I become a white-collar bookkeeper, his paternal expectations would have been well confirmed.

The impact of growing up in the Depression is a continuing mark on my generation. We are survivors who delight in possessions, gluttonous consumers of mail-order catalogs. I still find the best device to cope with anxiety and depression is a shopping spree—hats in my twenties, plants in my sixties. By contrast, my own adult children travel light and rely on jogging, sleep, and loud rock to cope with stress.

The second historical event of great influence was Wold War II, which shook me out of a New Yorker's parochialism, deepened my appreciation for regional differences, and provided a range of job experiences more profound in their impact than any reading of the sociological literature on occupations and social class. Living in rented rooms in a dozen southern homes gave me intimate access to family and race relations. I was astonished by the extent to which a gracious life-style penetrated down to lower class levels more than was possible in the North, facilitated by an underclass of poorly paid blacks. I was amazed that the husband who returned home for lunch served on linen and china, with a tinkling silver bell to summon the next course, was a hat salesman in a local department store. In other homes I was witness to the same female alliance I knew from my aunts, only in interracial, mixed-age sets of women and children. Stories and shared intimacies flew back and forth in one Mississippi household, where my landlady insisted that all the women and children, black and white, gather on a big bed in an inner room, where she assured us we were protected against lightning bolts that might otherwise strike us. The rainy season reinforced female and, to some degree, interracial solidarity and furthered the oral transmission of legends.

Years before any murmur of a civil-rights movement, I was impressed by the quality and content of interracial relationships among women. One upper-class woman I befriended in South Carolina, for example, used her wealth to run a summer school on an island off the coast for promising black youth secretly referred to her by black teachers in her county. I left the South chastened by my human encounters there, freed of many northern stereotypes of the South and southerners.

I have almost left out one important additional impact of World War II, perhaps because it involved such pain: the replacement of pride in my German heritage with shame. Just before the war, I had battled, to the point of leaving home, my father's views toward Hitler's Germany. And it was thirty-five years before I felt up to crossing the border into Ger-

many on European trips. Ethnic orphan that I was, I adopted my husband's ethnicity as my own. This was no hardship, for Italy is one of the loveliest lands in the world, and I have never had complaints from guests about my basically north Italian cuisine.

The third historical event of great impact was the renascence of feminism in the 1960s. In retrospect I think some of the androgynous roots of my childhood, hidden behind a facade of traditional patriarchy, influenced many choices I made in early adulthood. Combined with involvement in a radical student culture during college years, my choice of profession and my persistence in working at it while rearing children made me a marginal person in the cohort of women to which I belonged. I was what Vern Bengtson calls a forerunner in my generation. My unmarried aunts, women teachers, and the women writers I loved were important models supporting my own marginal choices. My experience of sex discrimination at the University of Chicago pointed up a long predisposition to feminism.

Historical or period effects differ in their impact depending on the age at which they are experienced. That the feminist renascence was begun by employed middle-aged women like myself reflects our experience as women with permanent attachments to the labor force who found barriers to promotion or who received lower pay than men doing comparable work. Hence our political efforts were on improving the educational and occupational opportunities for women. Our personal lives had jelled by that point, so it was left for younger feminists to call for change in private, sexual, and family life.

This point was first brought home to me by the different reactions of older and younger women to my early feminist publications in the mid-1960s. The bitter, angry letters I received were from women over fifty, whose response centered on their lost chances. As one woman put it, "Had anyone written as you do when I was twenty, I would have had two, not six children, and I would not have given up my desire to be a lawyer." By contrast, women in their twenties and thirties said such things as "I've decided to postpone getting married, and will finish college first"; "I'm going back to school instead of having another child"; and "I think I have the courage now to face the fact that my marriage has been dead for years."

Later I found this same age difference in an analysis of the political issues on which delegates to the first national women's conference had been active (Rossi 1982). Younger delegates seemed to leave gender issues of educational and job opportunities to the by now older branch

of feminist organizations. The younger delegates' energies were invested in sex issues like women's health care, rape, and spouse abuse. The unifying commitment of both young and old delegates was to increase representation of women in politics so that they can make the laws, not court the votes of men. Their joint efforts have contributed to the growing gender gap in voting behavior and position on political issues in the 1980s. In the coming decade I predict a great increase in the proportion of women holding public office (Rossi 1983).

Maturational Effects

I have left for last a cluster of changes that may be true maturational effects. These changes are an inherent function of the process of growing up and growing old that can speak equally to people of all ages—hopefully with an echo of recognition for readers my age, and with a note of prescience for those younger.

One key maturational change is an altered perspective on time. In youth and early adulthood one rarely thinks of time running out. Psychologically time feels limitless, so if you take one option rather than another, you can expect one day to also experience the postponed option if you still wish it. With age, one begins to rely on a time calculus: if I do X, will I ever get to do Y? If I write a book on kinship, will I ever get to do one on the sibling relationship? Will this be the last time I see Venice or Taormina? As Neugarten suggests, a shift in time perspective occurs when one passes the meridian of life, from viewing life as years since birth to viewing it as years left to live (Neugarten 1968).

Closely related to this shift in time perspective is an altered sense of one's body. Health and stamina are no longer taken for granted; they become things to work at. The sociological concepts of achievement and ascription apply here, at least in a figurative sense. In youth, one's body is an ascribed fact, a healthy instrument one does not hesitate to challenge, push to extremity, and overindulge without fear of the consequences. From middle age that body becomes an achieved fact—an instrument to listen to, tune up, pamper, and, if need be, transcend. An unusual ache or stiff back may be a harbinger of some chronic disability rather than something that will surely pass. These experiences trigger a more cautious use of energy and a reduction of the excesses of food, drink, and exercise that characterized youth. In a sense they are small rehearsals for the acceptance of the loss of close intimates—parents, spouse, and friends—and of our own death.

