As the 2024 presidential election was picking up steam, one of JD Vance’s lightening comments resurfaced in which he complained that the country was soon to be run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their lives.” You know what happened next. Women without and with children, and with and without cats, jumped into the conversation, reminding the world that childless cat ladies are both awesome and rarely miserable.
The next part of his comment wasn’t often included, but it reflected an equally significant part of the same cultural construct – our collective dismissal of women without children. He said, “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to the people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” He, like most of our society, couldn’t fathom what would make childfree women give a damn about our homeland.
Vance’s comments and the widespread cultural sentiment they echoed brought about a meme-storm in the weeks and months following, though I’m not sure how much the attention moved the needle. We know it didn’t change the minds of large swaths of voters, but it also likely didn’t change the way we think about women who aren’t having or actively raising children all that much either.
Those sentiments – the disregard and even disdain for non-childbearing women – is so embedded in our cultural framework that it will take much more to shift the paradigm. Those sentiments are perhaps nowhere as blatant as in the way we see (or rather, don’t see) older women. But how do we shift a whole paradigm? And is it worth trying to do it directly?
These are questions I’ve been thinking about generally in the last few months, and I’ve found solace and guidance in the wisdom of adrienne marie brown, the social activist who introduced me to the concept of fractals. She explains that in nature, small patterns repeat and repeat at larger and larger scales. We tend to focus on the large-scale version of the pattern – what’s happening out there or at the highest levels – rather than what is happening in the small scale, right here in our own lives. She asks us to think about the smallest iteration of the large scale change we want to see.
I’ve been finding fractal opportunities all over my own life since learning this idea, and I want to see if we can practice one collectively here as we consider not just how the world (out there) thinks about older women, but about how we do (in here). Because it’s not just the world writ large that is missing out on the beauty, wonder, wisdom, and power of older women – it may be all of us.
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By all accounts, 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot lived a relatively ordinary life prior to the discovery she made of being repeatedly assaulted at the behest of her husband. She had worked for an electric company, sang in a choir, and spent time with her grandchildren. She didn’t ask to be propelled into the international spotlight last year, but when she made the decision to let her case be heard in public, her face quickly became a symbol of courage for women.
The details of Gisèle’s case were stunning in their horror. With her willingness for a public trial and to attend almost every day of the grueling four months, the world learned that she had been subjected to rape by over 50 men while drugged and unconscious, all orchestrated by her husband. Images of Gisèle during the trial flooded the internet, and her sorrowful but steadfast eyes came to represent for women, particularly survivors of sexual violence, a refusal to internalize toxic emotions. As she declared in court, “It’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”
Honoring the experiences of millions of women around the world who decide – or are forced – to remain anonymous in these circumstances, I found myself wondering what had allowed Gisèle to come forward in such a public way. I had to wonder how her age and life experiences factored into her willingness and ability to become a poster-woman for rejecting shame. I’ll never know the answer to that – unless she writes the memoir I’m hoping for – but I can fantasize that it has something to do with being at the infamous no-fucks-left-to-give point in her life.
She acknowledged that her age made her realize she had limited time to heal. “I’m not sure my life will be long enough to recover from this,” she shared. And so I wonder if the decision to use her experience to unburden others helped her to find meaning in a way that, I hope, gives her a slice of the peace she deserves. Gisèle herself pointed to her grandchildren as her inspiration, saying that, “It’s also for them that I led this fight.”
We are not owed women like Gisèle, women who offer us up their most private turmoils to change the cultural narrative, but I am so deeply grateful we have them.
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There are groups of researchers whose science is to study the very question of why postmenopausal women exist. The line of inquiry makes me curious if there are academics studying why any other demographic groups exist. And at the same time, I do understand what sparks the question. There are hardly any other species on earth in which females continue on after they can no longer reproduce. I might suggest we just call it a miracle that we have postmenopausal women, but apparently not everyone is satisfied with that.
Two other species that have these rare postmenopausal females are orcas and chimpanzees. Studies of each have given us clues as to the potential function of this biological curiosity.
Researchers studying orcas have focused primarily on what they call the grandmother hypothesis. This theory suggests that females beyond reproductive age contribute to the health and well-being of the species by supporting their daughters in raising their own offspring. Because it becomes biologically costly for older females to continue to reproduce themselves, they stop and instead contribute to the protection and nourishment of their grandoffspring. In orca communities, the impact of this support is tangible: if a Pacific Northwest orca grandmother dies, her grandbabies are 4.5 times more likely to die.
This grandmother effect doesn’t translate exactly to humans, but it certainly has its echoes. As I wrote about in my piece on the grandparent gap, parents and their children without grandparents in their lives are at a significant disadvantage. Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, was struck by how productive the older women in a Tanzanian tribe of hunter-gatherers were. She theorized that the contributions of grandmothers was what allowed greater reproduction by their children. Studies have then confirmed: when women live near their mothers, they have more children and lower child mortality.
This theory makes sense, of course, and one can see how older women could have a direct positive impact through their grandmothering. But it also feels like it stays centered in a comfortable paradigm – the one in which women’s value ultimately is support to support childbearing and rearing. This isn’t inherently wrong, of course, and one could argue that the survival of a species is ultimately any human’s core biological value.
