18 Years Ago In TIME

In a 1987 report on WOMEN AND RELATIONSHIPS, the issue was not a change in midlife but how to parse the present.

Unfortunately, today's "new woman" is too often contending with the same old man. Women continue to do the lion's share of the housekeeping, child care and cooking, even in households where both partners work ... Women are finding that they cannot have it all: they are staggering under the burden of trying to be all things to all people--the nurturing parent, the successful careerist, the sexual athlete. Now they are asking men to play all these roles too. Can this work, or will it merely leave everybody frazzled? And even if it can work, and both men and women can succeed in playing all these roles, what then will they need each other for? What will have happened to the partnership, to love? Maybe Katharine Hepburn has the answer. "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other," she once said. "Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then." --TIME, Oct. 12, 1987

Read the entire article at time.com/years