Age, Gender and Sexuality through the Life Course

The Girl in Time

Susan Pickard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317520627
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Age, Gender and Sexuality through the Life Course argues that the gendered structure of temporality (defined in the dual sense of everyday time as well as age and stage of life) is a key factor underpinning the stalling of the gender revolution. Taking as its central focus the idealised young woman who serves as the mascot of contemporary success, this book demonstrates how the celebration of the Girl is (i) representative of social mobility, educational and professional achievement; (ii) possesses diligence, docility and emotional intelligence, and (iii) displays a reassuring sexuality and youthfulness – but is constructed from the outset to have a fleetingly short life span.

Pickard undertakes a theoretical and empirical exploration of the contemporary female experience of education, work, motherhood, sexuality, the challenge of having-it-all. Furthermore, through additional analysis of the transitional 'reproductive regime' from youth into mid-life and beyond, this insightful monograph aims to demonstrate how age and time set very clear limits to what is possible and desirable for the female self; yet how the latter factors also, if used reflexively, can provide the key means of resisting and challenging patriarchy.

This book is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience located in gender studies, age studies, culture studies, sociology and psychology; accessible for advanced undergraduates and beyond.

1 Introduction

Femininity and age, or, how time is not on our side

The Girl is the emblem for late modern success. She symbolises all the qualities admired by contemporary culture: diligence, self-surveillance, emotional intelligence, sexuality and above all youthfulness. The sign of the times, she is represented by female heroes and icons who are ‘leaning in’, scaling the heights of politics and the professions and leading the feminisation of culture and society. Yet there is a catch. The clock is ticking and early on, by the time the Girl reaches her late twenties or early thirties, the carriage is already threatening to turn into a pumpkin. Girls younger than this may shrug their shoulders and deny that such matters as the reversing of the gender pay gap, the career stalling, the creeping back of traditional gender roles in the context of work environments, relationships and especially parenthood, will happen to them; their generation is surely different. However, if the Girl pays attention she may recognise that right now there are also demands on her everyday time that her male peers do not share. They include: time given to others; too much time spent daydreaming, but not really planning, about what the future may bring; time stolen from sleep in order to study in a way that allows her the time to be a good daughter and a good friend or girlfriend, perhaps even experiencing the ensuing fatigue as emotionally satisfying, indicating that she has restored some cosmic balance that might otherwise be too tipped in her favour. Moreover, if she peers ahead a decade or two at the women who have reached mid-life she may not much like what she sees in the part-time labour economy, the attempt to balance work and home life, the stalling of once-cherished ambitions. Indeed, if she reflects just for a moment on the difference, she may begin to see that the clock is not on her side now, though up to that moment she might have thought that it was; that indeed age and time are conspiring against her even from her mid-twenties or earlier when she is told she needs to work on staying youthful because youth is beauty and ‘beauty is the first impression of total success’ (Martin, 2007: 16), as girls today know all too well (Brumberg, 1997); because she has a limited window of opportunity in which to have babies, and needs to plan her career just right and find a good man in good time if she is to ‘have-it-all’; because the opposite to having-it-all is failure, which will be entirely her own fault.

Whilst it is recognised that the gender revolution has stalled, as evidenced by a wide range of factors including the failure of women to increase their representation in the highest ranks of business, the professions and politics, or to close the pay gap, to note just a few obvious markers, the role of temporality in this is less recognised and thus less discussed. Indeed, time and age have emerged as central factors in gender inequality. Never before has the difference between men and women revolved so much around time, constructed as a natural quality of bodies, and of which women, despite currently exceeding men in terms of longevity, are said to suffer from a deficit. There are both routine and quotidian, existential and structural, institutional and interpersonally-embedded problems regarding time for women. The importunate ticking of the ‘biological clock’ makes the casual nature of sexual relationships in the ‘hook-up’ scene extremely stressful for women wondering whether they are going to be able to find a committed relationship in time to have a family, whilst at the same time calling into question their nurturing of careers over babies. Once they become mothers, women struggle with lack of time to combine motherhood or other types of caring with work, whether this be full- or part-time. A great part of women’s social worth and status is still situated in their beauty and physical capital and despite entering the workforce and becoming more successful than they ever have been, no alternative beauty ideal has yet emerged to match this shift: no female equivalent of the ‘silver fox’, just the requirement for women to undergo cosmetic treatments to retain the look of youth (and too often a sad parody that leads to stigmatisation).

