Generations and Aging

Are Boomers and Gen X'ers Remaking the Experience of Growing Older?

I studied the autobiographical narratives of 235 America women from the four generations before the Baby Boom, women who reached their 50s and passed into old age amid the dizzying changes of the 20^th century. My study included rural and urban women, well-educated women and those with little formal schooling, Jews, Christians, and atheists, heterosexual and lesbian women, affluent, middle and working class, from 31 states and all regions of the country. Eighteen were African American, and a handful were Asian, Latinx, or Native American, but the overwhelming majority, 87% were white. Ten women self-identified as lesbian.

Do generational differences shape our experience of aging?

As I sought to understand their experience of aging, I grappled with the question of how much the generation to which we’re born shapes our life experience. In other words, do generational differences shape our experience of aging?

Let’s begin with the notion that each generation possesses a shared consciousness. Writing in the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. historians William Strauss and Neil Howe popularized the idea that people in a particular age group shared a generational consciousness—a set of ideas and beliefs about the world that was shaped by major historical and cultural events that occurred in their adolescent and young adult years. Journalist Tom Brokaw brought this idea into popular culture with The Greatest Generation, which celebrated the grit and determination of the generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II.

More recently, Stanford University psychologist Jean Twenge has used “big data” (huge datasets that have to be analyzed by today’s supercomputers) to refine Strauss and Howe’s work. In addition to shared experiences of historical events, Twenge identified three other forces shaping generational outlooks: evolving technologies that change daily life; shifting values that emphasize individual growth and achievement; and the rise of a “slow life strategy” in which childhood and adolescence are prolonged periods of preparation for adult life. As only one example of Twenge’s argument, think about how growing up without telephones or with wired telephone systems creates a much different experience of daily life than today’s smart phones.

Scholars often define a generation as people born over a roughly 15 or 20-year period, but the boundaries between generations are not exact. As historian Robert Wohl put it, “A historical generation is not defined by its chronological limits or its borders. . . . It is more like a magnetic field at the center of which lies an experience or a series of experiences.” What binds a generation together is a shared frame of reference.

As historian Robert Wohl put it, “A historical generation is not defined by its chronological limits or its borders. . . . It is more like a magnetic field at the center of which lies an experience or a series of experiences.”

The women I studied fell into four generational groupings. Some were members of the generation that Strauss and Howe dubbed the “Missionary Generation.” Born between 1860 and 1882, members of the Missionary Generation were beneficiaries of the massive expansion of public education particularly widening educational opportunities for women and African Americans. They came of age in the midst of labor and racial unrest, witnessing the Populist Movement and the Haymarket Riot, the Spanish-American War, and the founding of the NAACP.

Members of the Missionary Generation redefined the role of women. Missionary women were more likely to obtain a high school or college education than earlier generations of women, and the educated among them tended to delay marriage or to remain single. Many moved into previously all-male professions such as medicine, journalism, and the law. During this period, women came to dominate the teaching profession in the United States, and they carved out new career fields in home economics and social work.

Many in the Missionary Generation were moral crusaders, but they could crusade around very different causes. Civil rights reformers like Ida B. Wells-Barnet (b. 1862) were part of this generation, but so were rabid white supremacists and eugenicists. Birth control pioneer and eugenicist Margaret Sanger (b. 1879) and disability rights activist Helen Keller (b. 1880) were part of the Missionary Generation as were scores of women’s suffrage activists, prohibitionist crusaders, trade unionists, muckraking journalists, and evangelical revival preachers. Lucy Cobb (b. 1877), the genealogist I featured a few weeks ago, was a member of the missionary generation.

The Missionary Generation entered middle age during World War I, and their years of elderhood coincided with the national crises of the Great Depression and World War II. The Missionary Generation saw a rapid increase in longevity, and it became the first generation whose women outlived its men. Nonetheless, the generation suffered for its longevity because the nation had not yet developed a good infrastructure for providing for people in old age. Of the Missionary cohort who survived until 1949 (when the oldest among them would have been 89 and the youngest 67), fully sixty percent lived in poverty. No wonder then, that this was the generation that pioneered Social Security.

Strauss and Howe characterized the generation born between 1883 and 1900 as the Lost Generation. Several women in my study sample were part of this generation. This generational cohort came of age during World War I and the influenza epidemic of 1918. Historians and cultural commentators have observed that this generation was disillusioned and often seemed aimless or unrelenting in their pursuit of pleasure, but many were also breaking new ground for women. Their young adult years were years of relative prosperity in the United States and a general loosening of social mores. Their middle years were marked by the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II. Well-known members of the cohort included writers like Dorothy Parker and film star Mae West, both born in 1893 and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884), and pilot Amelia Earhart (b. 1897).

