Aging out loud

Unpacking the ick factor of crone, hag & harpy

My ageing body is a ruined temple… (say that to Athena if you dare!)

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 Steinem’s statement that ‘the truth will set you free: but first it will piss you off.’ And the rising generation of feminist women writers currently in middle age and older are getting more explicit still, hence Soraya Chemaly’s 2018 Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger; Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life (2022); Victoria Smith’s 2023 Hags: The demonisation of middle-aged women; Elise Loehen’s On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to be Good (2023) and Caroline Magennis’ Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women in 2024.

Although these are all very different books, they each speak to the idea that women are fed up with being silenced, and they say so loudly. It’s worth noting that several of them centre the unflattering stereotypes of older women in their titles, including crone, hag and harpy (interestingly, I’m interviewed in all three of those ones!)

Shame is the most potent tool of social control and in this tiny handful of books, it seems we’re seeing a wresting back of ownership over the words used to shame post-reproductive women into submission. The LGBTQIA+ movement has led the way, as is so often the case with, for example, their reclamation of the term queer.¹

The words crone, hag and harpy have a long history, much of which predates the dominance of patriarchy. Thus it’s rare that you’ll find their embodied and entangled etymology within current dictionaries, those descendents of the iconic projects of the rationalist enlightenment to name and own the world. All initially written by men of course.

The ick-factor of these words is real. They carry a potent patriarchal whiff of shame and deviancy.

I can’t tell you how many women have written to me to say how much they struggle with my use of these words and to ask me to stop using them. But the thing is, I don’t know what it is about me, but if there’s something we’re not meant to be talking about, words that we’re not meant to be using, that’s like catnip to me. I sniff the air, lick my lips and wonder, well why not? What is it those particular words point at that we’re not meant to see? (I doubt that Pandora’s box would have stayed shut if it had been mine either).

Crone, for example, hasn’t always been an insult; its deep origin is thought to come from ‘Rhea Kronia’, (Mother of Time) and is connected to black creatures, such as the crow, which is sacred and related to death.² But then when we consider how grief and death-phobic our culture is, with more than 50% of us not even having written a will³, perhaps our aversion to the Crone’s implacable nature is not surprising. As someone who feels she survived a shocking identity death at midlife, and who is often known through my work as ‘that grief woman’,⁴ I feel steadied by the backbone of the Crone’s presence in my life, so much so that my Instagram profile is @ApprenticeCrone.

Hag has perhaps even more surprising roots, and although online etymological dictionaries don’t appear to be able to trace it back much further than the early 13th century (although modern usage is rare before the 16th century) it seems to be a conflation of a healer or hedgewitch, along with a hideously ugly (and probably warty!) post-menopausal woman. Yet there is a more ancient meaning too, hidden in the depths of the Greek language, that of ‘holiness’; the lives of the saints were known as ‘hagiographies’ after all. There are also links to the ancient Greek Furies. So, an angry, skilled, wise older women filled with holy rage? Sounds about right; frankly, she sounds like someone it wouldn’t be wise to ignore, so I disagree with Jean Shinoda Bolen that it’s a word ‘beyond redemption.’⁵ I think the very harshness of the way it denigrates women the patriarchy deems unfuckable is precisely what makes it worth reclaiming, but this time by women who refuse to be fucked-over any more.

Harpies were originally mythological beings from ancient Greece - creatures with the head of a woman and the body of a bird; they were the personification of storm winds and guardians of the underworld. As Caroline Magennis writes in the introduction to her book Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, ‘They are usually in packs, scaring someone or driving them to a nasty end.’ In modern usage, along with ‘virago’, it is often used to describe a woman unafraid to voice her non-patriarchial opinion; a woman who won’t back down (or quieten down) and is thus considered ‘unfeminine’ as a result. (See shrill, strident and Hilary Clinton…)

Writing down these demeaning and shaming definitions is hard; it takes the wind out of my feminist sails—as they are designed to, of course. Yet, as someone who recently turned sixty, I remain deeply grateful that I live at a historical and cultural moment where I have the emotional, intellectual, social and political freedom to speak my mind (something none of us in the West can take for granted anymore) and an outlet for it through my writing and speaking, very little of which has to get past a status-quo gatekeeper.

