Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims of the years of transition, for during that time women would be happier in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated from the other sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though we struggle to make others think us sane.

There are moments when I envy every living creature who has the right to pair—either from hate or from habit. I am alone and shut out.

Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but they will never learn any of the things women confide to each other. Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal hostility but the involuntary abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.

It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over red-hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be slight, indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters the region of despair we call growing old.

It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth not one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took infinite pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just as she really is, he would think she was suffering from some incurable mental disease. A few of us indicate our true natures in hysterical outbreaks, fits of bitterness and suspicion, but this involuntary frankness is generally discounted by some subtle deceit.

If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the head like mad dogs.

Are there honest women? At least we believe there are. It is a necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother or sister, but who believes entirely in a mother or sister? Absolutely and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the boundless love cannot bridge over? Who was ever really understood by mother or sister?

I envy every country wench or servant girl who goes off with her lover while I sit here waiting for old age.[26]

The author has been spoken of as a traitor to her sex, revealing all its freemasonry. Certainly no female writer ever emancipated herself more completely from man’s point of view. There is no masculine note here. It would seem as if she aspired to be a specialist in feminine psychology. M. Prévost calls it a cinematograph of feminine thought set down without interposing between the author’s mind and the paper the vision of a man. No extracts or epitome can do justice to the precision of style, the acuteness of self-observation, the range of social experience, and the depth of insight here shown in depicting the psychological processes that attend the beginnings of old age in women.

It is well at any stage of life, and particularly at its noonday, to pause and ask ourselves what kind of old people we would like, and also are likely, to be—two very different questions. In youth we have ideals of and fit for maturity. Why not do the same when we are mature for the next stage? Why should not forty plan for eighty (or at least for sixty) just as intently as twenty does for forty? At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority. Woman passes through the same stages as man, only the first comes earlier and the last later for her. If and so far as Osler is right, it is because man up to the present has been abnormally precocious, a trait that he inherited from his shorter-lived precursors and has not yet outgrown, as is the case with sexual precocity, which brings premature age. Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more and more so, an afternoon and evening worker. The coming superman will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade. Not only with many personal questions but with most of the harder and more complex problems that affect humanity we rarely come to anything like a masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward, and for a season, which varies greatly with individuals, our powers increase as the shadows lengthen. Thus as the world grows intricate and the stage of apprenticeship necessarily lengthens it becomes increasingly necessary to conserve all those higher powers of man that culminate late, and it is just these that our civilization, that brings such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends to dwarf, making old age too often blasé and abgelebt, like the middle age of those roués who in youth have lived too fast.