Description

‘Rich, complex and witty’ ROSE GEORGE, SPECTATOR

‘Devastating and clever’ BEL MOONEY, DAILY MAIL

‘Could not be more necessary’ RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER

What is about women in their forties and beyond that seems to enrage – almost everyone?

In the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings: the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused.

In Hags, Victoria Smith asks why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme – care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex – and explores it in relation to middle-aged women’s beliefs, bodies, histories and choices. Smith traces the attitudes she describes through history, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so very now. The result is a book that is absorbing, insightful, witty and bang on time.

Publisher Review

Her book traces the hatred and fear of the middle-aged woman back through history . . . The greatest joy of Hags is its lively erudition . . . This eloquent, clever and devastating book describes the last remaining acceptable prejudice, one that is now even posited as progress: the loathing of older women -- Janice Turner * The Times * My polemic of the year . . . a book that could not be more necessary (a sword and a shield) in the current climate -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * Riveting, vital and impossible to read without rage -- Lissa Evans, author of Old Baggage