THE WAY WE ARE

By Johanna McGeary

Maturity, said Erik Erikson, the famous explorer of the human life cycle, is when you wake up on your 50th birthday and don't regret your life. My classmates and I in the Radcliffe class of '67 have reached that daunting milestone. So what's our answer?

Those who have regrets keep them to themselves. The rest of us regularly offer up our judgments every five years, when Harvard asks its graduates, male and female, to write about themselves for the class "Redbook," a "collective autobiography of triumphs and failures, bragging and tales of woe." As the preface to our just published 30th-reunion report warns, what we have to say can be "breathtakingly candid, insightful, boring, witty, curmudgeonly, heartbreaking." But it's always an intriguing peep into 1,493 personal diaries.

All told, the women of '67 account for only 293 of those. We can hardly claim to speak for a generation, except insofar as revolutions, including social ones, are often made by the few on the front edge. We are not the inventors of feminism, but we are its first lifelong beneficiaries, eager and able to enter whatever profession we contemplated. So we define a large part of ourselves by our job titles, and then change the jobs and the titles along the way. Margot Eberman de Ferranti turned 50 and resigned from the civil division at the Justice Department to become a mediator in local courts. Economist Karen Hagstrom Johnson says, "I still have the same job at the Federal Reserve Board. I think that I have fallen into the trap of letting my work expand to fit the available time." Irene Marie Leary just decided to attend law school while continuing full-time work for Texas Instruments. Computer scientist Elaine Lipshutz Best says, "I imagine it seems odd to people who remember me that I am working at Los Alamos National Lab. I haven't always felt comfortable there, but I've always managed to find projects--solar energy, earthquake modeling, biomedical applications--that I was glad to contribute to."

We married too and had kids, and we rank our families above our professional accomplishments. Jane Hughes, wife and mother of two who has worked for 25 years as "a change agent" in government and in foundations, says her "biggest surprise has been discovering that my family is the axis of my life, not my work." Susan Butler King Brown feels bewildered over having kids so late: "Would this have been easier in my 20s or 30s?" Lucy Lee Grimes Evans lists "mother of four" as her occupation even while decrying, as a member of her local Democratic town committee, how "women are still woefully underrepresented" in state and national politics. But for lots of us, like Susan Smith Ellenberg, our children are all grown up and "we've had to get used to being less a part of their lives."

We overwhelmingly chose a few vocations: physician, attorney, academic and shrink. There's a '60s mentality at work here, looking for jobs that do good. Yes, we thought then and continue to think that even lawyers are in the business of changing the world for the better, which is why so many of us specialize in public policy, criminal defense and pro bono work. Ingrid Olsen-Tjensvold, counsel to the Cortland County, N.Y., department of social services, is deeply rewarded by "having a hand in keeping children safe from harm." Margaret Brown White works with the worst of the mentally ill and finds it "rather extraordinary work," a compelling witness to "the effort, against such obstacles, that people make every day to stay connected to life." Connected is a word we use a lot.

All that opportunity earned us considerable satisfaction, yet there were big stumbles too--a classmate was briefly a welfare mother, and a summa cum laude grad with a Ph.D. is doing "odd jobs"--and the searing realization that we could fall short of our high expectations. Psychologist Susan King Brown admitted in the 25th-reunion book the secret in many of our 50-year-old hearts: how hard it is to come to terms with the fact that "I'm not at the top of my field ... that I will probably never do any significant or well-known intellectual work." Vivien Weir Russe says she was asked recently if she had fulfilled her life's ambition. "The irony is I have no memory of having any concept of my future." We were too busy chasing it.

A few of us came up against discrimination and were beaten down. Linda McVeigh Mathews, a distinguished journalist, resigned from a newspaper when her editors would not allow her to cover the same foreign beat as her journalist husband, and has just left another paper after being "emotionally battered" by her boss. In a variety of corporations Marilyn Wilt "encountered the glass ceiling again and again" and quit the business world to "empower" herself.

At this late date, there are no second families for women. A startling number of men in the class remarried in the '90s and had a fresh batch of children. Meimei Chang, who married for the first time in 1992 and thereby acquired grownup stepchildren, rightly considers herself to be "defying the odds that a woman over 45 could do so!" Far more numerous are the divorced women who never remarried. Or the surprising number who, sometimes without intending to, never married at all. "Marriage has continued to elude me," says Cynthia McClintock, who adopted a daughter anyway. Sharon Jean O'Brien said in her 25th-reunion note that she "felt like the fortysomething woman in the joke--Oops, I forgot to get married! I forgot to have children!" Sometimes, she adds, "these things just happen to you. I never consciously chose." But among the never marrieds may be other Susana Rossbergs, who flatly declare, "I'm allergic to marriage."

Men have midlife crises. Women have menopause. The men talk openly about their middle-aged rambunctions, and the women of the pain that these caused. Martha Halpin Pleasure's husband of 26 years moved out, she said, when "it seemed he had a midlife meltdown," and she was not alone among classmates who recounted how hard it was to cope when men they thought they knew intimately came apart in drastic ways. We women, though, say not a word about menopause. Maybe we deem it unseemly, but there is little shame attached to this fact of life anymore. Or maybe estrogen replacement is transforming menopause into little more than a passing nuisance.

We don't talk much about other forms of aging either. Antonia Bryan was singular in her candor: "Fifty sucks. I don't like gaining weight or the effects of gravity. I can't stand a soft jawline. White hairs offend me." Maybe in five years we'll report that we dyed our hair or underwent plastic surgery. But Bryan makes a subtler point about how aging discriminates against women. Now that she's 50, she "finds it disconcerting to be virtually invisible to most men. Unless they knew me when," she says, they don't see her as sexy.

We worry more about our souls now. The search for spiritual solace has intruded into our Cartesian ways. For Kim Westsmith Simmons, it has led to becoming born again as a Christian. For Carol Emma Carlson, it has been a dogged determination to take orders as an Episcopal priest in the face of the church's struggle over the ordination of women. For Jeanne Harris Armstrong, it is the belated "discovery of spirituality and finding myself active in the local church."

Despite our fat stock portfolios, a lot of us embrace without embarrassment our corny '60s ideals. Bronwen Taylor Tudor: "I still believe in those quaintly passe ideals of peace, justice and progressive taxation." Nancy Uhlar Murray works as director of education for the American Civil Liberties Union, taking kids south to learn about the civil rights movement. Ann Straffin Hall is co-pastor of a Baptist church that offers sanctuary to Central American refugees and conscientious objectors. Whatever our politics, we want to "give back" something to society. For women and men alike, the age of volunteerism has begun. Some of it, as Annie Gottlieb says, is the "citizenship activity that seems to kick in instinctually at this age." Now that Cary Stratton Boyd has dispatched her child to college, she wants to find "ways in which we can give back some of what we have been given, if not in money, then in time and caring." Augusta Dawes Stewart says she wants "to devote the next decades to learning to reach out more and share the blessings." At 50, we're still brimming with restlessness.