"In Praise of Older Women" Topic

"Sex is not just the preserve of the young. Large-scale studies of 18th-century sexuality have not, however, been attuned to this fact and have positioned young people at the centre of historical narratives which claim to speak for ‘society' at large. This lack of historiographical engagement is particularly noticeable when examining women's sexuality, which was deeply affected by age. The milestones of menarche, childbirth and the menopause marked a changing sexual body, while the value placed on women's physical and aesthetic qualities powerfully coloured the meanings of ageing. Older women are not only neglected; an appreciation of how their sexuality changed throughout the life cycle is also rarely found. Though some historians of sexuality have begun to pay more attention to ‘old' women – variously defined as being over 50, 55, or 60 – few have examined the treatment and experiences of what could be termed ‘middle-aged' women, or investigated how their sexuality developed during a life cycle so often marked by marriage and motherhood. This ‘middle-age' was a crucially important period, in which women experienced key sexual, physical and social changes.

Middle-aged women of the 18th century can be defined as those between and including the ages of 30 and 50. Just as there was no ‘universal threshold of old age', so, too, there was no universal threshold for middle age. The term was rarely used in this period, but the absence of universal or particular vocabularies does not preclude historians from exploring these subjects, or from suggesting general numerical boundaries. For women, 30 heralded a new phase of life. Most women would have been married by this age: as the historians E.A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield have shown, the mean age of first marriage for women in 1700-49 was 26.2 years, falling to 24.9 years in 1750-99. Further, although 24.9 per cent of people never married in 1701, this fell to 10.7 per cent in 1751 and 6.8 per cent in 1801. Thus, the majority of women over 30 were wives in the 18th century and increasingly so. Many were also mothers: with limited contraception, women often began childbearing early in their marriages, with Wrigley and Schofield putting the mean age of maternity at 32. Thirty was arguably, then, the lower threshold for women's progress into a ‘middle-age' shaped, most often, by marriage and motherhood. Alternately, by 50, most women had passed out of this middle-age period, and were more clearly seen as ‘old'. Most were thought to have gone through the menopause and their physical and sexual capacities were emphatically seen as on the decline…"
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Amicalement
Armand

I love older women!!! I'm married to one.

of course she didn't start out that way