Time is one of the factors in the unravelling of the power and thrust of second wave feminism encapsulated in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s shocked realisation, as she approached the age of 30: ‘Our lot in life would seem to be enslavement to time – to time the avenger’ (1999: 385). It was not an accident that the idea of time-based infertility first emerged in 1978, just after the powerful gains achieved by women in the fight for gender equality, with the concept of the biological clock. The heirs of second wave feminism were then confronted with one of the most dire consequences of gender equality parodied in the Roy Lichenstein-style cartoon images of the likes of: ‘I can’t believe it. I forgot to have children!’ This may lead to vast amounts of time, effort and money spent seeking to reverse this with IVF, during which process women may become ‘stuck’, unable to move on with the rest of their lives. But, if and when they do have children, they will be caught in time in a different way.

Here I wish to be clear that it is not only fertility and reproduction that is the issue; of course one may reproduce ‘in time’ and most women do (although the imperative to reproduce pulls and twists the shape of women’s early years in a way it does not affect the lives of men), but regardless, time will avenge the Girl. Not only will daily ‘time’ be compromised for women, in ways that give them a distinct disadvantage to men, but femininity also has a short life span. It seems that ‘age’ alone made Madonna ugly, embarrassing and most of all irrelevant where it does not do the same thing to, say, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, or, further along in time, Robert Redford.

The Girl and her shadow

The meritocratic success symbol of high modernity since the 1990s is the young woman aged anywhere between about sixteen and her early forties (depending on class and capital). The term ‘girl’ is one that has been recuperated by young feminists from its traditionally patronising and infantilising signification and ‘grrl’ was a variant of this; as Siegel explains, ‘Grrl was a “girl” with a healthy dose of youthful female rage, minus the sugar and spice’ (2007: 140). In this book I use the term Girl to signify that, as a symbol of agentic, liberated femininity, she has also been appropriated by the new socio-economic order; she is the new Spirit of Capitalism personified. Positioned at the earlier end of the life course, she is poster Girl for educational success, workplace acumen and social mobility combining enterprise with attention to self-care, health and beauty, caring for others whilst managing her own emotional and other needs as much as possible. She evokes and embodies all the qualities most desirable in the modern era, including docility, ambition, emotional literacy, reflexivity, willingness to undertake emotional labour, to work on the self as a project, to hone unruly emotions, sculpt limbs, watch one’s diet. Her reign, however, is agonisingly time-limited and can be seen to have most relevance up to and during the period of her late twenties, which she can stretch out for a further ten years if she has sufficient capital and/or puts off having children for as long as possible. After that, the pay gap, which has narrowed and even reversed for young graduates, begins to creak open again. Indeed, in most ways the Girl stands counter-posed to the mid-life woman insofar as time deeply limits the Girl materially, physically, socially and psychologically. Time works to contain the Girl’s upward trajectory, if she chooses to have children, since child care and the ‘mommy pay gap’ were issues never resolved in a gender equal way and no major changes are planned in either the UK or US to address this. But well before this, time anxiety figures prominently in the psyches of young women, a preoccupation which lies behind women’s tendency to withdraw from full focus on their careers and other interests, which in itself puts them at a real disadvantage vis-à-vis men, who are busy fighting their way single-mindedly up the career ladder. This responsibilisation in time, which begins at a very young age, is associated with hard work but also anxiety and depression and possibly self-harm through school and university and into her early employment (Sweeting and West, 2003). Negative views of the mid-life woman further reinforce time panic in the Girl as do the paucity of alternative roles to that of wife/mother in mid-life. Singlehood and childlessness are both states that are rarely aimed at explicitly by women, even if they are living them, culturally shaped as they are to be perceived as ‘transient’; not a permanent status but a betwixt-and-between, a route on the way to a destination. In movies images of powerful femininity are often co-opted for regressive purposes. Jane Austen’s novels have always served this role particularly well and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a good contemporary example: the girls may be fierce martial arts-trained warriors, but they are also beautiful and feminine, and in the end Jane’s fighting prowess, combined with her warmth and kindness, results in the same outcome as in the more conventional rendering of the tale: Mr Darcy proposes (for the second time). Marriage is, then, even in this alternative steampunk Regency world, the ultimate accomplishment, the telos of feminine self-cultivation, whether displayed in French conversation, needlepoint or Girl-Power style martial arts, just as it ever was and the fact that it still makes sense to audiences of young women around the world indicates its continued saliency.

