{"id":6089,"date":"2020-02-20T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=6089"},"modified":"2020-02-25T17:24:59","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T22:24:59","slug":"american-women-on-the-verge-a-review-of-ada-calhouns-why-we-cant-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2020\/02\/20\/american-women-on-the-verge-a-review-of-ada-calhouns-why-we-cant-sleep\/","title":{"rendered":"American Women on the Verge: A review of Ada Calhoun\u2019s Why We Can\u2019t Sleep"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What are you losing sleep over? Sociologist Syed Ali reviews a new book that engages the question for middle-aged American women.<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ada Calhoun<\/a>, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis<\/a>, Grove Press, 2020.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Generation X women can’t sleep\u2014a third of them get less than\nseven hours a night. They sleep less than other adult age groups, and, compared\nto Generation X men, they have a harder time falling asleep and staying asleep.\nWhy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer to this question is at the core of Ada Calhoun\u2019s brilliant new book, Why We Can\u2019t Sleep<\/em>, the story of about today\u2019s middle-class American women and their midlife crises. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div> Why We Can\u2019t Sleep: Women\u2019s New Midlife Crisis looks specifically looking at the women of Generation X, born between 1965-1980, who are caught in between and are distinct from Boomers and Millennials. (Calhoun understands that many people, like my former Contexts Magazine<\/em> co-editor Philip N. Cohen, think the idea of a generational experience is nonsense. She\u2019s using it anyway.) These women have come of adult age as college tuition increased (so they have more debt, and more agita about debt, than their parents), wages have stagnated (daughters born in the 1980s have a 25% chance of out-earning their fathers\u2014and no, that\u2019s not a typo), and age of first marriage and first child have increased so these women are taking care of children and aging parents at the same time. For these women, who are the beneficiaries of the feminist struggles of the 1960s, \u201cthe belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.\u201d To say these middle-class women of varied ethnic\/racial and regional backgrounds have a lot of pressure on them is, well, an understatement.Generation X women sleep less than other adult age groups, with a third of them sleeping less than seven hours a night. Compared to Generation X men, they have a harder time falling asleep and staying asleep.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calhoun is one of these women. Born in 1976, she writes\nthat, \u201c[s]ince turning forty a couple of years ago, I\u2019ve been obsessed with\nwomen my age and their\u2014our\u2014struggles with money, relationships, work, and existential\ndespair.\u201d She started off by calling a reporter friend and asked, \u201cDo you know\nanyone having a midlife crisis I could talk to?\u201d The friend, after thinking\nabout it, said, \u201cI\u2019m trying to think of any woman I know who\u2019s not.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep, or the lack of it, is just the tip of the iceberg, an entry point to this book\u2019s thoroughly sociological analysis of women\u2019s midlife crises. Calhoun knows that what matters is Contexts (my favorite word and magazine), and indeed that is the story she is most interested in telling. \u201cThe context for Generation X women is this: we were an experiment in crafting a higher-achieving, more fulfilled, more well-rounded version of the American woman. In midlife many of us find that the experiment is largely a failure. We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage.\u201d The book is a deep dive into the divergence between aspirations and reality, the structural factors that keep women from having it all, and the psychological toll this takes. Individually, a woman\u2019s midlife crisis can be seen as her issue; but we know it goes well beyond her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>What are these factors that go well beyond the individual? Again, shifts in the economy and in terms of women\u2019s rights have led far more women to enter the workforce. On the one hand, this means economic power. On the other hand, it means economic responsibility. As the age of marriage and childbirth has gone up, they\u2019re taking care of children at the same time as they\u2019re often taking care of their parents and their in-laws. Even if women are childless, they\u2019re still stressing about work and parents and partners and money and retirement and health insurance and and and. The debt levels that people of this generation face are higher than for older folk at the same age, cost of living (especially childcare and rent\/mortgages) is higher and wages are stagnant in the middle so paying off debt is harder, and they save less. They get laid off. They\u2019re forced to freelance\/work part-time\/be unemployed. With so much on their plates and so much financial insecurity, even for the richer among them, it\u2019s not surprising that some of the many balls these women are juggling will fall. A response Calhoun heard from some women about careers and kids and husbands not panning out as hoped was: \u201cWhat did *I* do wrong?\u201d (Emphasis added.) They blame themselves instead of others or their structural circumstances; they swallow their despair, quietly. This is not something men do.Many Generation X women blame themselves instead of others or their structural circumstances for the stress they feel about work, parents, partners, money, retirement, health insurance, etc.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*********<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, a lot has gone right for these women of a certain\nage. The wage gap has shrunk some. There are more professional opportunities.