Levinson Daniel Jacob - The Seasons of a Womans Life

Copyright 1996 by Douglas F. Levinson and Mark E. Levinson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgements for permission to reprint previously published material may be found following the Index.

http://www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-97095

eISBN: 978-0-307-80714-4

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A UTHORS N OTE

If we are to learn about lives in adulthood, people must be willing to tell their life stories and trust that their privacy and the privacy of others will be respected. As a researcher I am committed to honoring this trust. Pseudonyms, Anonymous, and disguised details have been used in this book in an effort to protect the privacy of the forty-five women research participants as well as the privacy of others.

How does it happen that a man like myself at the culmination of his career, wishing to choose wisely the few remaining projects to which he can devote himself, should spend fifteen years attempting to understand the adult development of women? It is partially the legacy of a mother who left her Russian shtetl alone in 1890, at the age of 14, worked in the garment industry sweatshops of London and New York City for many years, became a union organizer and a passionate advocate of womens rights, and, after marrying and becoming a mother at 34, spent the next sixty years as a housewife and private feminist. It comes, too, from a father who admired and shared his wifes feminism while also wanting her traditionalism. Perhaps the most important result is not that I have incorporated both the feminism and the traditionalismbut that I have had a keen awareness of these contradictory themes in myself, in other men and women, and in female-male relationships. That awareness has been intensified and developed further by the current phase of the long-term gender revolution in which I believe our species is now engaged.

My research on adult development began in 1967. Eleven years later I published The Seasons of a Mans Life. Exploring the research literature, I concluded that very little was known about the adult life course and that the standard research methods (questionnaires, surveys, tests, structured interviews) would be of limited value in exploring this new field. I chose instead to develop a new method of Intensive Biographical Interviewing through which individual lives could be examined in greater depth. The use of this method limited the sample size to a maximum of forty. It seemed to me that there were significant gender differences in adult life and development. To include twenty men and twenty women would do justice to neither and might resultas it often has in the pastin an allegedly general theory based primarily on the evidence from men. My final decision to study men rather than women was based largely on personal considerations: I had an intense desire to understand my own adult development.

The seeds of this book lie in that earlier one. While deciding to focus initially on men, I promised myself to do a second, parallel study of women. The present book fulfills that promise. The study of women is central in my vision of my own work and of the field of adult development in general. As I wrote in The Seasons of a Mans Life, It is essential to study the adult development of both genders if we are to understand either. We cannot adequately understand men by the study of men alone, nor women solely by the study of women. It is also importantperhaps essential until our footing is more securethat women and men work together in the study of each gender.

I have been keenly aware that I began the study of women with concepts and findings derived chiefly from the study of men. I do not believe that it is possible today for anyone, male or female, to undertake the study of womens development without being heavily influenced by concepts, assumptions, and ways of thinking based primarily upon the experience and writing of men. A strongly male-centered view of adult life has for centuries been prevalent in our scientific and cultural institutions. It will take time, effort, and sharpened awareness of gender issues to achieve a more balanced view.

In The Seasons of a Mans Life, it was difficult to say which aspects of the theory and findings were true of human development generally and which held for men only. The present study provided the opportunity (and indeed the necessity) of arriving at a clearer distinction. My primary aim was to tap as directly as possible into the lives of women. I wanted to generate new concepts based on the actualities of womens lives, without losing what was valuable from the study of men. Conversely, I wanted to make appropriate use of what I already knew, without blinding myself to new evidence and insights. Work on this dilemma led me to explore two questions of basic importance in the study of development:

(1) Can we create a gender-free conception of adult human development, a framework that captures what is most essentially human and common to both genders?

(2) Within that general framework, can we create a gender-specific conception of the adult development of women? This is the driving question of the present book.

I have made strenuous efforts to overcome the limitations stemming from my own gender and from my previous study of men. These efforts began in the early 1970s, when I was engaged in the study of men. I encouraged Wendy Stewart to do her doctoral dissertation on the adult life structure development of women, and was an adviser on her study, one of the first to deal solely with women. A few years later, I was similarly involved in a dissertation by Susan Taylor Jackson. I also consulted with Janice Ruffin on her dissertation, which studied the adult development of African-American women. These studies indicated that my theory of adult development held in its broad outlines for women as well as men, while also giving evidence of some important gender differences within the general framework.

In 1979, a year after the publication of The Seasons of a Mans Life, I began exploratory work on this project. By one of those curious synchronicities in human life, I was approached just then by the Financial Womens Association of New York (FWA). The members of the Financial Womens Association are women executives and professionals working in the financial district and corporate headquarters and banks of New York City. Their level of achievement and income would make a large part of the population of the United States envious. The FWA was interested in sponsoring and raising funds for a study of the kind that I was planning. After canvassing the field, they came up with a list of researchers on which I was the only male. Other things being equal, they would have chosen a female. However, they were interested in careers and, like me, wanted to place career development in the context of individual life development. They felt, as I did, that an intensive study using in-depth interviewing would be more productive than standard survey research. They supported my interest in comparing businesswomen with other samples. When the FWA proposed to sponsor my work, I felt that I had passed an important test. And, in deciding to accept, I understood that much more than funding was involved. It made historical as well as personal sense to me that this project should involve a cross-gender collaboration in its sponsorship. In the years since then I have come to understand more deeply the importance of cross-gender collaboration in human life generally, and certainly in the study of development.