The image of the mid-life woman, alternatively known as the Menopausal Woman, serves as a foil to the Girl, warning her of what is to come. In the Fox series American Horror Story: Hotel Kathy Bates plays dowdy Iris, a mid-life receptionist at the Hotel Cortez, most of whose long-stay guests are drawn from the ranks either of the dead (ghosts) or the undead (vampires). Eventually she too joins them when she is turned into a vampire. When this happens she bemoans her fate to her colleague, the still-human transvestite ‘Liz Taylor’, complaining not so much of her fate of becoming a vampire as of being fixed in time at the wrong age, trapped forever in a frumpy lumpy body with its lined forehead and bespectacled face framed by wisps of thinning iron-grey hair. She is doomed, she feels, to be invisible until the end of time. It is a fascinating observation rendered all the more powerful because each episode of the series presents Poe-like vignettes which tell the stories of the non-human inhabitants of the Hotel Cortez as tableaux depicting some of the worst nightmares our collective conscience can spew out (such as: being bricked into one’s bedroom as one sleeps with no way out; losing one’s true love, finding him after a hundred years only to lose him again a few days later, permanently this time; losing one’s favourite child to a kidnapper or worse after perching him on top of a fairground carousel ride and glancing momentarily away to take a call on one’s cell; having your macho colleagues find you in the hotel during an overnight business trip in full drag of frock, heels and false eyelashes en route back to your room from an ill-advised trip to fill your ice bucket). It is alongside such tales of existential catastrophe that the true horror of being made to occupy a mid-life body for all time is thus impressed upon the viewer.

In real life, Madonna personifies the fate of the Girl who commits the error of ageing. She did so much to challenge the double-standard for young women, showing girls that they could be sexy and assertive, in work and in love, providing ‘teenage girls with a set of symbolic tools with which to subvert patriarchal definitions of femininity’ (McNay, 1999: 105). She was the older, wiser sister for many girls coming-of-age in the 1980s and 1990s; in India Knight’s novel My Life on a Plate the protagonist plays the game ‘what would Madonna do?’ whenever she is in a tight spot (a game I also played). But Madonna first stumbled and then made faux pas after faux pas starting in her early forties with her marriage to Guy Ritchie. She was at first celebrated in her role of motherhood, both as a single mother and then when she married Ritchie and gave birth to their son. But clearly that event was supposed to have resulted in ‘closure’ for Madonna; doubtless perhaps she was expected to withdraw gracefully from public life at this point. From now on her fortunes began to sink. Who can forget the way, as their marriage faltered towards failure, Ritchie resorted to a crude sex war, using the easiest weapon to hand, that of age, telling ‘Madge’ among other things, that she ‘looked like a granny’ on stage next to her younger backing dancers and confiding in friends that sharing a bed with her was like ‘cuddling up to a piece of gristle’? (Barton, 2008). Reading what Camille Paglia wrote about her in 1991 when Madonna was in her early thirties brings this shift in time into sharpest relief. Extolling her ‘extraordinary achievement in both artistic and feminist terms’, she declares, ‘playing with the outlaw personae of prostitute and dominatrix, Madonna has made a major contribution to the history of women. She has rejoined and healed the split halves of woman: Mary the Blessed Virgin, Holy mother and Mary Magdalene, the harlot’ (p. 11). But time alone has demonstrated what Madonna failed to do: namely rejoin the virgin/mother/whore with the hag, youth with old age. Since the Ritchie humiliation, she has year by year attracted more scorn than outrage; she has ceased to be powerful and attractive and has become ridiculous: an older woman pretending to be young, like a modern day Baby Jane, a pantomime ugly sister. Famed in the prime of her career for her dazzling self-reinventions the transformation into a mature sexual persona appears to be a reinvention beyond her imagination or willingness to take. The media and social media fixate on various aspects of her appearance and none moreso than her hands which betray the hag-like essence beneath the youthful disguise, serving as an unwelcome memento mori in the celebrity world of glamour, bodily perfection and eternal youth from which ageing and death have been otherwise excised (Woodspring, 2017).

Elsewhere in the media, the ageing into deep old age of Hollywood movie stars is airbrushed out of their story. In an edition of Vanity Fair containing articles that discuss the relationship between various famous sisters, including Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill (Kashner, 2016) and Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine (Stadiem, 2016), there are interviews with the surviving sisters (Lee and Joan respectively). But it is striking – and frustrating – that all recent photographs of the surviving sister of each pair, as well as later photographs of both sisters together, are omitted. The most recent photograph of Lee Radziwill and Jackie Kennedy comes from 1972 (Jackie died in 1994); that of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland together was taken in 1962. This is a narrative version of airbrushing perhaps even more pernicious than its more common form; it conveys a clear message, that old age has no place in the story of a glamorous female life. By comparison, an article on Kirk Douglas’ 100th birthday was accompanied by a contemporary photograph of the actor (Freeman, 2017) whilst media coverage of Hugh Hefner’s death was replete with rakish photographs of him in his eighties, complete with velvet tuxedos, cigars and Play Mates.

