.. A More Certain Age ..

A more certain age.

Anne Perkins
Monday 8 December 2008





Let's hear it for Selina Scott and her anti-ageism victory over Channel Five. First, you'll remember, they asked her to replace Natasha Kaplinsky as news presenter while the toothsome thirtysomething was off on maternity leave, and then changed their minds. Instead, they've recruited a 28 year old. Ms Scott, 57, settled out of court for £250,000. Good work.
I certainly don't begrudge her the cash. But the truth is, there has never been a better time to be a fiftysomething woman, and not only because there's a law against ageism now. You only have to look at the reports about student beauty pageants to realise (although you probably already had) that the pressure on young women to look good, and the definition of what looking good is, has eased off not one jot in the past 30 years.

Only now, you're expected to be clever with it.
The joyous thing about being more than 50 is that, at last, none of it matters. You might have spent the previous 35 years telling yourself that it didn't matter what you looked like, but you never really believed it. That made it even more complicated. You felt bad because you didn't look like Madonna, and you felt bad because you cared that you didn't look like Madonna.

For all the exhortation of the feminist movement, the evidence all around was that youth and beauty were the indispensible attributes of success for women. What was inescapable culturally was reinforced by all those men, and quite a lot of the women, at work. I say that with humble apologies to some of the really great women I worked for. Thank you for trying to tell me.

Now, on the sunlit uplands of middle age (and just look at Madonna, to see how sunlit), even those of us who have never been brave enough to thumb our noses at the world feel confident that it just doesn't matter to anyone but us. At last, we are free – unchained from the atavistic compulsion to look like a promising childbearer, beyond (well, speaking personally) the need to pick up a man to reaffirm one's worth.

Barbara Castle was 51 when she became a cabinet minister for the first time, in 1964, and experienced a surge of energy that was all about power – political power, yes, but also the power of autonomy. And as her career slowed down, 10 years later, she recognised it (enviously) in another woman: Margaret Thatcher, aged 49. It didn't stop either of them trading on their femininity. But, in middle age, femininity becomes a mere facet of personality, which entitles you to wear a short skirt and think about climate change at the same time.