ABSTRACT
This chapter explores more specifically to decide whether, and to what extent, the biological, psychological, material and other developments reflected the changes in the ways that the middle aged viewed themselves and the world in which they lived. It is true that people often tended to become more anxious, more conservative and more resentful when they reached their forties and fifties. Yet it would be a gross error to assume that the entire twentieth-century population, indigenous and immigrant, religious and non-religious, heterosexual and homosexual, male and female, working-class and middle-class, reacted in the same way to the onset of middle age. The conservatism of the middle aged manifested itself most strikingly, many people believed, in their political attitudes and voting behaviour. The middle aged were no more likely than any other age group to think in identical ways about the world in which they found themselves.
