Isabel Hilton is joined by Lyndal Roper, Marina Warner and others to discuss the older woman. To what extent does the depiction of witches in art and literature still influence our perception of elderly women? And, in an ageing society where women live longest, should elderly women be embracing their broomsticks or reaching for the surgeon's knife?
Duration:
40 minutes
Programme Details
The Crone: the wise woman, keeper of knowledge or the shunned older women embodied in the popular consciousness as the witch?
Just who has defined the cultural position of older women in our society and why? And what does the future hold as more and more women live beyond the reproduction years?
In Night Waves: Undercurrents we examine how we treat older women and whether our attitudes may be influenced by primitive fears we’re not even aware of. Are women vain and silly to put themselves under the surgeon’s knife in the quest for youthful looks or are they responding pragmatically to a society which marginalises women who are past reproductive age?
Do older women in the west feel powerless and if they do is that true in other cultures?
And we hear about surprising new research which shows that grandmothers might actually have not only a useful social role but a biological role in the continuation of our species.
Isabel Hilton is joined by Lyndal Roper, author of Witch Craze novelist and mythographer Marina Warner; the psychotherapist Andrew Samuels, and the anthropologist Olivia Harris.
That's all on Night Waves: Undercurrents at 9.30pm.
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