Hags

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO PRIZE 2023 ''A book that could not be more necessary'' Observer ''Eloquent, clever and devastating'' The Times ''Deftly illustrates how ageist misogyny remains an acceptable prejudice'' Guardian What is about women in middle-age 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