Reproducing and Resisting the Master Narrative of Decline

Abstract

This exploratory study provides an analysis of midlife professional women’s experiences of growing older at work. The master narrative of aging as decline encourages midlife women to experience and articulate growing older in terms of loss, isolation, and diminished material resources. Yet women do not simply reproduce the decline narrative, they also offer resistant stories. Analysis of women’s narratives suggests that increasingly, midlife is represented as a feature of one’s identity to be managed effectively. Specifically, entrepreneurialism has colonized the aging process such that the individual is now positioned as the locus of her own problems and solutions in relation to the seemingly inevitable decline that begins at midlife. In contrast, this analysis attempts to make explicit the economic, organizational, and discursive bases of aging. Finally, the article brings the politics of midlife professional women’s aging to the fore, highlights implications for theory and practice, and suggests directions for future research.