But it’s why I was intrigued to read about the studies on Ngogo chimpanzees, who have long post-menopausal lives but a different behavior pattern. Chimpanzees are, along with bonobos, our closest living relatives, and so they hold a lot of fascinating information for us. And like increasing number of their human relatives, these chimps actually live farther apart from their daughters who move away, meaning the grandmother hypothesis doesn’t as fully account for their long lives. The alternative explanation, then, is that the older female chimps stop having babies to both stop competing for reproductive resources (it’s costly to bear little ones, as we all well know) and to be able to shift their own resources to supporting the tribe as a whole.
We’re pretty deep into evolutionary biology here, so let me bring us back. What we learn from our animal relatives who also have long post-reproductive lives is two-fold: older females play an important role in the very survival of youth and they have a later-in-life imperative to support the wellbeing of the whole community. These ladies are far from just hanging on after their “usefulness” has evaporated. As the grandma orcas who in fact are the leaders of their packs teach us, getting older is just getting started.
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I’ve always found myself hungry for the conversation of older women. Growing up, I’d sit at the top of the basement stairs, where I was assumed to be playing or watching TV, and I’d listen in on the chatter of my mother sitting around our oval kitchen table with her two sisters. My great-grandmother lived her final months with us in that same small house, and in the earliest years, I’d hear her and my grandmother also there. They’d talk for hours about the latest parish gossip, national politics, and their own struggling marriages. In the rare instances when I accidentally made myself known, I’d be shooed back down the stairs, only to creep back up minutes later.
As I got older, I found this same titillation and solace by watching endless hours of the Oprah Winfrey Show and reading Maya Angelou memoirs. Outside of school, I spent significantly more time with these mentors I’d never meet than with my peers. There was something I could only seem to find in the stories of these women who had been to lonely places and returned. I was myself “old” for my age, perhaps another way of saying a little too isolated and introspective, but I fell in love with older women.
As all of these thoughts about older women have been stewing around in my mind recently, I’ve been considering why these relationships – both in real life and on the page and screen – have been so vital. I’ve wanted to excavate what they’ve given me, how they’ve shaped me.
There are the more obvious and perhaps practical ways, though even those can too easily go unacknowledged. Moms several steps ahead on their perilous parenting journeys have been lifelines, rescuing me from despairing beliefs like, “I will never go to the bathroom alone again,” to, “My kids are most absolutely going to end up in jail.” They passed on bouncy seats and dollhouses, parenting books and no-spill sippy cup recommendations. They helped me laugh in the midst of the grocery store meltdown and not spiral when my kids needed their own mental health support.
But the influence of older women in my life has gone far beyond uplifting me as a mom. In fact, many of the women who have had the deepest impact are not mothers themselves, or at least that’s not been the basis of our connection. The grandmother effect is incomplete.
In many ways, the most profound impact of older women on me has come from simply observing them living their own unapologetic lives. Because there are things that older women know that may not be impossible, but at least very difficult to know, without the gift and burden of a longer, more complicated life.
The nuances of these complicated lives are sometimes dramatic and sometimes mundane, but they’ve stretched across enough distance and time to reveal things deep and true. When I try to distill them, here is some of what I find:
The dissipation of the male gaze is at first disorienting, and then liberating. Some have shared that the invisibility they initially felt in public spaces at first felt like ceasing to exist, so intertwined our culture has made attention and existence. But they soon realized the power of traversing the world outside of the validation of men and others, and it felt like being reborn.
They’ve made enough mistakes to know that very few will actually kill you. They’ve stopped using those mistakes to lambast themselves, instead getting curious about what they can learn. They don’t fear taking risks because the idea of failing spectacularly has actually become intriguing.
They know that only one or two things can really matter, and everything else is a distraction. The specifics of those things vary, of course, but older women know that if everything matters, nothing matters. So they are picky about where they devote their time and energy.
They know that no one else is coming to save them. Even for those who have had the good fortune of enriching relationships, older women know that their own future is theirs and theirs alone. Whether through the fading of friendships or the loss of partner, they know that on some level, their relationship with themselves is the most enduring one they will have.
They know that time is limited to share the creative energies inside of them. Jamie Lee Curtis emphasized this when she shared that at age, 64, she’d “had the most creative life in the last year that I’ve had in my entire life.” For so many older women, the long-awaited liberation from other societally-expected roles finally allows for deeper creative expression – which frankly sounds amazing.
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At the end of the day, politicians can mouth off about how little they value the women they don’t want to sleep with all they want. They do it because they know they are the ones over which they have no control.
Older women have been a gift to my life, and they are a gift to society writ large. But the irony might be that their most powerful gift to us comes from their giving up on the idea of having to be a damn gift. By losing the so-called privilege of the world’s hyperfocus and an obsession with their uteruses, they’ve found new footing.
I recognize, by the way, that I’ve been referring to older women as one singular species – a characterization that’s not real or fair. There are, of course, plenty of women in older age who because of their circumstances or other limitations have not found enlightenment or freedom from cultural norms. Perhaps what I’m actually trying to describe is the gift of liberated older women. And “older,” of course, is all relative.
With that said, if there is a call to action here, it would be to cultivate relationships in your life with these women. Whether it’s a mom with kids just a few years older than yours or your spunky neighbor or a more senior mentor in your field, older women are often the most under-utilized resource we have in any community. They will enrich your life, I promise. And if you’re quite lucky, one day you’ll be in this prestigious club as well.
But don’t expect them to give you their time or their hard-earned wisdom just because you want it. We are not owed their emotional or mental labor – a lesson that we would do well to learn.
