Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism

Harleys and Hormones

I. Whelehan, J. Gwynne, I. Whelehan, J. Gwynne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137376527
• eBook ISBN: 9781137376534
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How has popular film, television and fiction responded to the realities of an ageing Western population? This volume analyses this field of representation to argue that, while celebrations of ageing as an inspirational journey are increasing, most depictions still focus on decline and deterioration.

1

Conscientious Objections: Feminism, Fiction and the Phoney War on Ageing

Liz Byrski

It was my mother who made me a reader. She was of the generation of women who had devoured the restless, questioning women’s novels of the thirties, moved onto ‘the resistance writing’ of wartime¹ and then the novels that juggled women’s changing post-war roles and expectations in the fifties. All her life she devoured books, and many years later I came to understand that those novels were compensation for our comparative isolation, buried in the Sussex countryside, three miles from the nearest village and five from the town. She lacked the company of women friends or neighbours but found it in the books that have come to be known as ‘the feminine middlebrow’. The middlebrow, according to Nicola Humble is:

... a product of the interwar years, its form, themes and successes were not immediately disrupted by the Second World War. [ ... It] is a hybrid form, comprising a number of forms from the romance and country-house novel, through domestic and family narratives.²

My earliest childhood memories from the late forties into the fifties are punctuated by the weekly visit to Boots Library and later, back home, Mum flicking through the pages of each new book deciding which to read first. I was thirteen when she began to share those books with me, introducing me to Monica Dickens, Winifred Peck, E.M. Delafield, Jocelyn Playfair, Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Whipple, and many more.

Once captured by the middlebrow I was riveted and there was no looking back to teenage fiction. I was reading purely for pleasure, and it was a very long time before I understood that I was reading politics of the sort that Grace Paley’s words suggest: ‘people will sometimes say, “Why don’t you write more politics?” And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women is politics’.³

To write about women’s everyday lives is to write about the tangled webs of marriage and families, of work and money or the lack of it, sexual politics, and the political reality of women living in a world defined by men, for men and to accommodate their preferences. The novels of the middlebrow teem with the politics of adjustment to changes in women’s status in marriage, home and workplace, their class, their expectations and their aspirations in a rapidly changing world, as well as the realities of ageing.

Nicola Humble notes that the ‘feminine middlebrow’ novels were, and still are, overlooked as mere reflections on the middle class, domestic status quo, largely because they were written by women and because they constitute a feminine literature which concentrated on women’s everyday experience, ‘paying meticulous attention to their shifting desires and self-images, mapping their swings of fortune’.⁴ Humble suggests that female authorship and the concentration on women’s lives combined to deprive these novels and their authors of serious critical attention and credit for any literary value. Today, many of those novels are being republished and recognised for their value as ‘a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also resisting, new class and gender identities’.⁵ The middlebrow also made women feel that they were not alone because, as Nicola Beauman writes, ‘the woman’s novel at this period was permeated through and through with the certainty of like speaking to like.’⁶

In the late sixties through to the eighties, feminist consciousness-raising fiction politicised the lives of millions of women, drawing them into the women’s movement as activists or fellow travellers or simply inspiring them to consider the politics at work in their own lives. Raised on the middlebrow and its restless tussles with everyday politics I, like so many others, was the perfect audience for those powerful feminist novels. I continued to read and enjoy contemporary women’s fiction until, in my late fifties, I grew irritable and frustrated. I wanted to read fiction about the lives of women who had aged with me and were also a little ahead of me. The shelves of bookshops and libraries were packed with novels about younger women living lives which I had outgrown. As I returned, for consolation, to the feminist novels of the seventies I was shocked to realise that these, unlike the middlebrow, had failed to pay attention to the situation of ageing and old women, and more recent trends in popular fiction seemed even more youth focussed. Fortunately, my irritation and frustration as a reader proved motivational for me as a writer.

In the last twelve years I have written and published seven novels in which ageing and old women are the central characters. All have become Australian bestsellers, some have been published in England, France and Germany, and two are currently optioned for films.⁷ Believing in the power of stories to show rather than tell, I began constructing narratives that would demonstrate the realities, the challenges and the rewards of older women’s lives. I had been a journalist and nonfiction writer for most of my adult life and always wanted to find my niche in fiction, so the initial imperative was creative and personal, but it is fair to say that my writing also had a pro-social purpose. I wanted to contribute to a change in the conversation about women and ageing, and I had been writing and publishing magazine articles and broadcasting on the topic for several years. Now I hoped fiction might work as a form of viral marketing of age acceptance and of the feminist values of collectivity, sisterhood, friendship, equal rights and social justice. I wanted to speak to women in the same way that the middlebrow fiction and then consciousness-raising fiction had spoken to me, and I wanted to do so in a popular genre where age was underrepresented. Some feminist literary fiction has examined the lives and politics of ageing women: Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1995), Love Again (1996) and The Grandmothers (2003) and Margaret Drabble’s more recent work, as examples. But in women’s popular fiction the over-fifties as a focus were, and still are, very hard to find, and representations of peripheral characters are often negative stereotypes, designed to create conflict for the main characters who are younger women, men and children.

