Hags

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2023

Victoria Smith

$32.99

Paperback

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English

FLEET
28 February 2023

Society & Social Sciences; Feminism & feminist theory; Coping with old age

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

In the last few years, as identity politics has 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.

Hags asks the question 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 and choices. Victoria Smith traces the attitudes she describes back to the same anxieties about older women that drove Early Modern witch hunts, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so powerful today. The demonisation of hags has never felt more now.

Victoria Smith has decided in this book that she will be the Karen so nobody else has to be, and she ends on a positive note, exploring potential solutions which can benefit all women, hags and hags-in-waiting.

By: Victoria Smith
Imprint: FLEET
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 230mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 32mm
Weight: 441g
ISBN: 9780349726977
ISBN 10: 0349726973
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 28 February 2023
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Victoria Smith is a regular contributor to the New Statesman and the Independent, focusing on women's issues, parenting and mental health. Her newsletter, The OK Karen, about midlife women's experiences of feminism, was launched last year, and she tweets @glosswitch. She lives in Cheltenham with her family.

Reviews for Hags: SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2023

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