Is the silencing and ridicule of older women necessary to keep women in their place?

[QuentinSummers]

On a thread a while back someone (can't remember who, sorry) said they thought there was a deliberate strategy to stop older women talking to and influencing younger women. For example the no-platforming of Germaine Greer.
I've been thinking about it a lot and I agree. I have been thinking about the treatment if Mary Whitehouse as a crank and religious nutter when i was younger - but a lot of her fears have come to pass.
And the recent thread about asexuality - if older women and younger women talked more openly about their sexuality and women's desire, how women's sex lives are over the years, impact of things like hormonal contraception and childbirtg, perhaps it would help younger women understand and be comfortable with themselves. I can't help thinking that all the labels are people trying to assert that they are different to the rather homogenous, masculine, aggressive view of sex that's everywhere at the moment.
Then the other day I heard a BBC presenter describing the White Widow (female terrorist, high value target for the USA, killed in a drone strike) as a ridiculous and rather pathetic figure. Which seemed really incongruous given how much effort the US have put into catching her. And made me wonder if she was being deliberately ridiculed as she was influencing a lot of younger women to join ISIS (It's a distasteful example but really struck me).

Also tied in here are all the younger women who "get on better with men" (I was one of those myself, I am so embarrassed now).

What can we do to build the credibility of older women? I really think it's necessary to help women overall.

Thanks for reading the wall of waffly text

Bring back old women! Can you imagine night clubs, with all the parents of the young folk sitting around the edges, judging any lewd behaviour harshly.....vetting any men you want to dance with the young women. I think sexual assaults would stop overnight.

OP - I agree completely with your thoughts. (And I'm another former "get on better with men than women" )

Why were women who lived alone and knew a bit about herbs so dangerous that they had to be denounced as witches, for example?

As well as age = not giving a fuck so much, I think there's an overlap with sexual desirability. Older women are often treated similarly to lesbians, because they are not in the market to sleep with men. That is, they are marginalised, ridiculed, deprived of a voice.

Why are men so scared of us?

Tamatoa - that's basically what Jane Austen era balls were, isn't it?

Why are men so scared of us?

Because we can see right through them.

I don't think it is just men who don't like older women.

Considerable real life experience is often just dismissed by younger women as delicate ego, knows nothing. As demonstrated on this thread.

On that note lets have a little recap on driver ages and their involvement in accidents.

You'll be shocked and amazed to discover that there hasn't really been any study done in to the role of older women and the menopause in our society but I remember hearing about this and it's totally fascinating.

www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/after-menopause-killer-whale-moms-become-pod-leaders-180954480/

It's almost like young women don't know where old women come from.

It amounts to an amazing act of self-willed forgetting when you discount that life-experience. Liberalism suggests that we should take all opinions equally seriously, and my particular brand of feminism tells me to be aware of power imbalances - including the power balance that can inhere between generations, with older people often accruing more power than younger people have acquired - but there is a tendency to dismiss that learned experience.

The result can sometimes seem like watching a wheel being re-invented again and again.

It's sad because I remember reading all this as a young woman. Even my post about losing a type of cultural memory is something I read in my twenties, written by a woman, writing about the impact of cultural, social and political minimising of older women.

... and then you think of the learned experience that never even makes it to the written page or cultural record.

But I think there is a huge issue about women and work here. One reason for the sidelining of older women is that caring responsibilities often impact on work and the accrual of cultural and economic power. That means that, come the period we call 'older' or 'old', women just don't have the clout that older men have.

What's more, those caring responsibilities pile up. They don't diminish. When i think about 'entering public space as an older woman', I realise that it's hard - I'm busy! Busy with a lot of things that don't necessarily mean I have a lot of money (and economic power). So the cycle continues.

Yes ollena, I'd dearly love to see the youth of today chaperoned a bit more. Maybe a gang of old mumsnet codgers could start handing out dance cards and life tips in the toilets of nightclubs?

Yes, Sentimental, much like 'mothers', it seems to be hard for people - even women - to connect that before we were mothers, and older women, we were women! And still are! Older women is a multiple identity.

I think some people regard 'older women' as a different species, unchanging, homogenous. We are X age (this will be imprecise, and just signifies some kind of alterity to the age of the thinker/speaker) and we do Y (insert weird shit that the thinker/speaker considers themselves in rebellion against).

What older women are not: revolutionary, disruptive, anti-establishment, thoughtful, incisive, self-aware, in solidarity with others who are oppressed ...

... and we are not creative, productive and autonomous.

I think the potential for autonomy is quite threatening.

