Hags : 'eloquent, clever and devastating' The Times

by Smith, Victoria | Society & social sciences
Published 02/03/2023 by Little, Brown Book Group (Fleet) in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 368 pages
244 x 163 x 34mm | 586g

'Rich, complex and witty' ROSE GEORGE, SPECTATOR'Devastating and clever' BEL MOONEY, DAILY MAIL'Could not be more necessary' RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVERWhat 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. 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.