Jessica L. Fripp, associate professor of art history, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth
Before the word “menopause” was coined in the 1820s, the biological changes that happen to women around the age of fifty were acknowledged by French physicians but poorly understood. But aging, in addition to being a biological process, was also culturally constructed and performed. Literary, theatrical, and visual representations of women during their “old age” were often malicious, focusing on what women lost as they grew older, namely their beauty and the supposed power it gave them. This focus was often at odds with their lived experiences, however. This talk explores how women navigated the gendered expectations of life after forty-five by examining the representations of older women in eighteenth-century visual culture.
Image: Charles-Antoine Coypel, Portrait of the Singer Pierre de Jélyotte in Female Costume, c. 1745, Musée du Louvre, Paris
