Women of a certain age
In this episode, we’ll explore several kinds of generational divides in feminism. For our contemporary text, we’ll explore the particular kind of misogyny directed at older women. Witch, hag, shrew, crone, evil stepmother, mother-in-law… the terms for this special hatred are multiple. Best yet, Hags is written by a woman who has, like the both of us, recently crossed over into the realm of the invisible, hated — yet fearless — middle-aged women.
For our historical text, we’ll discuss the opening chapters of the feminist classic, The Feminist Mystique, where Betty Friedan explores how even one generation prior to the women under the influence of “the problem with no name,” women’s magazines were not promoting marriage and children as the sole means of a woman’s fulfillment, but rather offering to them the possibilities of autonomy and career of which their mothers could only have dreamt.
Contemporary text
Hags: The Demonization of Middle-Aged Women, by Victoria Smith
As luck would have it, I appear to have hit middle age at a point where efforts to counteract the ignoring of older women are being eagerly slapped down n the name of kind, virtuous conduct (though to be fair, the more I research, the more I find every era has its hag/shrew/mother-in-law/scold figure to wield piously against the inappropriately audible/visible older woman). In today’s iteration of ageist sexism, ‘complaining to the manager’ and ‘being entitled’ have been identified as the key sins committed by middle-aged women, particularly (but not exclusively) white ones. Middle-aged women are, apparently, ‘the worst online trolls’, ‘the worst drunks’, or simply ‘the worst’. (5)
Older text
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (chapters 1-3, but feel free to read more)
It is like remembering a long-forgotten dream, to recapture the memory of what a career meant to women before “career woman” became a dirty word in America. Jobs meant money, of course, at the end of the depression. But the readers of these magazines were not the women who got the jobs; career meant more than job. It seemed to mean doing something, being somebody yourself, not just existing in and through others.
I found the last clear note of the passionate search for individual identity that a career seems to have symbolized in the pre-1950 decades in a story called “Sarah and the Seaplane” (Ladies’ Home Journal, February, 1949). Sarah, who for nineteen years has played the part of docile daughter, is secretly learning to fly. She misses her flying lesson to accompany her mother on a round of social calls. An elderly doctor houseguest says: “My dear Sarah, every day, all the time, you are committing suicide. It’s a greater crime than not pleasing others, not doing justice to yourself.” Sensing some secret, he asks if she is in love. “She found it difficult to answer. In love? In love with the good-natured, the beautiful Henry [the flying teacher]? In love with the flashing water and the lift of wings at the instant of freedom, and the vision of the smiling, limitless world? ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I think I am.’”
The next morning, Sarah solos. Henry “stepped away, slamming the cabin door shut, and swung the ship about for her. She was alone. There was a heady moment when everything she had learned left her, when she had to adjust herself to be alone, entirely alone in the familiar cabin. Then she drew a deep breath and suddenly a wonderful sense of competence made her sit erect and smiling. She was alone! She was answerable to herself alone, and she was sufficient.
“‘I can do it!’ she told herself aloud…. The wind flew back from the floats in glittering streaks, and then effortlessly the ship lifted itself free and soared.” Even her mother can’t stop her now from getting her flying license. She is not “afraid of discovering my own way of life.” In bed that night she smiles sleepily, remembering how Henry had said, “You’re my girl.”
“Henry’s girl! She smiled. No, she was not Henry’s girl. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient. And with such a late start it would be some time before she got to know herself. Half in a dream now, she wondered if at the end of that time she would need someone else and who it would be.”
Do your homework!
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