Spirituality and Women's Midlife Development

✍ Scribed by Lynn Calhoun Howell

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 556 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1524-6817
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-0029.2001.tb00106.x

✦ Synopsis

This qualitative study describes midlife spiritual practices of 2 groups of minority women, I lesbiadbisexuaf group and I Black group. Eacb poup attended 3focus group meetings in New York City. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. Implications for counselors working with middleaged women were discussed.

Existing literature on women's midlife development reflects substantial shifts in psychosocial paradigms. Three shifts are explored in this introduction: increased human life expectancy, the emergence of gender-specific research, and the focus on spirituality. In the context of the new paradigms for understanding women's midlife development, I then describe my prior research (Howell, 2001;Howell & Beth, 2002), which was used as a baseline for the current research.

INCREASED LIFE EXPECTANCY OF HUMANS

A rapidly changing figure, life expectancy now exceeds 80 years. Midlife has, therefore, become the gateway to old age. As a result, various definitions of midlife exist. Mansfield, Theisen, and Boyer (1992) used parameters of 35 and 55. Lacy (1986) and Levinson (1978Levinson ( , 1996) ) defined midlife as ages 40 to 60, and Borysenko (1996) used the ages 42 to 62 to define midlife. In contrast, some researchers did not tie midlife to age at all. Rubin (1979) and England and Finch (1991), for instance, said that midlife began when women's children left home. Most recently, I (Howell, 2001) interviewed women from ages 35 to 60 and found that participants who were below the age of 40 did not identify with what was being shared by the older members of the focus groups. In addition, members of groups strongly believed that midlife started as late as 45 or 50 for most women.