Abstract
It sounds like a simple matter to study lives—in this case, women’s lives. But there are many aspects of lives: actions and choices; immediate relational and larger social, cultural, and historical contexts; personality traits, motives, and goals; and interior reflections and reactions. And lives are long—so the structure, shape, and texture change in the course of time. Over many years, Ravenna Helson and her collaborators have organized these elements into important research papers with a range of designs, methods, and analyses. Those papers, listed in a helpful appendix to Women on the River of Life, are a remarkable contribution collectively to our understanding of the psychology of women’s lives. But this book—written in straightforward and accessible style by Helson and her long-term collaborator Valory Mitchell—offers something completely different: a rich, sophisticated, and integrated account of the many ways women have constructed their lives out of these elements. Thoroughly grounded in the findings of the individual studies, this account is a creative new product that demonstrates that lives are better illuminated when they are described in their diversity within similarity rather than in terms of large, totalizing constructs and theories.
The core material for the book comes from a single longitudinal data set—the Mills Study—initiated in 1958 and continuing with five more data collections over 50 years (spanning ages 21 through 72). Most of the sample are fairly affluent White women, born and raised with a particular set of expectations and pressures associated with their time, class, race, and gender.
To their credit, the authors place the sample in all of these contexts and make clear the things we cannot know from a deep study of this group of women; at the same time, they are undefensive. This was the first and is still one of the very few longitudinal studies of adult women of any kind. It offers important insights into those women that can now be studied in women of other backgrounds and periods. The book is organized into adult life stages and chapters within those larger periods focus on important conceptual issues: the place of creativity and wisdom in women’s lives, the power of social norms and expectations, and the utility of a range of major life span developmental theories (including Levinson, Gilligan, Jung, Erikson, Loevinger, and more). Some chapters foreground particular personality assessment tools and use them to study change and differences within the group of women, while others compare women with different life commitments or engagement with social movements and events of their time.
The focus on different ways individual women pursue what might seem like a common path is a consistent theme throughout the book, whether that path is defined by their creativity, their commitment to a particular life structure, or a pattern of satisfaction or personality growth. Over and over we see that there is no one way to construct a satisfactory—or unsatisfactory—life at a particular moment, and at the same time that over time many women reverse course and change their minds and their luck. While always demonstrating ways that women who score high or low on a particular indicator fit certain thoughtful predictions from theory, Helson and Mitchell also show that the ways women pursue their lives within those predictions are varied and wildly distinctive. Avoiding a narrow focus on particular outcomes as most interesting or desirable, or a single method, or (crucially) judgments of the women, the authors end up offering us a sense of the remarkable range, resilience, and innovation reflected in this set of lives. They do this by attending to regularities and divergences at the same time and by their clear enthusiasm for their project. Along the way, the authors manage to show us how much we miss when we insist on keeping our stories simple. This book is simultaneously an extraordinary accomplishment, a pleasure to read, and a model of what can be understood about the psychology of women when we keep our vision large and granular at the same time.
