Hags Quotes

“No one wants to shame a woman for the moves she has made when forced to play a game according to someone else’s rules, but criticising the rules is easily conflated with criticising the player. This is a ploy which extends into multiple areas in which women make choices, from traditional housewifery to sex work. Those of us who question the conditions under which women make decisions which limit or harm them are deemed to be invalidating the women themselves, due to some inexplicable, innate discomfort or phobia regarding children, sex or even silicone.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“I’m going to look at a number of areas – beauty, the body, unpaid work, progress, sex, community, power, violence – in terms of how they are experienced by women in midlife, and how other groups exploit, scapegoat and demonise middle-aged women in order to preserve favoured narratives.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“In 1978 Susan Sontag coined the term ‘the double standard of aging’ to describe the way in which ageist sexism/sexist ageism impacts the status of women, particularly with regard to physical appearance.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“I want to draw links between past and present, with feminist history and politics, in order to ask why this particular separation of women from other women and their own older selves keeps happening, and what’s different – or not – in how it is manifested today.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“Much of what we learned about feminism’s very recent past was inaccurate, just as much of what is told about us is inaccurate today.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“It is more than a matter of older women having views that are ‘out of date’. Older women have views that are informed by a variety of different experiences, and these experiences deserve to be understood not as creating bias or triggering prejudice, but as adding to a lifetime’s knowledge base.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“It is very hard to explain to people that neither J. K. Rowling nor the women of Mumsnet – or, by extension, that middle-aged white woman who looked at you a bit funny in the queue at Tesco – are plotting mass murder when so many online voices respond to them as though they are. The misogyny directed at Rowling for what was a compassionate essay, advocating violence against no one, was off the scale.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“It is not weird for mothers and menopausal women who gather online or in real life to get rather angry about the suggestion that femaleness is not politically important, or that female people should not be permitted to organise around their own interests. On the contrary, it would be weird for them not to, which is why they keep doing it, century after century.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“It’s all about squaring the self-determination circle, pretending that if we find the right set-up – the family? Not the family? The anti-family? – we can outwit the human condition. But this is impossible; our vulnerability and dependency on others, their vulnerability and dependency on us, and the compromises we have to make as a result of this, cannot ever be eliminated.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“This book is not a celebration of our hag status. Both the history of witch hunts and the witch figure in fairy tales tell us something about attitudes to older women which have not gone away.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“Beauty, like gender, is relational; women have been obliged to remain forever young so that men can delude themselves that they are not ageing themselves.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“The flipside of the discrimination women face upon having ‘lost their market value’ is no longer having anything to lose by refusing to play by the market’s rules. From the perspective of those who value these rules the most, this makes middle-aged women dangerous, capable of leading younger women astray.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“as long as we are stuck in the same fairy tale, progressing towards the Snow White to Evil Queen epiphany, women will remain alienated not just from one another but our own reflections.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“They try to over-run, disrupt or destroy the exclusively female forum. Once more, a pre-Mumsnet voice is already describing Mumsnet, the site that can no longer even advertise Flora margarine due to pressure on advertisers not to be tainted by association with the witches. The ‘nice little site, be a shame if something were to happen to it”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“In any case, they still want the bread at the end of the process, but are annoyed that there isn’t enough for the whole farmyard and because it’s a bit too crusty around the edges and why didn’t she do a gluten-free version? Whatever: the hen has made rubbish bread and it just goes to show that while everyone should have bread, no one should ever make bread again. Obviously in this version the hen still allows everyone to eat the rubbish bread – she’s a feminist – but no one wants the recipe from her. Years later, long after she’s been made into roast dinner, the remaining animals think it would be nice to have bread again, but no one knows how to make it. The moral of this story is that it’s a pity the hen was such a bitch.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women