Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, by Victoria Smith. Review

Fleet, £20

Review by Susan Flockhart

Aha,” I cackled as I cracked the spine of Hags, “a book for me!” And sure enough, Victoria Smith offers a blistering tirade against the myriad ways in which older women are routinely ignored or – as they have been throughout history – vilified as crones, witches and (new in for the 21st century) trolls.

Then it dawned on me that at 61, I don’t actually belong to the “middle-aged” cohort who are the focus of Hags – Generation X-ers now in their 40s and 50s who, like Smith, came of age “just as feminism’s second wave had crashed and burned”.

For anyone hazy about the boundaries of the movement’s various waves, this seems to include women whose youth coincided with the rise of “sex-positive feminism”, enthusiastically embracing slut walks and raunch culture only to discover that – like their prudish mothers and grandmothers before them – they’d been rendered obsolete now the three Fs of “fertility, femininity and f***ability” had deserted them.

It would take an embittered hag newly apprised of her own decrepitude to point out that things can only get worse. Still, as Smith points out, the demonisation of older women affects all females – particularly the young who, just like their forebears, will soon be on the wrong side of history.

READ MORE: The Herald's pick of the best new Scottish books of 2023

“Ageist misogyny has always existed,” writes Smith, citing generations of cruel mother-in-law jokes and TV caricatures such as Little Britain’s Women’s Institute frumps. What’s new, she argues, is that it’s increasingly being perpetrated by people who consider themselves politically progressive. The vilification of the “Karen” figure, defined as “an obnoxious, angry, entitled and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way”, is offered as a case in point.

Born in the 1960s when that baby name had its zenith, I know and love several women called Karen, none of whom fit that description. So, while obnoxious, racist individuals undoubtedly deserve to be denounced, it’s disturbing to read that the name has been co-opted as an insult often aimed at older feminists who fought tirelessly for equality but whose views on sex-based rights are at odds with the current liberal orthodoxy.

When Harry Potter star Emma Watson declared at the 2022 Baftas that she was “here for ‘all’ the witches” this was, writes Smith “taken to be a dig at the older, supposedly ‘exclusionary’ JK Rowling.

Yet in taking on the role of the younger woman denouncing the older woman who nurtured her, Watson was really signalling that she wasn’t a witch: I only played Hermione. Burn the author, not me”. Whether or not that’s fair, the author has titled her new podcast The Witch Trials Of JK Rowling. And it’s clear that older feminists, including Suzanne Moore and Germaine Greer, are increasingly finding themselves in the firing line.

SNP MSPs pictured next to signs calling some feminists TERFs (Image: FREE)

“Misogyny flourishes in spaces where it can be made to appear virtuous,” writes Smith. And that’s certainly the atmosphere that prevailed during the 17th-century witch-hunting era, when unruly women who gathered together to “gossip” or share subversive views were barbarically gagged with so-called scold’s bridles or, worse, executed for sorcery.

More recently, the “screaming, destructive witches” of Greenham Common” were decried as “belligerent harpies” but today, argues Smith, the feared coven has moved online in the form of Mumsnet – an internet parenting platform that has been derided both as a forum where silly women talk about prams and school catchment areas, and as a “toxic” cauldron of “TERFdom” (trans-exclusionary feminism).

Being a hoary-headed social media refusenik, much of this has passed me by but Smith makes a persuasive case that those who consider themselves politically progressive must guard against whipping up hysteria around older women.

She doesn’t explicitly tackle the thorny subject of the Gender Recognition Act, but rather calls for a cool-headed examination of the ways in which those who question certain aspects of the policy have been traduced and, in some cases, issued with threats reminiscent of horrific old-style patriarchal violence. “Punch a TERF, rape a TERF, kill a TERF” are among the insults cited. In such a climate, Smith should be commended for putting her head above the parapet.

READ MORE: Whether it's sanitising Dahl or Dickens, don't tamper with history

Gloomy as all this sounds, Hags offers a spirited and enjoyable reworking of a familiar subject – the devaluing of older women.

Yet aside from a few statistics on the comparative earning power of older males and females and the shortage of middle-aged women in the public eye, Smith presents little scientific evidence to support her thesis, favouring instead a series of anecdotal comments gleaned from social media posts or classic texts by feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf, as well as conversations with contemporary women.

The book opens with a gleeful reappraisal of Alex, the bunny-boiling villain of Fatal Attraction, who stalks her erstwhile lover after he refuses to return her calls. Though she’s portrayed as the ultimate “psychobitch”, Smith now considers Glenn Close’s character to be a metaphor that captures menopausal women’s feeling of “having been f***ed and ghosted by life itself”.

Alex’s declaration that “I’m not going to be ignored!” becomes a rallying cry in Smith’s battle against “hag-hate”. Fair enough, but do middle-aged men also feel disregarded within a society that venerates youth? Smith doesn’t ask and I’d have liked to see a more rigorous analysis of the distinction between misogynistic ageism and ageism per se.

In a welcome rejoinder to the “Karen” slur, some of Smith’s interviewees suggest an alternative vision of the “entitled” older woman as simply someone who has grown in strength and confidence, no longer cares about breaching the submissive boundaries of feminine convention and – being at the tail end of her career trajectory – has “no sh*ts left to give” about risking her job by upsetting the establishment apple-cart.

Perhaps, though not all older women occupy this nirvana of financial security. In fact, many face the double whammy of landing on the employability scrapheap just as the state pension age accelerates away from them. Like I said, things can only get worse.

All the same, Hags is a cracking read. Bubbling with wicked wit, it is sure to raise hackles as well as cackles.