@GreeboIsMySpiritAnimal
I've been thinking about this, and I just don't recognise these women! I'm not doubting they exist - obviously they do, and a depressing number of you have been dealing with them all your lives - but I'm very fortunate not to know any!
My mum is 65, a true feminist and career woman, has been single and independent all her life, and is as unladylike as they come!
Both my MIL and step-MIL are in their 70s, and both had high-flying careers - MIL in a field which is almost entirely male-dominated now, never mind when she started it in the 60s. By the end of it she was charging £1k a day as a consultant. She's a loud, lively woman who likes a drink.
Step-MIL is much more of a "traditional" - member of the WI, elegant, softly-spoken, rarely drinks - but she's never treated me with anything but love and respect. If either of them disapprove of me they've kept it very well hidden all these years!
In fact, now I think of it, there are loads of inspiring older women in my life. My former teacher, still running her own drama school in her 70s. She raised a son by herself, and is still absolutely formidable. A friend in her 80s who started her career as a chemist, then had a mid-life career change and became a dresser on the West End, and now runs her own fashion business. A cousin who in her 80s lives abroad and hosts music festivals.
Reading about all these judgemental, narrow-minded women who've lived such constrained, restricted lives, I feel even more grateful to have them in my life!
I think that class and education must form part of it. My mother is from a very poor rural background, and was taken out of school to work at 13, and brought up to hand over her wages to her widowed mother and to step off the footpath and bless herself when the parish priest approached -- she is not a questioning spirit, and I have difficulty blaming her for that, as nothing in her life ever gave her the sense that circumstances could be fought, and that dissent from anyone in authority was possible. As a result, she's a timid, people-pleasing 70something, who has deferred all her life to anyone, especially men, whom she perceives as being 'in authority' and she's terrified of being judged, after a childhood and youth as being the conspicuously non-coping family, even when my grandmother prioritised 'respectable' clothes over food for her children when it was a choice between the two.
More damagingly, she doesn't approach things in a critical spirit, and tends to believe anything that anyone tells her that sounds authoritative, especially if that person is male, whether it's a priest, the local racist radio presenter, some columnist in the local paper.
But she has not understood all her life that her daughters are not her, and she feels she will be judged negatively for the 'wrong' decisions we have made whether that's prioritising careers, unapologetically taking up space, behaving as though we are important, not marrying or not having a big white church wedding, remaining childfree, wearing our hair long after 30, not presenting in a sufficiently 'feminine' manner etc. It took her months to recover after I was on a high-profile programme on national TV and corrected a male fellow-expert on a panel on an incorrect assertion in her view that was 'Vegetarian making a show of herself on TV'. She has a horror of female confidence.
I love her, and I bear with her, because her early life made her what she was, and she didn't have the resources to fight the ingrained assumptions and prejudices that life gave her, or to understand that her children chose not to follow her into deferential, self-damaging people-pleasing and living her life according to the twin mantras 'Expect nothing and you don't be disappointed' and 'Never stand out from the crowd'.