A Woman's Place is Celebrating Hags
Fri 3 Mar 2023 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM GMT
Online, Zoom
Description
#WPUKhags Woman's Place UK is delighted to celebrate the launch of Victoria Smith's latest book: Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women.
Victoria will discuss her book with Observer columnist Sonia Sodha during the live webinar and will answer questions from attendees. Kick-off your weekend by tuning-in to this conversation between two leading feminist writers and join the online chat, which is always lively!
Pre-order your copy here.
Victoria Smith is a brilliant writer and polemicist, whose articles perfectly articulate the anger so many of us feel about the current wave of misogyny directed in particular at older women. Her hotly-anticipated book asks why it is that middle-aged women are now treated with active dislike, and regarded by those mired in identity politics as morally inferior bigots who deserve to be ignored, pitied or abused. There is even, she points out, a dismissive insult, coined to describe the middle-aged woman: Karen.
In Hags, described by novelist Lissa Evans as “riveting, vital and impossible to read without rage,” Victoria Smith traces a line from the antipathy towards older women that characterised the witch hunts of the 1450s to 1700s to the vitriol heaped on the same group today. In doing so, she seeks to answer the question: what is it about middle-aged women that seems to enrage people so much?
The event promises to be an invigorating and entertaining discussion between two of the UK’s most interesting feminist writers and thinkers.
Victoria Smith is a regular contributor to the Critic, writing on women’s issues, parenting and mental health. Her work has also appeared in the New Statesman, the Independent and Unherd. Her newsletter, The OK Karen, looks at midlife women’s experiences of feminism, and she tweets
@glosswitch. She holds a PhD in German literature, with a particular interest in Romanticism, dark fairy tales and the fantastic. She lives in Cheltenham with her family.
Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer and columnist at the Observer. She also makes documentaries on economic and social issues for Radio 4 and appears regularly on the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 as a political commentator. Prior to her career in journalism, Sonia spent ten years working in policy and politics: initially for the think tanks IPPR and Demos, where she led programmes of work on education and social policy; then as a senior policy adviser to Ed Miliband when he was leader of the Labour party; and then in a series of strategic roles for charities including Which?, the Dartington Social Research Unit and Generation Change. She is a trustee of the Trust for London (and chairs one of its two grant-making committees) and the Indigo Trust.