Description: The Seasons of a Woman's Life, based upon lengthy and exhaustive interviews with forty-five randomly chosen women - businesswomen, academics, and homemakers - completes and substantiates Levinson's thesis: that all human beings, of whatever sex or culture, go right on developing throughout their lives, in a pattern of amazing predictability. Change - the movement from one life structure to the next - is, as Levinson has said, "part of the nature of our existence". Almost half our adult life is spent in developmental transitions, and these are almost invariably difficult, sometimes agonizing. Yet if the developmental timetable is surprisingly similar in men and women - and this fact is one of Levinson's principal new findings - The Seasons of a Woman's Life also illuminates a number of profound differences. Many relate to the phenomenon of gender splitting, the rigid division between male and female, masculine and feminine, that has existed throughout history. In an epochal shift, this division is now being eroded. But the shape of women's lives, and the circumstances of their passages through the phases of adult development, are still uniquely affected by gender issues. This emerges with poignant clarity from the stories told by the women interviewed here.

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