Victoria Smith makes many telling points about ageist misogyny, but it is important to see it through the political dimension, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

It is not news that misogyny is ageist. Once they reach middle age, women are expected to disappear. They’re no longer valuable, their earnings have peaked (unlike men, who don’t reach the age of peak average earnings until their mid-50s), they are past their sell-by date. The side benefit of this invisibility, exemption from street harassment from random men, is sometimes presented as a consolation. Speaking personally, being able to walk past men in the street without inwardly cringing has been freeing, but Smith is correct to point out that this isn’t so much a liberation from female objectification as it is simply a shift in its nature. ‘You’re still an object; you’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture to, say, hat stand’ (p.3).

This expectation, that middle-aged and older women will fade politely out of public life, is of course coupled with the parallel expectation that they will nevertheless be taking on the lion’s share of the work of the reproduction of labour; the household and caring jobs, paid and unpaid, that are traditionally assigned to women. As Smith puts it, middle-aged women represent ‘the tasks you’d never really want to take on, the places you’d never really want to end up, the jobs you’d like to see done but would never actually want to do yourself’ (p.84).

In part, these assumptions about middle-aged and older women’s role arise from women’s oppression through the structures of the traditional family, with the accompanying old misogynist view that all women eventually become shrews. Smith comments on a demonstration at a Women Talk Back event at which she spoke in Bristol in 2019 that ‘it could have been 1999, 1979, 1959 … Only the haircuts and insults change’ (p.224). A more recent development though has been the growth of a form of ageist misogyny which ‘masquerades as feminism’ (p.7). ‘A moral case is being made for silencing us, one which scapegoats us for bad behaviour which is not unique to our group and makes crimes of traits that in other people would be seen as independence, self-assertion or empowerment’ (p.6).

Progressive sexism

It is this progressive hag-hate which enables men who regard themselves as left-wing and feminist to describe women as ‘all dried-Fairy liquid hair and saggy-faced delightfulness’ because they disagree with them about sex and gender on Twitter (p.40), and to embrace a cohort-based misogyny which suggests that ‘once we are gone an all-new, better brand of middle-aged woman will come to take our place’ (p.9). It fuels, Smith argues, not just online arguments but the real-world protests and sometimes violence against mostly middle-aged women articulating women’s rights. It is particularly damaging because it purports to come from within feminism, acting as a way of denying past feminist campaigns and feminist thought as a ‘problematic second wave.’

Smith is coming here from a particular side in the current debates about gender identity, but her point stands whatever your views on that specific issue. She suggests that part of the explanation for how a form of ageist misogyny has come to be viewed in some quarters as positively virtuous is the ‘politics of mess’. Generation X women like Smith (and me), now in our 40s and 50s, grew up with the expectation that the struggles of Second-Wave feminists over housework had meant that we would not find ourselves, as our mothers had, with responsibility for the bulk of caring work in the family.

When we nevertheless do find ourselves lumbered with it, it appears as a personal failing. ‘We are not structurally oppressed in the way that earlier women were, just hopeless at delegation’ (p.130). This is particularly pertinent at a time when renewed austerity and the care crisis is pushing women into unpaid care and when female-dominated professions supporting the reproduction of labour, like teaching and nursing, are at the forefront of struggles over pay.

Smith argues that older women constitute a reminder both of the material reality of human embodiment and of human dependency. As progressive politics increasingly sees different ways of overcoming physical limitations as social-justice issues, and embraces a view of the human self as a self that is trapped in the body, rather than an intrinsic part of the body, then middle-aged women come to stand for old-fashioned, irredeemable obstacles to this progress. Smith has a witty turn of phrase, but despite the quality of the prose, there are some issues here.

Political contexts

Although Smith is clear that she is setting out to explain a new development in ageist misogyny, the discussion here of how hag hate provides a psychological and practical ‘solution’ to ‘fear of inferiority, fear of change, fear of our own mortality’ (p.67) seems rooted in the human condition, or at least the human condition in class society. The references to witch persecutions and to the way that in fairy tales, the only good older woman is a dead one, also convey the impression that what we are considering is hag hatred which, if not inevitable, has been a feature of different human societies for a very long time. After all, when Smith wants to cite an example of respect for older women, she turns not to a human culture, but to orca whales.

It is possible though to see derision against older feminists by people who define themselves as progressive more as a political development, rooted in a specific historical moment, than Smith allows it to be in much of her discussion. Contrary to the way they are often represented in modern feminist writing, the witch persecutions of the early modern period in Europe were not so much expressions of age-old misogyny against older women as political events, with particular, albeit complex, origins. They are not evidence that hatred of older women is somehow innate to European society, still less to human society in general. There is for example little evidence for marked misogyny against older women specifically, as opposed to younger women, in the medieval period.

The denigration of Second-Wave feminists as old-fashioned and out of touch, and therefore conservative, bigoted, enemies of progress, etc, has parallels in discussions of left-wing politics in general. Since the 1980s, after all, socialists have been being told that the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and so on are hopelessly outdated and have nothing useful to say to the new, enlightened generation. Smith is right to point out the denial of feminist history and the damaging way in which each new generation of feminists is expected to dismiss what has gone before and reinvent the wheel, but this is not an issue limited to feminism. Trotsky argued that ‘the memory of the working class is in its party’ precisely because the mechanisms for preserving historical memory in society are bourgeois mechanisms. The lessons of the previous struggles of working people, men and women, are exactly what we are encouraged to forget. Women’s oppression means though that the dismissal of those who fought these previous feminist struggles is done especially vituperatively.

Continuity of experience

Smith argues correctly that middle-aged and older women’s experience of women’s oppression is cumulative. Women do not experience incidents of sexism as discrete events, but as a continuum that builds up throughout their lives. This emphasises the importance of avoiding the sort of language which talks about menstruators, cervix-havers, pregnant people and so on, which necessarily breaks female experience up into discontinuous events. The implication of this is that any commonality of experience between the cervix-havers and the pregnant people is coincidental. This denial of the reality of women as a group makes it harder to recognise the cumulative effect of women’s oppression, as well as occluding the reasons why, for example, both menstruators and pregnant people may mysteriously be facing discrimination at work.

The cumulative effect of women’s oppression renders older women’s experience vital to the feminist movement. It is not the case that our knowledge becomes outdated once we hit forty. As Stacey Schiff puts it, ‘an older woman moreover knows things a younger woman does not; she can say things a younger woman says with difficulty. Like no’ (p.248). The damage done to feminism by the dismissal of older women can be serious. Smith argues that the attack on abortion rights in the US represented by the rolling back of Roe v Wade can be seen as an example of the sort of defeat which can come from being detached from the experience of older feminists. Smith acknowledges that there were many factors in the defeat, but posits that ‘they were not helped by the belief among younger feminists that to prioritise abortion rights at all smacked of anti-intersectional, biologically essentialist second-waverism’ (p.267).

Abortion in the US is a salutary reminder that we can’t take any of the rights won for the rest of us by the Second Wave for granted. No struggle is ever really done and dusted, so denigrating or forgetting those who fought them is rarely a good idea. Smith is right to argue that we need ‘a feminist investment in intergenerational narratives to replace the “new dawn” narratives of obsolescence and replacement which pander to the idea that women are only useful for half their lives’ (p.303).

This is not a need, though, which affects only feminism. Some men do indeed get to have history and to be seen as relevant even as they age. This however applies mostly to bourgeois men and to bourgeois male history. Working-class history is devalued just as is the history of women’s struggles. That feminist investment in valuing our elders and our history will need to be on the basis of class interests if it is to succeed.