Aging out loud
Unpacking the ick factor of crone, hag & harpy
One of the unexpected delights of writing about ageing here on Substack has been the chorus of powerful older women readers and writers I’ve met, my truth of crones. It seems we’re not going quietly, which brings me hope that as my old age rises up to meet me, it will not be the lonely and uninitiated passage that my midlife involuntary singleness and childlessness were. This time I have elderwomen to lean on, and learn from and with.
I wonder if this is because as the long tail of the ‘Baby Boomers’ enter old age, they’re not doing so quietly; after all, they’ve made a big noise about everything else, radically changing the world as they’ve passed through it, maybe they’ll overturn much that we believe about old age too?
From Gloria Steinem’s 1994 essay Doing Sixty through Jean Shinoda Bolen’s 2003 Crones Don’t Whine, there’s a red thread of anger that runs through a lot of Second Wave feminist writers that echoes Stei…