What middle age used to mean and what it means now ...

Surprisingly, there are few written accounts of what it feels like to become middle-aged. In 1970, when Simone de Beauvoir wrote with emotional candour about the process of ageing and society’s marginalisation of the elderly, she talked of the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding the subject. Four decades on, it is midlife that is the hush-hush affair. When the term “middle age” came into general use in the late 19th century, it was principally in a socioeconomic setting. Empire and industrialisation had expanded and enriched the middle classes, and this, coupled with a demographic trend for having fewer children, meant that women who’d finished raising families were able to enjoy another decade or two of vigour and relevance. Middle age was admired: these women were mature, worldly beings, having “freedom to” as well as “freedom from”. In an essay published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1903, “The Woman of Fifty” was hailed as someone who had attained a “mastery of the rules” of life. She was characterised as having “distinctive charm and beauty, ripe views, disciplined intellect, [and] cultivated and manifold gifts”. Midlife’s negative tarnish came only with the advent of mass production in the Twenties, and the theories of “scientific management” (the brainchild of American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor) that underpinned it, sharpening our association of youth with productivity, and middle age with decreasing efficiency.

In the Taylorised system, time was of the essence as never before, yet it wasn’t just manufacturing that could be made more efficient. All of life might be Taylorised, broken down into a series of successive standardised stages, from childhood to senescence. In her study of midlife, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age, Patricia Cohen observes how the spread of Taylorism led to a seachange in the way midlife was viewed that showed itself not only in sweeping pronouncements made by doctors, sociologists and psychologists, but in the little ways that ordinary people behaved: rounding down their age for census questionnaires, and acting on a decided reluctance to go grey: sales of hair dyes shot up in the Twenties and Thirties.

Although we now live in a post-industrial society, we continue to be enslaved by the habits of Taylorism, and we are even more mindful now of how we occupy our time. This is where the quackery of anti-ageing hoves into view, with all its white-coated assurances, shiny miracle creams, invisible fillers and surgical lifts — all of it in the service of unstitching time. Its purpose is to reassure. To tell us that we need not relinquish youth just yet. That there are ways of stalling our foe.