\nTitle IX has expanded educational and sports opportunities in K-12 and higher\ned. Men do more work at home. There\u2019s some pushback against sexism. \u201cThe\ncomplaints of well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are easy to\ndisparage\u2014as a temporary setback, a fixable hormonal imbalance, or\n#FirstWorldProblems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, there\u2019s lots of reasons why Generation X women shouldn\u2019t\nfeel bad. And here\u2019s the central question of the book that Calhoun poses: \u201cSo\nwhy do we?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to do when you\u2019re a middle-aged woman who\u2019s feeling bad, feeling depressed, feeling physically discombobulated, and you can\u2019t sleep? There\u2019s no shortage of people giving advice\u2014doctors, other women, men (so many men), the fashion mags, the morning shows, Gwyneth Paltrow. Take anti-depressants. Supplements. Pollens and oils. CBD. Put jade eggs in your vagina. Long walks in nature, take the stairs, drink lots of water, limit caffeine and alcohol, do your planks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet still they feel bad. And still they can\u2019t sleep. But\nno one hears them. Calhoun points out the stereotypical male midlife crisis\ninvolves busting stuff up\u2014marriages, careers, etc. But women\u2019s are usually\nquieter. Sometimes, yeah, there\u2019s an affair, \u201cbut more often she sneaks her\nsuffering in around the edges of caretaking and work. From the outside, no one\nmay notice anything amiss.\u201d One of the women she interviewed bought herself\nthat well-known marker of the male midlife crisis\u2014a car. But not a fancy, new\nsports car. She turned in her minivan for a Prius. A ten-year-old one at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calhoun\u2019s triumph is to put the personal in a sociological\nperspective, in a very convincing way. You don\u2019t have to take it from me, a\ncisgender, hetero middle-aged male. My wife, Eli Pollard, who\u2019s turning 50 this\nyear (note to self: start party planning now), confiscated the book from me\nwhen I bought it two weeks ago. She devoured it and, like so many other women\nhave commented in public forums, said she felt like this book was written just\nfor her. Kristi Williams, badass sociologist and demographer (and editor of the\nJournal of Marriage and Family) told me this when I asked her what she\nespecially liked about Calhoun\u2019s work: \u201cThat my crippling insomnia might be\nrelated to the intersection of age, period, and cohort rang true in a geeky\ndemographer kind of way.\u201d I said, \u201cDude\u2014please let me quote that!\u201d To which she\nsaid, \u201cFuck yeah! Add menopausal hormone chaos to that demographic cocktail as\nwell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And speaking of menopause, I like that Calhoun puts hormonal\nchanges due to perimenopause and menopause as factors in the midlife crisis and\nsleep deprivation near the end of the book. She starts with the sociological,\nthen goes to the physiological, and shows the interplay. She put it this way in\nan adapted excerpt in Time Magazine: \u201cThe unique confluence of stressors and\nhormonal shifts poses a sort of chicken-or-egg problem for Gen X women: the\nsymptoms of hormonal fluctuation (like sleeplessness) are exacerbated by\nstress, while those symptoms (like not sleeping) in turn raise stress levels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her penultimate chapter is on something all too familiar\u2014the\ncrippling effects of too much social media. But instead of going on about this\n(something she could have easily and successfully done), she pivots to\nsomething much more useful conceptually: the benefits of a networked life. She\ngives plenty of examples from others and herself, and solid advice. \u201c[T]he\nsecond you start having perimenopausal symptoms: start a club. A book club\ngives you a reason to read and to get together with friends. A stitch and\nbitch. A going-out-dancing club. Margarita Mondays. A\ntry-every-pizza-place-in-town club. [SA: This only applies to New Yorkers.] A\nNew Midlife Crisis Initiation Club,\u2122 perhaps!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her concrete advice in this chapter, and throughout the\nbook, really, is a welcome, sociologically informed, corrective to the multiple\nstreams of well-meaning though often ineffective and sometimes just bad advice\nwomen get from doctors, the fashion mags, the morning shows, Gwyneth Paltrow.\nSome things people suggest to middle-aged women who are feeling bad, feeling\ndepressed, feeling physically discombobulated, and can\u2019t sleep: Take\nanti-depressants. Supplements. Pollens and oils. CBD. Put jade eggs in your\nvagina. (Don\u2019t put jade eggs in your vagina.) Take long walks in nature, take\nthe stairs, drink lots of water, limit your caffeine and alcohol intake, do\nyour planks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They do these things, and yet still they feel bad. And still\nthey can\u2019t sleep. But no one hears them. Calhoun points out the stereotypical\nmale midlife crisis involves busting stuff up\u2014marriages, careers, etc. But\nwomen\u2019s are usually quieter. Sometimes, yeah, there\u2019s an affair, \u201cbut more\noften she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work. From\nthe outside, no one may notice anything amiss.