The C Word
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on February 1, 2023.
Don’t get your knickers in a knot, the C-word under consideration, at this moment, is Crone. I want to consider the blaze of light within that word, which is generally understood as the third phase of womanhood (after the Maiden and the Mother). It is also generally understood to be a dark, ugly, wrinkled, malicious old woman – a trio of warty witches stirring a pot of trouble in the depths of the forest. I understand this interpretation as garden variety ageism and misogyny. Because, really, after what we’ve had to put up with as Maidens and Mothers, a little maliciousness may be warranted.
But I would like to claim the word, without getting all New Agey, as a time when a woman’s life belongs to her. I used to horrify my women friends (the men had long since bolted from the room) when menopause was on our minds, by doing some simple arithmetic to quantify the extent to which our lives returned to us with the cessation of menstruation. Roughly one quarter of our lives for forty years, not counting the five years or so at either end worrying about it starting and stopping.
It is within this bent mind set that I enjoyed Jessica Grose’s column in the Jan7—8/23 New York Times International Weekly column entitled ‘The Quick Change, from Babe to Hag’. She decries the unfairness – but doesn’t argue with the probable correctness – of these findings of a social gerontologist (who knew there was such a creature?) from University of Minnesota, Tetyana Shippee: “From ages 18 to 30, women report age discrimination due to being too young. From your mid-30s to your mid-40s is a safe time. Then age discrimination starts to pick up again after age 50, and it’s especially high after 55 plus.” I think the outcry when Lisa Laflamme was ejected, purportedly (and arguably, her erstwhile bosses say) because she’d neglected to cover her grey, indicates there is some shared sentiment floating around out there.
Grose’s primary complaint, aside from being able to expect a gender-even playing field for only ten years in her working life, was how women’s appearance is consistently ‘marked’, to use a sociological term that means it conveys information that positions you socially in such an ambiguous way that it’s nigh on impossible to get it right. For example, what’s slutty to one person might be sexy to another, and whether sexy is good or bad is as slippery as a banana peel. In fact, the amount of time a woman loses trying to figure out what to ‘go as’ when she faces her day, and the many moments during the day when she wonders if she got it right and/or how she got it wrong, very likely dwarfs the amount of time that menstruation steals from her life.
Grose seems to see the decade of gender fairness as the promised land between being patronized (in youth) and infantilized (in old age). I will not disagree that there is a tendency to infantilize old people (calling us ‘dear’, using a pared-down vocabulary and simple sentence construction, speaking loudly and slowly) and that it is annoying. But there is freedom in perceived incompetence. Permission to misbehave is implied when one’s censor board is understood to be unreliable and wonky. We can with impunity wear red with purple (with a nod to Jenny Joseph, who apparently was 29 years old when she wrote that poem, perhaps to gird herself for the gauntlet that awaits).
When I am an old woman I shall
wear purple,
With a red hat which doesn’t go,
and doesn’t suit me.And I shall spend my pension on brandy and
summer gloves,
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no
money for butter.
All this to say that being a woman is very hard work. And so I think we should embrace the kingdom of Cronedom (the queendom of Cronedom? Interesting that it’s maidenhood and motherhood, but cronehood does not slip easily off the tongue, does it?). In Grose’s article, she cites psychologist and mythologist Sharon Blackie who suggests we embrace our ‘inner hag’, advice which Grose slams as impractical in a world where a woman needs to earn a living. I empathize with Grose’s position, but from the security of Cronedom, I’m with Blackie. Life is much more fun and productive when who you are and what you do doesn’t matter to hardly anyone but yourself.
