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And it is a market that many established companies haven't figured out or are scared to talk to. "Marketers are obsessed with 16-to-24-year-olds while substantially ignoring the largest, richest cohort of women in the history of humanity," marvels Bob Garfield, advertising critic for Advertising Age. "It's bizarre how focused people are on children when the baby boom is just sitting there with hundreds of billions of dollars of discretionary income and very few kids left in the house to spend it on." Women make the majority of purchasing decisions. "The marketers I talked to for my research, I was expecting to find many of them poised to profit big on this pattern," Shellenbarger says. "But they didn't understand it. They were asking me questions--How does this play out? What do women want?"
For entrepreneurs with a smart answer, these are gold-rush days. "Anybody who is making pants with elastic waists is cleaning up," laughs Sharon Hadary, executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research in Washington. Curves International, a women's-only gym franchise aimed at the over-35 group, is the fastest-growing franchise of any kind in history, including McDonald's. Ninety percent of the franchise owners are women. Curves doubled in size from 1997 to 1998, from 247 to 537 locations, and now has more than 9,000 locations around the globe, the world's biggest fitness franchise. Tammy Parkinson, 42, who left the real estate industry to start her own personal-training and nutritional-consulting business in Los Gatos, Calif., thinks the fitness focus makes a huge difference. "We lower cholesterol, blood pressure, help them lose weight," she says. "Some of these people, I don't know where they'd be if they hadn't started a program."
THE BEST ESCAPE ROUTES
When women find a key to solving their own midlife mysteries, they often want nothing more than to help other women do the same. That typically involves some kind of journey, often a literal one. For Jennifer Wright, a divorced assistant professor of occupational therapy in Indianapolis, Ind., the epiphany came seven years ago, when she was 46 and on an intense four-day backpacking adventure in Nevada with her 21-year-old son. Up to that point, she says, women like her "may have been spending a good deal of our life taking care of everyone else. We come to the place where we say, 'It's my turn.' If women get there, they get there with fervor." The transcendent confidence Wright acquired on that trip ultimately inspired her to move to--of all places--New Zealand and become what she calls an "adventure coach." She leads hiking trips through rugged scenery--a "midlife, middle-earth adventure" on the Banks Peninsula Track in New Zealand. But Wright also emphasizes the internal journey: "You step out of time. You don't know what day it is, what time it is. You eat when you're hungry. And when you come back, you are changed."
The notion that the way to launch a spiritual journey is to take an actual trip is fueling the adventure-travel market, especially since many adventure travelers are women in their 40s. Women who want company but don't have family or friends who feel like rafting in Costa Rica seek out a new breed of travel agency--like Gutsy Women Travel, founded by Gail Golden, 55, wife of former TWA boss Carl Icahn. Half the women who sign on for her trips are married, but their husbands aren't interested in taking cooking classes in Italy or visiting gardens in Savannah. "He likes the fact that she is safe, traveling with an escorted group and comes back happy because she has fulfilled her travel dream," says Golden.*space"I don't think women afford themselves the luxury of a midlife crisis because they have too much responsibility," she adds. "But there is internal pressure and the need to release themselves. It's self-serving for me to say that Gutsy Women Travel does that. But some of these women have never been on trips on their own, without children and husbands. By the end of the first night, women are hugging each other and telling their life stories. You remember when you were young and had a pajama party? Well, we're only taller."
GUIDES FOR THE INNER JOURNEY
To serve women in need of ongoing support and guidance, there is the growing army of life coaches who, once again, are often women looking to turn their midlife experience into a career. Cynthia Barnett, a longtime teacher and school administrator in Connecticut, left education two years ago to start educating women. She holds regular retreats at a beach house for a dozen or so women at a time. "They get to a point where they feel, well, my children are gone, I feel like I have an empty nest now, so what's me? They seem to feel the need to have somebody help them through the process." Kimberly Fulcher, who ran a software company in California's Silicon Valley, was lucky enough to have an early midlife crisis--at 28--before the dotcom crash, and sold the business while it was still valuable. She trained as a life coach and built a clientele of women she coaches by phone for a monthly fee of $500 to $1,000. Hoping to find an efficient way to reach women with fewer disposable dollars, she launched in late January an online version of Compass Life Designs, an affordable coaching program that costs $37 a month. That buys women access to three teleconference workshops and an online library of workshops, plus digital workbooks.