The generation born between 1901 and 1924, the G.I. Generation in Strauss and Howe’s parlance, have become popularly known as the Greatest Generation thanks to journalist Tom Brokaw’s profiles of men and women who survived Depression-era childhoods and bore the brunt of World War II’s demands on American citizens. Nearly half of the men in this generation served in the U.S. military during World War II, and many women also served in the military or took on other wartime jobs.

In spite of (and sometimes because of) the Great Depression, this generation enjoyed the largest share of federal attention of any generation to date, benefitting from attention to child welfare through Child Labor Laws and the U.S. Children’s Bureau to the G.I. Bill benefits awarded by a grateful nation after the war to the establishment of federal programs for the aged in the 1960s. They enjoyed better health, higher overall levels of educational achievement, and higher overall levels of affluence than any previous generation.

Well-known women from this generation included Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924), the first African-American elected to Congress and the first to run for president on a major party ticket, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (b. 1917), and marine biologist Rachel Carson (b. 1907). Many of the women in my sample, including psychologist Ida Fisher Davidoff (b. 1903) who was featured in earlier posts, were born during these years.

The men and women born between 1925 and 1942 have often been characterized as the Silent Generation. Children during the Great Depression and World War II, most members of this generation whole-heartedly embraced established American institutions. After the trauma of the Great Depression and World War II and coming of age during the anxieties of the Cold War period, Silent Generation members felt a great pressure to conform to societal norms. A relatively small generation because of the low birthrates during the Depression and World War II, the Silent generation married and had children at the earliest age of any generation in American history. Men in this era outpaced the Greatest Generation’s educational attainment, but women’s education levels remained flat, and college-educated women in the Silent Generation had higher fertility rates than their less-educated sisters. They were also less likely to pursue professional careers. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (b. 1930) was a member of the Silent Generation as was writer Maya Angelou (b. 1928). I’ll be featuring a number of Silent Generation women in future posts.

Many scholars have been critical of Strauss-Howe generational theory, arguing that it is weakly grounded in empirical research and that it glosses over real differences among members of the same generation. Their work is also heavily based on the experiences of educated elites who became political, military, cultural, and civic leaders.

Nonetheless based on my long study of history, I am convinced that members of a generation often share some common attitudes shaped by common experiences, and as I read the personal writings of aging women, these generational attitudes were sometimes evident. While the boundaries delineating any particular generation might be fluid, generations do seem to have “personalities.” But does this mean that the generation to which you belong shapes your aging experience?

In the end, I decided that the answer was yes, a little bit. The shared experiences that bind people together when they are young may also bind them together in old age. Aging is not a static process. The experience of growing older, like the experience of growing up, is shaped by social change, and the attitudes and outlook of a generation of people can shape their approach to growing older. As I’ll explore in a later post, what it meant to grow older in America changed dramatically in the last half of the twentieth century.

While the boundaries delineating any particular generation might be fluid, generations do seem to have “personalities.” But does this mean that the generation to which you belong shapes your aging experience? In the end, I decided that the answer was yes, a little bit.

Still, as I read the personal writings of aging women, I found that the generational differences were less significant than individual life experiences. For example, Ida Fisher Davidoff may have been a member of the so-called Greatest Generation, but she many elements of her young life resembled that of the earlier Missionary Generation and many of her adult experiences had more in common with the later Silent Generation. The experience of aging did shift because of the increased life expectancy and wider array of choices that each generations enjoyed, but in the end I found that many aspects of the aging experience were consistent across generations. Stay tuned for future posts to learn more about why.

Sources: William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future: 1584-2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991); Jean M. Twenge, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York: Atria Books, 2023). See also Norman B. Ryder, “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change,” American Sociological Review, 30: 6 (December 1965), pp. 843-861 and Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

For critiques of Strauss and Howe, see Gary L. Jones, “William Strauss and Neil Howe ‘Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069’ (Book Review)”. Perspectives on Political Science 21: 4 (Fall 1992): 218. See also Matilda White Riley, “Aging, Social Change, and the Power of Ideas,” in Generations, Stephen R. Graubard, ed. (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), 39-52 and Howard P. Chudacoff and Tamara K. Hareven, “From the Empty Nest to Family Dissolution: Life Course Transitions Into Old Age,” Journal of Family History (Spring 1979): 69-83.