Stanley Reynolds wrote a novel in the 1960s called 30 is a Dangerous Age Cynthia, based on the premiss that, in that youthful decade, if you had not made it by that age then you never would.
With the sad death of Amy Winehouse at the age of 27 comes the reminder of others whose star has burned all too briefly to that same age.
In the 1960s you were classed as EPG (elderly prima gravida) if you delayed your first pregnancy till that age. I remember that when Jean Thomson, the distinguished population statistician, suggested that fertility rates could not continue their sharp fall into the 1970s since that would mean an unprecedented & unlikely number of young women reaching the age of thirty without ever having borne a child, she came in for quite a lot of criticism on the grounds that she was insufficiently sympathetic to the liberated woman’s desire to establish herself in a career before devoting herself to motherhood.
I had a personal hypothesis that the ‘new age’ for a first birth was in fact 27, based solely on the grounds that a number of my slightly younger friends were suddenly doing just that, which seemed quite extraordinary to those of us who had somehow grown up with the idea that you needed to get on with it by the age of 24 or 25 at the latest.
We were all wrong. Twenty seven became the new seventeen, very young to have a child, & how dare you call me elderly if I have my first child at 40?
Twenty seven was also, until surprisingly recently, too old to apply for a job in the Civil Service Fast Stream (graduate trainee), not just for the mandarin, generalist, class but also for professional grades such as statistician or economist. Attempts to have this declared illegal on the grounds that it indirectly discriminated against women foundered because of the way that indirect discrimination was defined in law – a term or condition which applies equally to both sexes but with which one sex is less able to comply. An upper age limit seemed discriminatory because young women who became mothers in their early twenties would not be able to take on a full time job in the civil service, but were barred from applying after, say, their children went to school. The law looked at all those, of whatever age, with the relevant qualification & considered how many of each sex could comply with the condition that they be under 27 & found that, because women had only recently begun to go to university in significant numbers, the probability that a female graduate was under 27 was considerably higher than it was for a male.
Is there anything special about 27?
Well it is the third age that is a multiple of 9.
When you are 9 you get excited at the prospect of the first double digit birthday
At 18 you are, finally, an adult.
Let’s hope there is something other than early death which makes 27 worthy of note.
