Mulvey (1963) organized what data she had found on characteristics of women's vocational behavior into seven career patterns, defined in terms of a career with and without marriage, and with and without work. Her study of women between the ages of 50 and 60 years concludes that high life satisfaction is associated with career patterns marked by: (1) return to career after children entered school ("interrupted-work primary"), (2) entry upon deferred career ("delayed-work secondary"), (3) contribution of talent and time to volunteer activities" when children were young ("stable homemaking-work secondary"), (4) continuous and simultaneous homemaking and working. The vocational behavior of women who displayed the least degree of life satisfaction was characterized by a single, continuous role of either homemaker or worker over the adult life-span. The woman with a greater degree of life satisfaction has experienced more discontinuity and change of primary roles over the lifetime.
Dunkle (1972) reanalyzed data from Schooler's (1969) study of non-institutionalized elderly to investigate the relationship of length of time at residential location, distance moved, change in marital status, and change in position within the labor force to morale in old age. The value of her work in application to this paper's hypothesis is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of sex differentiation in her sample. Her results show that 47.1 per cent of the men experiencing only a small degree of change in residence, marital status, and work involvement have high morale, while 51.8 per cent of those men who have experienced a considerable amount of change over the life cycle display high morale, a difference of 4.3 percentage points; 6.3 per cent more women who display a large amount of change over their lives have higher morale than the women characterized by stability in residence, marital status, and work involvement. Furthermore, Dunkle's data show that almost twice as many women as men experience change with relation to the tested variables.
With admittedly weak measures in the sense that the data were not originally intended for this purpose, Dunkle's study suggests that women are socialized differently from men such that they were in the past more likely to experience discontinuity and impermanence, and that women, in fact, are better able to adjust in old age as a result of this past impermanence in life situations. It seems, therefore, that if discontinuity could be shown to be positively associated with adjustment to old age as measured by morale, there would be important implications for a theory of successful aging, based on discontinuity and impermanence over the life cycle.
Work and Leisure Patterns
Probably the most feasible method of building an option for discontinuity into our societal structure would be to revamp our current work and leisure patterns. Kreps (1971) points out:
The individual's choice seems to have little to do with how much he works. At any point in time, institutional arrangements largely dictate the terms of nonworking time, i.e., when it occurs and who receives it.
Compulsory retirement at age 65 is one example; the statutory 40-hour week, as well as negotiated vacation plans, help to standardize the length of the work-year. It is important to raise the question of worker preference: preference as to how much free time one would elect, under any given income status; and preference as to when that free time would be taken. "For there may be ways to bend the institutions to the workers' wishes, once they are known" (Kreps, 1971).
Little is known about people's perceptions of the worth of free time; certainly, there is no evidence on the price that will be paid for time off. Most important, there is the question of whether leisure becomes more or less valuable as one grows older. Research might indicate that retirement in the optional years has the effect of conferring leisure on man when he least wants it-a curious inversion of the notion that youth is wasted on the young. The total number of workers involved in career changes during middle age or later work-life might increase, more-over, if such changes were made to be viable alternatives to present continuous cycles of employment.
Senator Mondale (Special Committee on Aging, 1969), a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, called for the altering of traditional work lifetime patterns, including institution of sabbaticals, phased retirement, trial retirement, and part-time work arrangements for those near retirement years. Such experiments, however, have been limited. For most elderly males, retirement, whether compulsory or voluntary, has provided the first opportunity for considerable amounts of leisure time throughout all of the adult years. It is no wonder then that renouncing the primary work role and substituting new roles for which there has been little change for "rehearsal" presents difficulty for the male.
Lopata and Steinhart (1971) suggest it might be valuable for our society to assume that few persons actually benefit from working in one occupation for more than perhaps 10 years, and that, with some exceptions, those who do produce diminishing returns for the organization. More efficient methods of education could then be introduced to retrain people at the end of each "natural cycle" of involvement in a particular occupation. We still lack adequate re-engagement procedures in the work world, because of a myth that modern workers work continuously and have steady careers from education to retirement. This fiction does not reflect lives of men, let alone women.