Older women’s dominance in the book buying market sits in uneasy contrast to their representation as subject material, because as a society we seem to find old age distasteful, particularly in relation to women. An obsession with sexualised youth and beauty in popular culture generally makes up the wallpaper of our lives and engenders a fear of growing old. Younger women, who feel the hot breath of age on their necks, are deprived of images of their elders living fulfilling, active and enjoyable lives and grow desperate to cling to youth. Alongside this deprivation the reality of an ageing population – which is a triumph of a civilised society – is viewed as only a burden for future generations. And so war has been declared. But the ‘war on ageing’ is a phoney war, one which most ageing and old people find offensive and frankly ridiculous. It is phoney because it creates a common enemy of which we will all eventually become a part and because ageing is as precious a part of life as childhood. In this chapter I will argue that because women live longer than men – and ageing and old women are subject to greater distaste, dislike, hostility and abuse – the ‘war on ageing’ is predominantly a war on women. I will consider how the products of popular culture, and specifically women’s popular fiction, can constitute counter intelligence in that war and how writing about ageing and old women, making them visible in popular fiction, has been my own antiwar propaganda.

Scoping the Battleground

Despite the fact that women live to greater ages than in the past, live longer than men, stay longer in the workforce, and return to work at an age when many men are seeking early retirement, they have been airbrushed from the images of popular culture. As Imelda Whelehan writes:

Post-menopausal women are assumed to disappear into a dismal neutered future or else the kind of femininity available with age remains unutterable in contemporary popular culture.⁸

Four decades ago Susan Sontag, then just 39-years-old, suggested that ‘ageing is largely a trial of the imagination [ ... ] much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality.’ She pointed to the link between ageism and sexism, identifying the double standard of ageing for women as ‘part of recurrent state of “possession” of her imagination, ordained by society – that is, ordained by the way this society limits how women feel free to imagine themselves.’⁹ That freedom of imagination is crucial; the way we hear ourselves discussed, and see ourselves represented in the culture, influences the ways women can imagine, observe and experience their own ageing. Nothing much has changed. Sontag’s ‘double standard of ageing’ is as relevant today as it was in the seventies. A war on ageing is a bizarre concept in societies in which people aspire to live longer and live well. Do we think we can live longer without getting old? ‘[Y]ou are not only as old as you feel, you are also as old as you are,’ writes Molly Andrews, whose work on ageing and ageism contributes to a wide body of research that shows that old people frequently claim that they do not feel old; they feel, in fact, like the same person they have always been.¹⁰ This acknowledgement of the original youthful spirit within exists alongside the knowledge that they are actually old, and (hopefully) proud of it. Concepts such as ‘stretched middle-age’ and ‘successful ageing’, which use youth as the model of ‘success’, disrupt the emotional congruence of older people and set some up for failure.

In this battlefield women are bombarded with images of youthful, often adolescent, beauty – airbrushed and eroticised in ways more in keeping with the sex industry than with beauty and fashion. While shopping centres thrive on the custom of older women, the wallpaper within them is tediously youthful and excludes old and ageing women as consumers. There are no billboards of feisty, wrinkled old women choosing an outfit for a special occasion, a bathing suits, or a track suit for their morning walks. Ageing and old women are cast as outsiders, unacceptable or wrong, fragile, dependent, or as the carers of other old people. There is an interesting dynamic at work here as, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, women over 55 have greater disposable income, have more free time than women in the younger age group (25–55), and make up 67 per cent of users of shopping malls between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays.¹¹

As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in the seventies, an absence of representations of ageing limits the ability to live as fully rounded human beings.

If we do not know what we are going to be we cannot know what we are: let us recognise ourselves in that old man or that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state. ¹²

With notable exceptions in the areas of health and housing, feminist research has continued to sideline the issues of women’s ageing, particularly in relation to representation. This absence has been noted by, among others, Marilyn Poole and Susan Feldman in 1999¹³ and Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin who, in their 2006 publication Age Matters, noted that feminists still ‘exclude old people both in their choice of research questions and in their theoretical approaches’.¹⁴ In view of the widespread anxiety about the ageing population, it is surprising that feminist attention is not focussed to a greater extent on the future situations of the millions of old women who will dominate that demographic.

In an era that has been defined as post-feminist it is heartening to see the recent resurgence of interest in feminism, currently most evident in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Popular Culture’s ‘Silver Tsunami’
• 1  Conscientious Objections: Feminism, Fiction and the Phoney War on Ageing
• 2  Fiction or Polemic? Transcending the Ageing Body in Popular Women’s Fiction
• 3  ‘Mrs Robinson Seeks Benjamin’: Cougars, Popular Memoirs and the Quest for Fulfilment in Midlife and Beyond
• 4  Sexing Up the Midlife Woman: Cultural Representations of Ageing, Femininity and the Sexy Body
• 5  Paternalising the Rejuvenation of Later Life Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Film
• 6  Too Old for This Shit?: On Ageing Tough Guys
• 7  ‘The (un-Botoxed) Face of a Hollywood Revolution’: Meryl Streep and the ‘Greying’ of Mainstream Cinema
• 8  Grown Up Girls: Newspaper Reviews of Ageing Women in Pop
• 9  Mature Meryl and Hot Helen: Hollywood, Gossip and the ‘Appropriately’ Ageing Actress
• 10  Funny Old Girls: Representing Older Women in British Television Comedy
• 11  Silence Isn’t Golden, Girls: The Cross-Generational Comedy of ‘America’s Grandma,’ Betty White
• 12  The Older Mother in One Born Every Minute
• 13  Women, Travelling and Later Life
• 14  Kane and Edgar: Playing with Age in Film
• 15  Beyond Wicked Witches and Fairy Godparents: Ageing and Gender in Children’s Fantasy on Screen
• Index