\u201d One of the women she\ninterviewed bought herself that well-known marker of the male midlife crisis\u2014a\ncar. But not a fancy, new sports car. She turned in her minivan for a Prius. A\nten-year-old one at that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*********<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>I should have said this earlier, but I\u2019ll say it now\u2014I\u2019m friends with Calhoun, so of course I\u2019m her cheerleader. But that\u2019s ok, because this book really is great. (There are See the dozens of positive reviews online, if you don\u2019t believe me.. And Pollard\u2019s and Williams\u2019s words above.) Who should read this book? Generation X women for sure. Anyone who has a Generation X woman in their lives\u2014partners, parents, children, friends, coworkers\u2014needs to read this to understand their situation. You want to know why this woman can\u2019t sleep? Calhoun has answers. You want to know how you can help? There are implicit and explicit answers. Do more for this woman. Bosses, pay her more and give her better job opportunities. Partners, do half the cooking, cleaning, and childwork. Make your their teenage kids read this and tell them to be better to their mothers! (Ok, about that last one\u2026)Anyone who has a Generation X woman in their lives\u2014partners, parents, children, friends, coworkers\u2014needs to read this to understand their situation. <\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since most of you reading this review will probably be\nsociologists\/related geeks, anyone who teaches courses on aging, gender,\nmarriage and family should assign this bookuse this. Calhoun makes the point\nthat research on aging still often skips middle age, and it\u2019s typically on men.\nThis book fills a gaping hole, and it\u2019s an easy, fast, satisfying read. Your\nstudents will actually read it and love it and tell you all about it and\nunderstand all you were talkingthe nuanced points you were making about the\nwhole semester in class through their understanding of this book. Do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the sociology geeks, I need to stress Calhoun\u2019s writing\nstyle is wonderful. It\u2019s a little bit memoir and a lot sociology. There\u2019s a lot\nof data and analysis, and a lot of storytelling. Remember my geeks, she\u2019s\nwritten a book that she wants people to read and wants it to sell. So, you\nknow, she can make some money. Because she\u2019s a freelancer paying the equivalent\nof a mortgage every month for health insurance, hefty credit card debt, and\nshe\u2019s never sure how long until the next gig. So the book has to be\ninteresting\u2014the content of course, but especially how you present it. I\u2019m\nfascinated by her personal stories, but I\u2019m also fascinated when she gives me\nFOUR PAGES IN A ROW OF STATISTICS. Numbers don\u2019t have to be boring. And she\u2019s a\ngreat interviewer\u2014the stories of pain and occasional joy these women tell her\nare the product of a sympathetic ear and asking the right question of the right\nperson at the right time. This book will be highly instructional for\nqualitative interviewers, but also for all of us who strive to find a broader\nreading audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot here for sociologists to quibble over, and\neven be annoyed by. And that\u2019s ok. Calhoun\u2019s stepping into your turf. If you\ndon\u2019t like it, read this book even more carefully. Write better so that others\nmight read your book. You\u2019re probably not going to get the readership she has.\nBut you might.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calhoun ends on a hopeful note: \u201cJust in the course of\nwriting this book, I saw the lives of many of the women I spoke with change,\nmostly for the better. They found new jobs or new towns or new partners or\nfigured out how to better enjoy the ones they had. They got on hormones or got\noff hormones or started exercising or stopped exercising. Time passed. Things\nwere different.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the midlife crisis is not a permanent state. The importance of this book is in bringing these women\u2019s private stories into the public, telling women they\u2019re not alone in this, there are factors beyond their control that are contributing to thistheir midlife crises and inability to sleep, that this is ok, it\u2019s normal, and there are better ways to cope. This is a big idea book, and it delivers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Syed Ali<\/a> is a former co-editor of Contexts Magazine, an aspiring potter in Brooklyn, and the grievance officer for Local 3998, @LIU_FF<\/a>. He is the co-author (with Margaret M. Chin) of The Peer Effect: Lessons from the Best High School in America for Improving Our Educational System<\/strong>, which is forthcoming (at some point) from NYU Press. He tweets @skyedali<\/a>.<\/em>
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What are you losing sleep over? Sociologist Syed Ali reviews a new book that engages the question for middle-aged American women. Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Grove Press, 2020. Generation X women can’t sleep\u2014a third of them get less than seven hours a night. They sleep less than other adult […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1952,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1716],"tags":[100986,211,100981,100995,100988,30343,35,100991,488,100999,2580,100994,245,3902,127999,2826,127998,116211,13,128000,128004,31077,100985,100990,100987,3093,922,117832,4374,127991,128002,128003,122618,10218,99,117831,11317,1528,5018,3540,3547,144,190,76],"class_list":["post-6089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-ada-calhoun","tag-aging","tag-american-women","tag-aspirations","tag-boomers","tag-childless","tag-children","tag-college-tuition","tag-contexts","tag-cost-of-living","tag-debt","tag-existential-crisis","tag-feminism","tag-generation-x","tag-gwyneth-paltrow","tag-health-insurance","tag-hormonal-imbalance","tag-hormones","tag-inequality","tag-insomnia","tag-interview-study","tag-menopause","tag-middle-aged-women","tag-middle-class-women","tag-midlife-crisis","tag-millennials","tag-money","tag-mortgage","tag-parenting","tag-partners","tag-perimenopause","tag-qualitative-interviews","tag-qualitative-methods","tag-reality","tag-relationships","tag-rent","tag-retirement","tag-sexism","tag-sleep","tag-stereotype","tag-stress","tag-teaching","tag-women","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1952"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6089"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6121,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6089\/revisions\/6121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}