Hakluyt, at the risk of being simplistic I'd suggest that men as a social class devalue older women because we're not sexy or fertile - everyone knows that's what women are FOR. Where we have value, it's in mummy roles - home mummy or office mummy. And everyone takes mummy for granted, don't they?
With younger women, I guess there's a need to make hay while the sun shines - enjoying the status of youth and 'othering' older women because subconsciously they are seeing their future and they are horrified.
Ooh, one other thing I wanted to say is about the loaded baby boomer stereotype. I'm slightly fed up of younger colleagues assuming I'm loaded because of the year of my birth. I think this stereotype also makes invisible women's relative poverty and how precarious their relationship to financial security can be. My mother and grandmother both struggled with poverty and social isolation as they raised their children as single mothers; though I'm not poor like them, there's no question I have a very different lifestyle from the one if I might have had if I had pooled resources with a male breadwinner earning male wages. Add to that the huge number of women who have been bumped in poverty by marital break-up, pension arrangements etc. Remember that the gender pay gap gets wider the older you get; that older women are markedly poorer than older men; that midlife and older women have higher rates of depression, lower body confidence, the highest growing rates of obesity. They are the people who bear the brunt of caring for older and younger family, who lacked maternity rights and so often had to give up work, who tend to run our voluntary and community services.
I have no doubt that our society benefits from the work older women put in; but I don't think they value older women. We are encouraged to feel shame for daring to exist without turning men on, to apologise for the space we take up on the planet. In essence, we personify Middle England, suburbia, Damart and Lakeland and Hotter shoes and everything that is laughably dull. And I feel a bit exposed even having this rant, daring to express my anger, because I think women my age are supposed to be pleasant and undemanding and slightly apologetic. We are supposed to agree that our age is a bit of a joke; we are supposed to self-deprecate. We are supposed to read the Daily Mail and drink in all those stories about famous beauties who have dared to get older. We are supposed to consume style and beauty editorial that is all about how we can fade into a pleasant, peachy, undemanding blur. And the only rebellion allowed to us is a kind of cheeky, Beryl Cook, I shall wear purple (ooh, scary), isn't she marvellous for her age, you're as young as the man you feel end of the pier show. I'm tired of being told I don't look my age, as though that is the greatest compliment ever. I'm tired of a situation where the only admired older women are abnormally youthful or surgically altered. Why is it a source of shame to look or act 50? Why is menopause not a subject for polite company? Why do younger feminists see it as natural that I - and other women of my generation - should continue campaigning for their access to abortion, their reproductive rights, their need for quality affordable childcare, their right to walk the street unmolested and to be free of gender stereotyping at school, but have apparently no interest in campaigning on issues affecting older women?
And now I'm going to lie down in a darkened room.