Clodagh Finn: Getting there can be horrendous, but let's look forward to our magnificent days
In the BBC comedy drama series Fleabag, Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas, centre) delivered the excellent 'horrendous/magnificent' speech about the menopause. Picture: Kevin Baker
It is profoundly uplifting to find that, at age 54-and-a-half, I’m still too young for something.
During the week, a notification flashed up from , the business website, announcing that it was seeking nominations for its inaugural list of female solopreneurs over the age of 60 to watch in 2022.
There’s still time to nominate your over-60 captain of industry — submissions are accepted until February 11. Alas, there’s a small fly in the ointment. Your female brand or business founder has to have reached over $1m in sales in the last year.
The average age of people who founded high-growth startups is actually 45. https://t.co/MbRHqW7IFX
— Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) January 7, 2022
But, as this competition shows, those women are out there. Also, this upbeat call to find them changes the narrative — at last. Entrepreneurship is often seen as male and the preserve of the young, but most successful entrepreneurs start their companies around the age of 45, according to the .
Championing older businesswomen reminds me of that magnificent scene in the British comedy drama when Kristin Scott Thomas gave the best speech I’ve ever heard about the menopause.
It is the most wonderful thing in the world, she says. Yes, she admits, there are horrors and your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get hot and no one cares, but then you’re free:
It is a sign of real progress that we are finally starting to acknowledge the ‘horrendous’ part of the menopause; a conversation that has raised awareness and made issues such as the shortage of HRT headline news.
But let’s not forget about the ‘magnificent’ afterlife too. The menopause might mark the end of fertility but it also heralds a beginning. It is, it seems to me, a kind of second adolescence with a similar promise of a new horizon once the hormone storm passes over.
That idea is not new. In 1857, American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “We shall not be in our prime before 50 and after that we shall be good for 20 years at least.”
It’s a message that has been lost, if indeed it was ever fully appreciated. Either way, it’s time to revive that flame of hope and pass it on to this generation of older women.
That brings me back to the list of high-achieving over-60 businesswomen. Just because you are not a successful person in business at 54-and-a-half doesn’t mean that you won’t be one at 60, or 60-plus.
Am I dreaming (read: Delirious)? Yes, of course I am, but that doesn’t stop me spending a lot of my time thinking of ways to punch a hole through the age stereotypes that hem us in. They affect all of us, but women in particular.
The most praiseworthy thing you can do as a 50-something woman is to not look like a 50-something woman. The accolades flow if you succeed in shaving a few years off your appearance.
Maybe that explains why L’Oréal’s double-edged phrase — “because you’re worth it” — has endured for 50 years. Yes, for half a century we have been listening to self-criticism dressed up as self-care.
But how seductive it all is.
During lockdown, I was mesmerised by US actor and producer Eva Longoria, who gave us lessons in how to pronounce ‘hyaluronic acid’.
She repeated its five-syllable beat — hy-a-lur-on-ic acid — like the lyric of some catchy song that burrowed its way into my consciousness, reinforcing the idea that self-worth means spending money on products designed to smooth and conceal.
Then again, who doesn’t want to look well? I don’t suppose we’ll ever be free of the desire to put the best side out — and that’s not entirely a bad thing — though the irony in all of it is that once women reach, say 50, they become invisible.
Listen to actors who say it’s impossible to find good female roles once they are over 40, not to mind 50. Or those who hesitate to put their age on a CV. Experience is a plus, but somehow the years spent acquiring it are not. That is just one of the traps and contradictions facing us as we age.
I’d argue, however, that invisibility can be a superpower. You are beyond the public gaze, for one thing, and what a gloriously happy and free place that is.
Consider Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s self-reliant, clever, and inconspicuous detective who blends into the background as she solves multiple crimes. Though, you don’t have to resort to fiction to find examples of older women proving that menopause is not the end.
What of Mary Delany (1700-1788), a woman who started her life’s work at age 72? She wrote: “How can people say we grow indifferent as we grow old? It is just the reverse…”
She was, in the words of her gifted biographer Molly Peacock, “a fan of Handel, a sometime dinner partner of satirist Jonathan Swift, a wearer of green-hooped satin gowns”, and the 18th-century inventor of a precursor of what we now know as collage.
There are endless examples from history. Mary Ann McCracken, the social reformer and anti-slavery campaigner was, at 88, still distributing anti-slavery leaflets to emigrants leaving Belfast docks. As she used to say:
Flash-forward to the present and you’ll find several examples of older people leading rich and productive lives.
This week, I read of a woman in her 90s who is still serving pints. Margaret Carmody, 92, is a pub landlady with no intention of retiring as she enters her 66th year of pulling pints, the report said.
It went on to describe her as the oldest publican in Co Limerick, if not the country. The tone was celebratory — though accounts of older working people are often patronising.
It's the perfect time, then, to think of inaugurating an Insider-style list to recognise that there is plenty of life left after menopause. What about a media campaign running under the heading, ‘Women over 60 to watch in 2022’?
You’ve seen that kind of thing numerous times, but those lists usually alert us to the wondrous work being done by the under-20s, the under-30s, and sometimes even the under-40s.
Let’s broaden the scope. Look around you and take a moment to appreciate all that older people, and in particular women, do. It’s in your own interest because more of us will spend longer as an over-50 than ever before.
Many of the children born this year will live to be close to 100. We can’t condemn them to fade to grey when they are only half way through their lives.
We shouldn’t condemn ourselves to living in that dull netherworld either. Let’s push the boundaries and open up possibilities. It’s up to us to shape a future that has a meaningful place for older women, and indeed men.
And remember, the best is yet to come if only we will let it.
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