Hmmm wonder if I'm considered older or young still?

I'm 41 not (yet) married / had a child but I do find myself worrying about & giving advice to the under 25s at work...

However my 50 / 60 something colleagues like to give ME advice.

Mainly like, don't trust men!

Perhaps older women are born at the age of 55 like Robert Robinson.

Another problem is that we lump all women who are 50+ in a category, as though the only years worth the consideration of close attention, and micro-categorisation are those that are pre-menopausal.

Now, our expected life-span is, what, 80+? So that's 30 years just lumped together, while the years before that are child, maiden, wife, mother, etc.

You can kind of see the archaism, which then is appropriated as sexism, in that: it's all about fertility and sexual availability.

I think we need to do conceptual work to 'fill out' those years and their reality and meaning for women. The figuration of all those years being just 'older women' - a kind of conceptual porridge - jsut doesn't fit the reality of women's lives. We are going to be working for fuck knows how long. We're going to be mothers for far longer, we live (and love) for longer.

who It does, anecdotally, seem to be specifically a Boomer generation thing, to demand respect for their age. My DM, a Boomer, told me she got an earful from a lady of your generation about Boomers attitudes and behaviour.

I missed being a Boomer by three years Scaredy . But too young to remember the war..remember playing on bomb sites though...

Now, our expected life-span is, what, 80+? So that's 30 years just lumped together, while the years before that are child, maiden, wife, mother, etc.

So true.

Yes cat this habit of everyone 50+ being in the same category of "over 50s" is incredibly daft. There is as much distance in time between a 50 year old and an 80 year old as there is between a 50 year old and a 20 year old. Yet no one suggests lumping 20 and 50 year olds together.

It 's as if you are relatively young and active when you are 49 years and 364 days. Then on day 365 you are suddenly an old biddy - never mind being kicked off the telly, it's zimmer frames and incontinence pads here I come....

I'm back now. Thanks for all the replies! I think this dismissal of older women is damaging because we learn so much about e.g. red flags in relationships. I was wondering today if sex is taboo precisely to try to remove power from women, by making it so younger women can't find put as easily that sex doesn't have to be crap or coercive (assuming some are having that kind of sex).
Women discussing things is just so threatening

Women discussing things is just so threatening

Absolutely. If it weren't, so many men wouldn't try to shut us up!

On the other hand, I often notice in my local paper that whenever there is a local campaign, like save a library or opposed to houses being built, or whatever, there are almost always older women leading the campaigns or strongly involved in them.
I guess retired people have time in the day to do these things, but it surprises me (and pleases me) that these women are active, involved, being listened to, getting in arguments with councillors and the like.

I agree. It's very threatening to the patriarchy to have more experienced women passing down wisdom and warnings to less experienced women. The less that happens, the better for the patriarchy. In other words, listening to our grannies and mothers could be a feminist act ;)

If I was a person who benefitted from the patriarchy, or had been convinced that it was in my interests to take the side of men rather than women, it would be very tempting to try to sow as much disconnection and discord as possible between the different generations of women.

By the way, I've noticed quite a few 'intergenerational' threads on MN over the past couple of days.

It's not surprising that it's older women doing these things. For a start, they probably have a long history of it. Women do an awful lot of the actual work in political constituencies and in political organisations. Very few of them make it to the more powerful and public roles in those organisations.

i think where the ageism comes in is a. the failure to realise a lot of those 'loveable older women, out campaigning' probably have a secure background in political organising and local campaigns and b. thinking 'bless' - which I'll bet goes through some people's minds and c. thinking, again, of those women as 'the acceptable, cosy face of this campaign', rather than as politically active, angry women.

P.S. I'm obvs not saying you thought that. I'm thinking more about where the ageism kicks in, and how it works/operates.

Yeah I haven't mellowed as I've got older I've got angrier and angrier.

I was having this conversation with a friend the other day about how we only just now feel like we've worked out that we're angry. Like we've had this feeling inside and haven't been able to tell what it is and we've just worked out it's anger.
As I get older I don't care as much about being seen as 'attractive' so I feel more comfortable being seen to have my own opinions.
I feel really sad for young women when I see how desperate they are not to offend or say something out of turn.

It's frustrating how many young women are "lost" to feminist causes for the reasons listed above. Until they're older. I know a few women my age (40s) only now getting involved in feminist activism, who were very much the "I get on better with men" types in their youth and who would've dismissed and ridiculed feminists. I feel a bit of grim "I told you so" (petty I know but they weren't very sisterly 20 years ago!) but also just what a loss their intelligence and energies were when they were worried about pleasing men.