What are the causes of this ongoing time disadvantage suffered by women? As always, there are continuities and perennial themes, as well as new developments. There is first a backlash or conservative tendency that has closely followed each powerful wave of progress towards gender equality at various points in history, including in reactions to Mary Wollstonecraft, to the New Women of the 1890s and suffragists and flappers of the 1920s as well as to second wave feminists. However what makes this particularly hard to resist today is that this is not simply externally-imposed but a more complex version that arises in equal part from women’s own wishes and dispositions, many of them unconscious. Indeed, Juliet Mitchell has termed this regressive dynamic a ‘kind of underwater tow’ and explains ‘this is not a tide that after going out returns more or less completely to the same spot; we do not revert exactly to the status quo ante – but nevertheless feminism seems always to be rowing against a current that is ultimately the stronger force’ (2000: xviii). Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) link this to a recuperative facility within capitalism itself. They note:

Capitalism attracts actors who realise that they have hitherto been oppressed, by offering them a certain form of liberation that masks new types of oppression. It may then be said that capitalism ‘recuperates’ the autonomy it extends by implementing new modes of control.

(2005: 425)

Thus, second wave feminism with its revolutionary challenges to both patriarchy and capitalism paved the way for low-paid flexible women’s work in a globalised economy, whilst women’s youthful freedom was reconfigured within the framework of the biological clock, incorporating time anxiety as an essential ingredient. In parallel fashion, the movement against ageism also resulted in the neoliberalisation of old age with the consequence that older workers are not only welcomed into the labour economy but increasingly are obliged to work as pension promises are not kept and relatedly we see the end of age as a special category requiring welfare protection (Macnicol, 2015).

The second theme involves the use of arguments invoking gender essentialism. These elements play an important role in the maintenance of the socio-political order. Traditionally, emphasis on gender has served to obscure class differences, highlighting women’s ‘natural’ commonalities and making middle-class styles of femininity aspirational for working-class women, ‘translating the discrepancy between what one now has and what one could acquire into a new psychological narrative of personal development’ (Poovey, 1984: 11). Today, however, there is a growing discourse of populist biological determinism, evident in a range of social practices from increasingly gender-differentiated consumer goods for children, to media rhetoric about women’s ‘emotional intelligence’ and a celebration of familism including the spreading of heterosexual norms to gay relationships and a celebration of transgenderism which happens to involve very stereotypical notions of what a man and woman are and can be. All of the above revalidate traditional roles for women, infusing them with nostalgia and a sense of a golden age of self and society, now lost.

The third is age essentialism, which is also generated by patriarchy. As I will argue in this book, there are two main elements of patriarchy which relate to gender and age respectively (easily discernible if one remembers that the patriarch is literally a father ruling over his family), although it is the gendered aspect that receives the lion’s share of attention by critics of patriarchy. Arguments about the old being ill, socially conservative and stupid, are historically recurrent although this takes different forms in different periods. Today Silicon Valley takes a particular lead in the glorification of youth, with billion dollar investment in anti-ageing technologies, whilst blaming the old for Brexit, the election of President Trump and austerity are themes prominent in the media. All of these narratives single out age as the defining characteristic for millions of people otherwise differing according to gender, class, race, wealth and education: this being the definition of ageism, indeed.

Indeed, both gender and age essentialism, combined with a meritocratic emphasis on achievement and productivity through work, are features of late modern capitalist governmentality. The latter combines an advanced liberalism concerned with the freedom of both the markets and of subjects with conservative elements present in nostalgic depictions of gender and family more synonymous with patriarchy, whilst both streams converge on an emphasis on the shrinkage of the state and the individualising of both problems and solutions. For women the biological clock is the centre piece of this awkward conjoining of two rather different agendas, controlling women’s ability to challenge or detach themselves from the age and gender systems. For centuries in the west, fertility control was effected through marriage postponement with marriage traditionally leading to motherhood (owing to the absence of reliable contraception). Now the female body per se is represented as a ticking clock, a metonym that both foregrounds women’s reproductive role and ensures it is defined by time at its core. This combination works powerfully to regulate women’s choices. The Pew Research Center notes that the number of highly educated women at the end of their childbearing years with no children is going down and that family size for highly educated women is increasing despite the continued mommy pay gap (Livingston, 2015). Indeed marriage and (numerous) children is the ultimate badge of success for high-flying business women, including city investment bankers, with supermums including Nicola Horlick, mother of six, who came to prominence in the 1980s and more recently Helena Morrissey, mother of nine, hedge fund manager and founder of the 30% Club, and for both of whom this is an intrinsic marker of their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: femininity and age, or, how time is not on our side
• 2 The rise and fall of the Girl in time
• 3 Structures of the female self
• 4 The Girl in time: everyday time, time of life and the structures of femininity
• 5 The self through time: feminine plots through the life course
• 6 Sex in time: sexual liberation – another stalled revolution
• 7 Conclusion: imagining alternatives to the Girl in time
• References
• Index