I’m involuntarily childless (and these days at peace with it) and thus not tangled up in the delights and obligations of my children's lives; this has afforded me the space for a lot of post-graduate education (although caring responsibilities can fill that time for many.) And once the midlife storm of grief from my infertility and divorce had cleared, the highly educated woman who rose from the ashes, her bones picked clean, was also one more at ease with transitions and endings—things like menopause, ageing and death. In fact, this reflective, sure-footed, opinionated version of me, with its echoes of the wild tree-climbing girl I’d been before puberty, feels like a workable identity to enter my sixties with.

I’m living a life my working-class female ancestors could barely have dreamed of. So why does it still feel so difficult to speak my truth in relationships, whether they be familial, friendships, workplace or others?

I suspect that the shadow of the scold’s bridle and the witch hunts is a long one, (intergenerational trauma anyone?) and whilst I can be ‘shrill’ in my writing (another shaming word used only for women; men are never ‘shrill’) and even pretty bold in my TEDx talk, I often still struggle to find my voice in situations of relational conflict. And I’m not alone in that.

In June 2024 I brought together a panel of eight childless women aged between their mid-fifties and mid-seventies for a public webinar on Courageous Conversations; I worked out that we had more than 600 years of lived experience between us, yet none of us had been supported by our upbringing, education or the wider culture to develop our skills in dealing with boundaries and conflicts. And despite the excitement of the clutch of smash-the-patriarchy book titles I mentioned above, the fact remains that it’s often dangerous, even fatal, for women to speak their minds.

To paraphrase Margaret Atwood, whilst men’s biggest fear is that women will laugh at them; women’s biggest fear is that men will kill them.

And although there’s little data on the former, femicide has been identified globally as a leading cause of premature death for women. Hence girls and young women are praised for ‘keeping the peace’ and encouraged to ‘not rock the boat’ not only because it reinforces the patriarchal status quo, but because it could save their lives. Additionally, as the panellists shared on the webinar, speaking her mind can cost a woman a relationship she might not want to lose—the stakes can be high. But then again, if it’s a relationship in which you can’t be true to yourself either, is it one you want to keep?

I made this mistake myself in my early twenties, making an unconscious contract with my inner patriarch to suppress my feminist beliefs to make my relationship with my then-boyfriend ‘work’; it did, and we got married, until the cognitive dissonance of living that false self cracked me open into a nervous-breakdown-slash-spiritual awakening (I’ll always be grateful to Brené Brown for that phrase), bringing that whole chapter of my life to a crashing halt in my late thirties.

Because sometimes Sleeping Beauty smashes her own way out of the glass case.

So, for me, ageing out loud is not the ‘wearing purple’ kind of loud, to quote Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’, but is more about using the voice I have (and owe) to the older feminists that fought for it, and for being haggy enough to be off patriarchy’s fuckable list and thus free to fly under its radar.

The truth is, being an older, post-reproductive woman has a lot going for it. You just won’t find any of it in the dictionary.

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Advantages of Age first published a version of this essay as ‘The Joys of Opionated Older Women’ in July 2024.

1. https://theconversation.com/reviled-reclaimed-and-respected-the-history-of-the-word-queer-197533

2. Walker. B. G. (1996). The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. USA, NJ: Castle Books. Quoted in Ott, J. S. (2011) ‘The Crone Archetype: Women Reclaim Their Authentic Self by Resonating with Crone Images.’ https://bit.ly/ott-crone

3. https://www.canadalife.co.uk/news/half-of-uk-adults-don-t-have-a-will/

4. Day, J. (2021). ‘The disenfranchised grief of involuntary childlessness: A living loss that society dismisses’. Lecture given at York University. [Video and transcript] https://bit.ly/jody-grief

5. Bolen, J. S. (2022) ‘Jean Shinoda Bolen MD: Entering The Crone Age.’ Interview published in ‘Awaken’ [online magazine]. April 14, 2022. https://awaken.com/2022/04/entering-the-crone-age/