Angela Neustatter
Body Language
Mid-life isn’t what it used to be. The days when women of a certain age were expected to fade into the wallpaper, wearing beige crimplene and accepting they had reached their sell-by date, are no more than a memory.
And what has caused this disruption of the definition of mid-life? The fact that a new generation of women are hitting it with almost a lifetime of feminism behind them. That does not mean the profound and ancient issue of facing the second half of life is wiped out, but it has made women feel we must kick against accepting, as so many of our mothers’ generation did, that having brought up children and got past the age at which women were considered sexually desirable beings, we should quietly fade away.
Today’s generation of mid-life women are unique. We have grown up with better education and health, and more opportunities than our parents. We have been part of a culture of agitprop that took root in the 1960s; we are the first generation to have had the Pill and experience the sexual revolution. We have combined children with careers as never before and, thanks to the women’s movement, we have grown up in a culture in which we have learned to see not only the oppression of women but also our value.
So now, as we reach this certain age, we can draw on the up-and-at-’em approach and the confidence gained through fighting for our rights, for even those women not directly involved have lived in the culture feminism has created. Many of us see that we can and should stand up and oppose what Germaine Greer calls the “youthist culture” that is so dismissive of ageing women.
Marsha Rowe (53), writer and editor, and a founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib in the Seventies, acknowledges that facing menopause and recognising that youth is no longer ours are difficult, no matter how political you have been. But she does not share the anguish Simone de Beauvoir expressed when she said: “Old age looms like a calamity,” nor does she howl like Cher: “Fifty sucks.”
Rowe admits: “As I entered mid-life and the menopause, I had a profound sense of loss. My whole life flashed before me.” But she insists: “I have gone through that to rediscover pleasure in my appearance and to value the experience I have gained, the knowledge I have, the sense of myself. These are precious gifts to pass down to my daughter’s generation.”
It is an important statement of pride – yet I remain wary of the gung-ho cult that celebrates the Fabulous Forties and Fantastic Fifties. I detest euphemisms such as Superyoung which have been coined to disguise the distasteful fact that getting older is still regarded as a failure. The positivism seems to me to have less to do with a genuine love of mid-life than with demographics: the baby-boomers have grown up and now represent a quarter of the population, with spending power and voter power.
It is more that women are refusing to play their time-honoured roles or those roles are breaking down. When Elizabeth Buttle (60) and Pauline Lyon (55) had post-menopausal in vitro fertilisation children, they stuck two fingers in the air to the biology that bins our fertility at this life stage. And when Cherry MacAllister-Cotterill advertised for a surrogate granny because her own mother was too busy going out and having fun to stay home baking cakes and reading to her six grandchildren, it was testament to the fact that life doesn’t finish at 40.
But while these women are symbols of a new generation, they belie the fact that there remains in our culture a deep fear of middle- aged women as sexual beings. That fear is fed by a virtual eclipse of imagery, and rather than dissipating, it is spreading to thirtysomething women. Witness the recent British media attack on 33-year-old Elizabeth Hurley when she wore a short, strapless dress to an award ceremony. “Is Liz Hurley getting too old to dress like a girlie?” asked The Mirror, happy to print pictures to prove she “is in real danger of being labelled mutton dressed as lamb”.
It is vital that we oppose the tyranny of words like those of United States Vogue editor Anna Wintour who has said: “Nothing is sadder or more frightening than seeing a woman of the more interesting age in clothes too girlish or revealing. It makes her appear as if she is out of touch with herself. And she is.”
Why should we give up on a look we have enjoyed for decades just because chronology has moved us on? I have always worn leopardskin leggings and see no reason why, just because I’m 55, I should not continue to do so on a body that is in slightly better nick than when I was 35.
Women, I believe, are also in better shape than men in their approach to mid-life. Feminism has helped us to challenge so many of the conditions of life that straitjacket men as they grow older: feeling they must define themselves by work, give up their children, hold down their emotions. Women have learned to be flexible with our time and emotions, and we have learned to see the value in cherishing ourselves. We may yet see the vision conjured by Gloria Steinem in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions: “One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth.”