Guest Post by Ann Dávila Cardinal

Floppy straw hat…
Pale blue, loose linen clothes…
Walking along a sunny beach in her capri pants…
A gentle ocean breeze tousling her blue-white curls…

For the most part, that’s how women of my age are portrayed in the media. Yet here I sit, Iggy Pop t-shirt, tattoos all up and down my arms, black dyed streaks in my gray hair, and huge silver hoop earrings. A far cry from the coastal grandma aesthetic. Mine is more… maximalist Latine with a hint of punk rock. In truth? I know more women who are not like our beach front grandma described above and I don’t see women like them in mainstream media. The way older women are portrayed (for the purposes of this piece I’m looking at those of us who are fifty and older) hasn’t really changed much in my sixty-one years of life, and I think it’s about time we, as women writers, shake things up.

Women of a “Certain Age”

During the pandemic I was one of those millions of people who rediscovered Paulina Porizkova on social media. I had always thought of her as a supermodel who was Ric Ocasek’s wife, a beautiful woman who graced the cover of so many magazines in the 80s and 90s. But I came to find out, she’s so much more: mother, writer, activist. During that dark time she rose to the surface of many of our Instagram feeds, making dinner, living her isolated life, and posing her 50+ glorious self in bikinis and getting dressed, both with and without makeup. But what caught our attention, was the way she handled the mostly male trolls who labeled her “old and ugly” or said she wasn’t aging “gracefully.” She confronted them without being angry or confrontational but rather by starting a movement encouraging women to embrace their aging selves, and post photos of themselves with the hashtag “old & ugly.” It was a public calling out of the ridiculous and one-sided standards women of “a certain age” are subjected to.

Now there are many such influencers—my favorite being Heidi Clements, another writer and style icon who records herself getting dressed each day with a voiceover of her musings about life as a woman in her 50s—but the very public support afforded Paulina back during those times made so many of us feel seen, understood, and appreciated for who we are. As a result, her memoir No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful was published. Now there are more and more silver-haired influencers appearing on social media. These changes are also coming to the literary world, albeit slowly, but they’re coming.

50+ Women in Novels

When we see a woman 50+ in mainstream novels, they have traditionally been portrayed as dotty comic relief, or proper ladies who solve crimes with their book club. But let’s be real: we are children of the sixties! We came of age during a revolutionary time when women were finally abe to get a credit card in their name, get appointed to the supreme court, and until last year, have agency over our own bodies. A woman is running for president, there is a good chance your physician or lawyer is a woman, and we basically run publishing. Yet we are still told we’re invisible, less attractive, and unhireable. I remember one troll asking Paulina why she didn’t just move closer to her grandchildren and stop posting bathing suit shots. Thing is? Many of us have spent lifetimes taking care of other people before ourselves—children, spouses, parents. A friend of mine, an academic who put two kids through college by working two jobs, just retired in her mid 70s. Her son called her and said, “Congratulations, Mom. Now your full-time job is to take care of my children.” Excuse me? Who decided this role for all of us? If that’s what you choose to do, power to you, but the expectation that we all just take care of another generation of young children is unreasonable. I mean, where is grandpa in all this? Playing golf?

But I digress.

Though we can all come up with classic women in literature who defy expectations like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes, they are grossly outnumbered by the ones that paint older women as stereotypically passive, care-taking beings, who sacrifice their own goals and happiness for the benefit of others. Changing this standard is up to those of us who write. It should be our calling to portray these wise women, the elders of our gender, in a way that shatters the established stereotypes. A few recent examples that I appreciate are Claire Lombardo’s character Julia Ames in Same as It Ever Was, the totally bad ass assassins of Deanna Raybourn’s irreverent Killers of a Certain Age, or the fabulous and hard-working Tova Sullivan in Shelby Van Pelt’s joyous novel Remarkably Bright Creatures.

We Need No Wings

For my part, the desire to see more women like me and my friends was fuel for the fire that became Tere Sanchez, the sixty-year-old protagonist of my latest novel, We Need No Wings. I wanted to consider this time of life from a different angle, without the assumptions about our gender’s next best destinies. In the story, Tere’s husband died a year ago, her son is grown and raising a family of his own on the other side of the country, and Tere is having trouble returning to her tenured faculty position at the university.

That is until she starts levitating.

As you can imagine, she freaks out, especially when she finds she can’t control it, and it happens in increasingly awkward and dangerous situations. She is reminded that her Puerto Rican family is descended from a sibling of Saint Teresa of Ávila—the badass Spanish rabble-rousing mystic and writer who was known to levitate—and Tere decides she better figure out what the hell is happening before she loses the little that is left of her life and her sanity. So, she takes a desperate pilgrimage to Ávila, Spain to commune with her long dead relative, and while there has to face her grief and figure out who she is now that she’s no longer a wife, a mother of a dependent, or an academic. The book asks the question: what’s left after all those identities that have defined her life are stripped away?

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Though Tere’s situation is dramatic—as novels are wont to be—many of us experience this kind of seismic shift after fifty, when we are reassessing our lives, shedding yet another chrysalis while heading into the winter of our existence. Recently, I described the novel as a coming-of-age story as I don’t believe any of us comes of age only once. I think it can happen several times over the course of a woman’s life, but in particular, when we have less years in front of us than we do behind.

So, here is my challenge to you, SheWriters: if your work includes characters or subjects that are women of the age group in question, why not write them uniquely? If you are not of that age, talk to a woman who is. Break the mold. But if your character finds herself on that beach in pastel colors or chasing after the next generation of your family, that’s the story you need to tell. But if they choose to go back to college, start a new career, end a marriage, or get a big ass tattoo? Then I hope they approach it with unbridled joy. Because I think women of our generation have spent enough time bridled, and we need the choice to run… or rather, to fly.