The OFN brings you a roundup of the week’s news relevant to Older Women.
Open Letter to NHS chiefs: The importance of the word “woman” in communication about women’s health
The Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender has written an open letter to the NHS chief executives and chief nursing officers of the four UK nations, as well as relevant ministers, calling for the reinstatement of language that uses the word “woman” in NHS communications about women’s health.
‘Things are definitely opening up’: the rise of older female writers
The Guardian reports that older, unpublished writers are now at a premium – with radical, edgy women aged into their 80s particularly sought-after:
Cherry Potts, the founder of the independent publisher Arachne Press, said: “There has been a sea change in publishers’ understanding and acceptance of older women’s experience and their voices, which are no longer dismissed as safe or cosy.
“It started with small presses like us but our ripple is now working through to the industry as a whole,” said Potts, who has recently published debut works from women aged 70 to 85 and in October will publish a menopause-themed anthology.
Importantly, Potts added, there is a “very willing readership” for the work of older women “including that most elusive of reader: the white middle-aged man”.
What is about women in their forties and beyond that seems to enrage – almost everyone?
“A ferocious counter-argument to the demonisation of middle-aged women, Smith’s trenchant volume draws a line from Early Modern witch hunts to the vilification of today’s ‘Karens.'”
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.
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