Overview

The stress on cohort membership and the influence of historical events is congenial to most sociologists since they illustrate both the potential for change in adulthood and the influence of social factors on personal values and personality. We sociologists like to think that we are what we do, that is, that we are molded by social situations and the institutional webs that enmesh us (or at least that enmesh our respondents, if not the free-agent, rational beings that sociologists consider themselves to be). There is certainly ample evidence of the marks left on me as a member of the 1920s birth cohort and of the particular historical events that impinged on my life at certain critical stages.

By contrast, before the mid-1970s most psychologists were committed to the view that early childhood is a critical period of development that leaves indelible marks on people for the rest of their lives. Clearly parents exert influence over their children in the years from birth well into adolescence. As key socializers of the child, parents are central transmitters of values, skills, and expectations. The picture becomes murky when parental influence is traced in the adult years of the children. An extensive review of parent-child pairs by Lilian Troll and Vern Bengtson (1979), covering a wide range of studies including political opinions, voting behavior, religious beliefs, and life-style preferences, showed only modest correlations between parents and adult children. But affective solidarity between parents and adult children was not impaired by discrepancies between them in politics, religion, or life-style. Such findings refute most of the theories that have been brought to bear on child socialization (whether psychoanalytic theory, symbolic-interaction theory, learning theory, balance theory, or exchange theory), all of which assume that the stronger, closer, and more attractive the bond of a child to a parent, the more similar the behavior, attitudes, and values of the child will be to the parent. It may well be the case that in all social relations except the parent-child relationship such discrepancies would lead to an attenuation of affectionate bonds. The uniqueness of the parent-child bond may lie precisely in the simple fact of genetic relatedness: my son the criminal may be embraced along with my son the doctor , and parents remain salient to our sense of ourselves even after their deaths. Despite the considerable social mobility from my family of origin, and wide differences in politics and religion between myself and either of my parents as a consequence of cohort and historical influences, they have remained central to my affective and social life.

As I have grown older, my relationship to my mother has, if anything, intensified further. I suspect one reason for this change is coming to grips in more direct terms with mortality. Our ties to parents may weaken during adolescence and early adulthood, but toward the end of life, these bonds take on a renewed emotional salience similar in intensity to the attachment we experienced at the beginning of life.

Such thinking does not sit well with sociologists since they tend to prefer upbeat perspectives on life rather than a bittersweet one with hints of deeper levels of human relationships rooted in genetic linkages between people. In recent years developmental psychologists have also come to stress a self-generating conception of adulthood—the self as an active agent determining the direction a life will take (Brim and Kagan 1980)—much as the majority of youthful feminists do. Developmental change is the "in" concept, whereas stability has become a concept on the wane. This view is certainly supported by sociological work on occupational success among subjects under forty-five years of age. The consistent finding from status attainment research is that parental class and parental encouragement affect the final educational attainment of the child but do not extend to the occupational success of children by the time they are in their thirties. Dennis Hogan (1981) has been critical of status attainment studies on precisely the grounds that they neglect contemporary pressures that replace or supplement early family and school influences, pressures like those rooted in different labor markets, occupations, or firms with different promotion rates, or variation in family size and economic circumstances impinging on adults in the families they form.

For most people the decades of their twenties and thirties are marked by several simultaneous, powerful transitions that seem to produce changes from earlier periods of life in one's family of origin. But one publication from the Oakland and Berkeley, California, growth studies poses a serious challenge to the assumption that change is the constant in adulthood and that there are radical and irrevocable breaks from earlier years. Dorothy Eichorn and her associates (1981) report a sleeper effect when adolescent characteristics are related to early versus middle adulthood. That is, there were very low or insignificant correlations between adolescent and early-adult personality characteristics, but adolescent characteristics did correlate significantly with characteristics in late middle age. It is tempting to interpret this to mean that, all other things equal, from mid-life on, we become more like we were in our youthful years than we were through the years of

early adulthood, when the press of job and family often required us to act "out of character."

For men in early adulthood, role obligations involve the suppression of their tender, feminine side, and for women, their agentic, masculine side. Consistent with the Eichorn findings on middle age, a number of studies suggest a reversal in sex-role characteristics in later life (Gutmann 1968, 1969, 1975; Lowenthal et al. 1975; Neugarten and Gutmann 1968). With increasing age, older men become more nurturing and older women become more assertive. Perhaps that is why I experienced a different man in my grandfather than his children had known, and why many mothers-in-law are often considered intrusive and opinionated. Years ago I thought this contrast between a parent-child relationship and a grandparent-grandchild relationship reflected the fact that parents must exercise discipline and authority over children, whereas grandparents are released from this role demand and are free to indulge pure pleasure in, and affection for, their grandchildren. But it could also have to do with maturational change since grandparents are typically over fifty, whereas parents are in their twenties and thirties. Moreover, I have observed the beginning of this sex role reversal in my husband and myself. Years ago he was a dominant, assertive man who suppressed the tender side of himself, but that tender side is revealed more each year, while I feel much more freedom to be dominant and assertive than ever before in my life. This interesting shift shows itself in all our social roles, as parents, spouses, teachers, and organizational officers.

And so at sixty-seven I feel closer to the Alice of thirteen than to the Alice of Twenty or thirty. I like this new-old Alice better too. Does anyone know of a play calling for a woman character with a purple cape and a walking cane? I feel old enough, and young enough, finally to take center stage.

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