Only in adolescence does a person begin to construct internally a story of her or his life.24 The need to do so comes with a recognition of one’s individuality, that one is the way one is and has the life one has for reasons having to do with personal endowments that differentiate us from others and social and economic circumstances that position u

others. The “I” enlarges to the “We.” Because Erikson’s model is often understood to mean that one has to know who one is before one can commit oneself to another in a mutually interdependent way, I came to this study with a question about whether this is also true for women. How, I wondered, do intimacy and identity intersect in women?15

me.” This is not the answer I was hoping for. I wanted to hear about what I then thought was real identity—their occupational and ideological commitments. This is what Erikson had theorized identity was about. In 1972,

Tolerance of difference from parents, even in ways that might perturb them, was, at this age, the hallmark of the internal psychological work that made independent identity creation possible. Where the Guardians could not free themselves from parental models or values and the Searchers could not overcome their guilt at doing so, the Pathmakers foun

Many psychologists have written extensively and thoughtfully about identity from an Eriksonian point of view, too many to adequately reference here. For current reviews, see especially

differently. Indeed, most women’s identity is grounded in relationship to others, but I have a much broader understanding of what relationship means and how identity is bound to these relationships.

Within psychological theory, the Pathmaker identity style in late adolescence has been considered to be the most developmentally advanced: these are people who are “on time” according to the developmental clock. But we have known little about what happens to such people later in life. What characterized the Pathmakers at the end of college was thei

Gail Collins’ (2009) book When Everything Changed documents in detail the social changes of the periods I cover in this book.

The young person (in industrialized society) is challenged by the alternatives available to choose a way of being in the world, to affirm what she will stand for as she takes her place in the adult world. This could be about occupation (what she will DO) or ideology (what she will BELIEVE).