A couple of months ago I attended a feminist reading session to discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s work on ageing. The group consisted of university educated people ranging from mid-twenties to mid-eighties with little to no prior knowledge on de Beauvoir’s impressive oeuvre. Surrounded by feminist artwork, we sat in a beautiful North European church which is now fully dedicated to contemporary art exhibitions. We read biographical, academic and fictional text fragments about women’s ageing bodies, noticing the overwhelming despair with which de Beauvoir describes the loss of desire and the increasing invisibility, especially in her own experience of becoming older.
For those of us in (late) midlife some of the depictions of loss sounded awfully familiar, while younger participants projected those mostly on other older women, wondering, for instance, how to respond to a grandmother’s presumably “unfeminist” attempts at staying young (including Botox injections). In our discussions some would dismiss de Beauvoir’s gloomy portrayals of ageing as a misogyny-fueled mistake that disappeared from her work once she embraced feminism in later life. Others, however, emphasized her unprecedented courage and precision in investigating the experience of loss and the passing of time. This tension became painfully apparent when one of the oldest participants called some of us “a bunch of grumpy, resentful middle agers” in a social media post a few days later. She was addressing those of us who shared similar negative experiences of loss with de Beauvoir and had, therefore, failed in emancipating ourselves from the male gaze.
Negativity and sadness over what has been lost are according to Andreas Reckwitz (2024) at odds with the future-oriented, progress-driven modernistic thinking that emerged in Europe starting from the 18th century. While progress underscores autonomy and controllability of life through emancipation from societal and material limitations, loss implies vulnerability and confronts us with transience and finitude. Paradoxically, he argues, modernity both limits and enhances the space for loss. By overemphasizing progress and creating high expectations, it increases the risk of failure, disappointment and disillusionment. Initially, progress was seen as a collective promise and imperative, while, for instance, exploitation through colonialism as a form of loss remained mostly unacknowledged. However, as modern institutions failed in delivering their promise of constant progress for all, especially since the 1970s, it is primarily in the realm of subjectivity that optimization is sought. The individual is increasingly expected to employ emotional, social and cognitive skills to achieve a successful life. Optimism, happiness and hope as affective structures of modernity have been relocated to the personal sphere in late modernity, making fear, sadness and loss into suspicious if not abject emotions.
Autonomy oriented strands of feminism tend to follow the same logic when it comes to ageing. Here ageing mostly carries the potential to finally liberate oneself from misogynistic beauty standards that dominate a woman’s life. The growing invisibility that comes with ageing is the very site where we can reimagine life beyond gender. Ageing, one could say, has a queering potential; by falling outside the norms, one gets to create a life of their own. As women become older, they may indeed be less restricted by constructions of “motherhood” and “wifehood”, allowing them to explore other ways of being. The loud, judgmental voice reminding them of the constant failure to meet the impossible ideals of womanhood would start to quiet down. What could emerge out of that silence?
At the same time, a big portion of life happens in and through experiences of loss, especially in midlife. The deterioration of the body – both of oneself and one’s loved ones – may bring mortality into view, causing a sense of melancholy. How can we attend to those experiences beyond either hopeless submission (“my life is over”) or paternalistic dismissal (“age is just a number”)? In her essay “Agelessness”, Zadie Smith reflects on women’s awareness of ageing in midlife as an opportunity to see what has been the case all along: the passing of time. Gendered embodied constructions of ageing such as the biological clock and menopause, allow women to feel time, “to know time as it is” (2025: 254-255). Ageing offers an honest mirror which necessarily involves loss and sadness but simultaneously provides a window into different seasons of life. Beyond offering solace, this understanding of ageing is mainly a matter of embracing life in all its facets.
References:
Reckwitz, Andreas. 2024. Verlies: een kernprobleem van de moderniteit. Amsterdam: Boom.
Smith, Zadie. 2025. Agelessness. In Dead and Alive. London: Penguin Book, pp. 253-257.
Rhythms of Love 