Autumn and Winter

Esther Harding’s name, in the-way-of-all-women, for the second-half-of-life task as it falls to the woman: the work of building inner spiritual value when outer roles — wife, mother, professional — recede or end. The chapter that bears the name argues that “old age is a part of life, with its own characteristic task — the development of inner or spiritual values” (Harding 1970, p. 250).

Harding refuses the Western reflex that treats aging as mere decline. The woman who arrives at fifty having lived only on the Eros side (mother) or only on the Logos side (professional) finds herself one-sided: “when a woman reaches the age of forty-five or fifty she is very apt to become aware of a lack in herself, corresponding to the lack in her too one-sided life” (Harding 1970, p. 252). The crisis is constitutive, not pathological. It is the demand of the self for the unlived half.

The remedy is inner. “No work which is merely temporal can satisfy his conscience. Unless during his life span on earth he has created something which shall transcend time his effort has been in vain” (Harding 1970, p. 249). The downgoing is its own individuation task, and Harding’s claim is that the woman in particular — denied, in mid-twentieth-century culture, both the religious schools that supported the medieval baron’s turn to contemplation and the Eastern path of the yogi — must “tread a lonely path, must function as pioneers — and that at a time of life when pioneering initiative is at its lowest ebb” (Harding 1970, p. 258).

Harding’s chapter is one of the earliest sustained Jungian phenomenologies of what would later be called the third stage of life, and it grounds the line that runs through edward-edinger on the ego-self-axis in late life and through marion-woodman on the conscious feminine in the aging body.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970, Ch. 6 “Autumn and Winter”)