I still see a million hot take articles on what women should be at certain ages: “Things You Shouldn’t Wear After Forty”, “Women Over Thirty Should Not Do This” seem to trickle into my feed like a schoolyard bully. And not surprising, there was a fair amount of this age based sermonizing going on in the Regency era.
The excerpt above is from the 1811 Mirror of Graces and I think is at once empowering and repressive. Its that self-effacing, yet hardly self-aware internalized misogyny that is still so rampant in the western world.
