What’s the mid-life Gen X woman to do – accept invisibility or speak up and risk being labelled an entitled Karen?
Neither are great options, according to British writer Victoria Smith. She says women are being pitted against each other when they should be banding together.
Photo: Lindsey Lamont for Unsplash
“It’s this tension between, on the one hand feeling like you're becoming more invisible, but also feeling like every time you do kind of try and make yourself heard you're being pushed down again and told that your views are old, that you're on the wrong side of history. You just need to pipe down and realise that your time is over.”
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In her new book, HAGS, the Demonisation of Middle Age Women, Smith writes that older women have always endured negative stereotyping.
“Sometimes she’s the wise woman, who can pass on knowledge, but often she is that warning figure, you don’t want to become her. She’s what lurks within the young, beautiful woman, the image you can get in fairy tales of the beautiful temptress who actually reveals herself to be a hag. There’s this idea that that’s what all women are, really.”
The advent of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the 1960s did nothing to help this image, she says, instead reinforcing the idea that women’s lives are over when their reproductive years are behind them.
“There were some really misogynistic books that came out promoting [HRT], saying that women’s feminity crumbles in ruins in mid-life, then they’re useless. Men carry on in smooth continuity, whereas women fall apart in mid-life and break down, and they’re useless.”
Gen X women have a particular set of additional critics, Smith says – their younger peers. Her research found that this conflict isn’t new.
“I can empathise with the younger woman who wants to cut herself off from the older women, because I think I felt like that quite strongly when I was younger. And then the more I read from early feminists, it seemed that's quite a pattern that women go through in their lives and it's kind of quite a waste, in that we could be more connected.”
Male-dominated society has a vested interest in fracturing connections between women, Smith says.
“These tensions that are there anyway are exacerbated and exaggerated by men getting involved, and it’s in your interest to align yourself with men rather than with women of different generations.”
Politics also plays a part: left-wing or progressive politicians associate their ideas with youth, which ignores older women and positions them as morally wrong as well as out-of-touch.
“The good thing is the young thing… that offers a particular way to demonise older women.”
Photo: Hachette
Feminism forms a large part of a great female intellectual legacy and history, Smith says, but it doesn’t get the respect it deserves.
“It's almost like housework. It gets done, but then forgotten and you have to repeat it and it has no kind of long-standing value. It's just repetition on and on and on… there's no sense that women are actually building a serious intellectual legacy and that we don't just reinvent the wheel with each generation.”
She says this is a mistake that ends up hurting women of every age.
“We should interact with what women were saying before, on a very serious level, because women we should take ourselves seriously. This kind of discarding of women with each generation, as if ‘oh, we'll start again, we'll be better women this time’, I think it feeds into not taking ourselves seriously as well.”
While more people – and more businesses – may declare themselves feminists these days, Smith says it’s hard to take them at their word.
“You get surveys coming out that actually look at the attitudes of young men and they're not actually that feminist, and sometimes they're not as open-minded towards women progressing as their fathers.
“The word 'feminism' can be more embraced, but the meaning of feminism can change and it can be misused.”
Smith says she feels sorry for young women, who face a different set of issues than their Gen X and Boomer mothers, aunts and grandmothers.
“I don’t know how I would cope if I had a teenage daughter. I had anorexia as a teenager, and I would really have to hunt out what you might call ‘thinspiration’… if I was a teenager now I could find so much really dark stuff just at the touch of a button, so much stuff that would get me to a really dark place. It’s so easy for girls who are lonely or girls who want to find an identity, and girls who just want to be liked to get dragged into this world. They can be very aware of what’s happening, but they still can’t stop it.
“It’s important for older women, even if at times we feel like we’re being judged unfairly by younger women, to remain open. They’re having a much harder time than we had at their age.”