Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

You come to this place, midlife. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. —Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.10 Even women who make much more may feel uneasy about their financial future, stunned by how hard it is just getting through the week, or disappointed by how few opportunities seem to come their way.

I hope this book will help us hear women’s concerns not as whining but as a corrective to the misleading rhetoric extolling an American dream that has not come within reach for us—and likely will not for our children.

We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising—in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.