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. Victoria 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.

Praise

‘Brilliantly and unrelentingly exposes all the weasel ways in which ageist misogyny enables regressive beliefs to be recast as progressive… a future classic, up there with Joan Smith’s Misogynies and Susan Faludi’s Backlash.’
Rachel Cooke, The Observer

‘Hags is rich and complex and witty and cleverer than I am.’
Rose George, The Spectator