Seasons of a Woman’s Life

An autobiographical essay provides an opportunity to link an early love of mine for writing and biography with contemporary intellectual concern for adult development. My years as a graduate student at Columbia University overlapped with the tenure of C. Wright Mills, and from exposure to his thinking I carried forward the view that sociology is properly located at the intersection of biography and history. Mills’s views, however, were little more than a perspective on the discipline, not a theoretical framework. It has only been with the emergence of life-span development theory in psychology and age stratification and the life-course perspective