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Debra Engle, 48, and Diane Glass, 57, both high-powered corporate marketing executives in Des Moines, Iowa, had done focus groups with a financial-planning firm interested in offering workshops for midlifers struggling with retirement planning. On the basis of that research, Engle and Glass, having rounded their own midlife corners, ended up starting a new venture on their own. Engle had recently remarried, 16 years after a divorce. Glass got breast cancer, which triggered the re-evaluation that ended with a career change. In their focus groups, they had found that many midlifers didn't want to spend all their days working at something they disliked just so they could finance a 20-year vacation in their golden years. Plus, there was the "Oprah factor," as they call it, a growing emphasis on women nurturing themselves and helping others recharge and reinvent themselves, often by finding spirituality. "We realized that we were on to something, that we had a particular affinity for how women had made changes in midlife," says Engle. They decided to provide moral and practical support. Their plan is called Tending Your Inner Garden, "a program of spirituality and creativity just for women." They offer a yearlong course of workshops, dinners and retreats that costs $480. "Sitting around a table with a group of women is so much more than sharing a meal and nourishing our bodies," says Meredith Houle, 56, a satisfied customer. "I truly think it's nourishing our soul."
Though the initial impulse for many women seems to be to do something for themselves for once, the renewal that follows seems to draw them back toward caregiving. Four out of five women over 50 said having a job in which they help others is important to them, according to a joint study by the Simmons School of Management and Hewlett-Packard. "All the studies on spirituality and religion in America show women have a much higher rate of participation in religious and spiritual activities, and they rank service to community as more important than men do," Shellenbarger argues. "You're going to tell me that's really sexist, but I show that research has documented it. No one can exactly explain this, but religion and spirituality compel one to reach out to others in service." Andree Bouty, 50, and Carolyn Morgan, 52, of Tucson, Ariz., both longtime hospice nurses, started Act Now RNs. Their mission: to make nursing available outside the hospital setting, to help families care for aging relatives by referring them to financial planners, assisted-living facilities, case managers and skilled nursing care. The staff, Bouty says, "is pretty much our age. It's all about getting in there and helping, doing something different and feeling good about what you're doing instead of just working for a paycheck." They knew their target audience was other midlife women: "We are historically and naturally the caregivers in our family ... the majority of our clients are the adult children trying to figure out what to do next."
There is no telling the impact this generation is going to have as it reinvents what it means to get older and applies its many blessings and ingenuity to the pursuit of health and happiness. "As we age, everything for our generation is going to be different," says Susan Johnson, 54, who quit her job as a Washington lobbyist to become a consultant to families with aging parents and complex medical problems. "We're staying in shape. We're eating healthier. We're Internet savvy. As we start to get into our golden years, we'll be on the Internet, investigating drugs and protocols. And we'll seek help when we need it. If we need a consultant, we hire one. If we need a coach to teach the latest exercise in Pilates or whatever, we hire people. We are a generation that will continue to invent. We won't just accept what's laid out ahead for us." Now that many Americans, according to a survey, think that full-fledged adulthood begins at 26, there is room for multiple midlife crises. There is the "quarter-life crisis" that hits at 25, the traditional one in your 40s and still another 20 years later. We are living too long and too well to stay settled even in a contented state for more than a few years at a time. And with experience, each new life-cycle crisis stands a better chance of looking like just another chance to start all over again.
With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, Amanda Bower and Deirdre van Dyk/New York, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Siobhan Morrissey/Boca Raton, Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines and Leslie Whitaker/ChicagoRead Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
