Conference turris::womannotes-v2

Not that I've noticed (at least, not in what I perceive to be the general
culture).

In some cultures, widow-hood was a time of general freedom (I can't remember
where I picked this idea up from). You had done your duty.
	Mez

	It seems that women are the only group that become more
	radical as they age.  For some older women they are now
	embracing the concept of "Crone" and seeing themselves
	as beautiful examples of the third phase of the moon.

	_peggy

		(-)
		 |
			Winter is the season of the Crone.

    I think the crone is just beginning to make a comeback.  In the
    next 20 to 30 yrs as more and more of the females of the baby boomer
    generation become over 60, especially the women who have been involved
    in the feminist movement, society will not be able to push us all
    aside and forget about us the way they have older women in the past.
     Women who have spent their lives being independent and fighting
    for equality are not going to allow that to happen.  I hope.
    
    Lorna
     

    re 950.1
    
    >>In some cultures, widow-hood was a time of general freedom....
    
    I know a couple of women in *this* culture who look forward
    to widow-hood as a time for the freedom to enjoy life. These
    women are in their sixties and have a strong sense of obligation
    to the husbands they resent. They also seem to have a very
    weak sense of obligation to themselves.
    
    Whaddaway to spend a life, eh?
    
    Kathy

    I must live in a different country -- my 79-year-old grandmother,
    81-year-old aunt-in-law, and 74-year-old mother-in-law are all
    healthy, happy, fully functioning women who are still active in
    all facets of life and family.  They have their own interests,
    their own friends, and their own lives.  One's a widow with a
    boyfriend, one's a spinster, and one's married -- but I wouldn't
    say any of them are neglected, pushed aside, or otherwise ignored.
    
    Our neighborhood is about an equal mixture of young families like
    ours and retired grandparents who like to garden and walk the dogs
    just like the rest of us.
    
    --bonnie

    Re .5, Bonnie, I think your relatives are a fortunate minority
    unfortunately.  It seems to me that I've read that statistics show
    that a very large percent of the people living below the poverty
    level in the U.S. are women over 65.  Maybe I'm mistaken but that's
    the impression I've gotten from different things I've read and heard.
     Also, it seems that, even when elderly women are themselves still
    healthy, financially solvent, with many interests, that they tend
    to be discounted and made fun of quite a lot by younger people,
    especially younger men.  I had entered a poem on this very topic
    in 535. (I don't remember the #), by Marge Piercy.  It doesn't seem
    to me that elderly women have been particularly looked up to, as
    a group, in our society, during my lifetime.
    
    Lorna
    

 I think crones are very interesting. They generally have a wealth of 
experience to draw upon. They can be very enlightening. I think my experiences
most closely resemble Bonnie's.

 The Doctah

    I keep wondering how come all these statistics and social trends
    never match up with my experience of life.  I find it hard to
    believe I'm such an anomaly!
    
    --bonnie

Everyone's a robot but you Bonnie, and it's an experiment on your grip on
reality.
	Mez

    My mother always told me I'd get into trouble if I kept building
    these fictional castles in the air and trying to move into them!
    
    --bonnie

    gee Mez,
    
    I thought that last one was aimed at me for a minute
    
    Bonnie J

    Fur supplementary material, see also:
    
    Womannotes-V1
    603 - growing old
    
    Human_Relations
    651 - growing older
    
    -Jody
    

    re: .9
    
    That's utterly ridiculous, Mez.  You shouldn't fill Bonnie's
    head with such silly ideas. . .illy ideas. . .illy ideas. . .illy ideas. . .
    
    whirrrr, pop, fzzzzt. . .

    It looks like some of us have a lot of work to do this afternoon,
    too.
    
    --bonnie

    
    if it turns out, as some have suggested, that older women will be a
    more potent force in the future and if it is also true that women
    tend to get more radical as they get older...
    
    

    
    I have to admit that I don't particularly "look up" to my own
    grandmother (my Dad's mother, that is; my mother's mother I
    never really knew before she died, but she was pretty cool from
    all I've heard).  My Dad's mother lived a very sheltered life and
    never had to support herself for even a *single day* in all her
    83 years of life!
    
    To be fair, she did raise 2 kids, but in my eyes, has wasted her
    life from the age 35 onward (after my Dad and his brother were
    in high school), and that's almost 50 wasted years.  But it's
    definitely how she was raised, and I can't blame her in the least
    for it.  But look up to her?  Want to emulate her?  NO WAY.
    

    It's good to know that some individuals value some crones for their life
    experience, continuing vitality, etc....but I wonder if this is really
    society's attitude towards them? Does society (ours) value them
    for their wisdom and provide any mechanism for the sharing of that
    wisdom on a large scale? If indeed crones have a wealth of knowledge,
    why doesn't someone put that knowledge to social use? Why aren't they 
    dispensing sage advice in the media? Why are all or most of the people 
    who *do* dispense sage advice in the media, male (e.g. Harry
    Reasoner)? How often are crones depicted positively in the media at all? 
    
    And if the answer is that society doesn't like them, *why* doesn't
    it like them,
                                                        
    Dorian

>Does society (ours) value them
>    for their wisdom and provide any mechanism for the sharing of that
>    wisdom on a large scale? 

 There's no mechanism I know of for helping crones share their experiences on
a large scale.

>If indeed crones have a wealth of knowledge,
>    why doesn't someone put that knowledge to social use? 
 
 Lack of motivation.

>Why are all or most of the people 
>    who *do* dispense sage advice in the media, male (e.g. Harry
>    Reasoner)?

 There are not very many female newscasters around Reasoner's age?

 The Doctah

    Just *think* how many crones there'll be when we boomers get to that
    age!  Could be a new political movement on the horizon...
    
    I lost one grandparent when I was young and the other three by the time
    I was twenty.  I miss not having that generation to explore life with. 
    My SO has one grandmother left and I love to talk and be with her.  She
    "threw" her life away for marriage and children after studying art (the
    curse of her generation) but she never lost her spunk.  She continued
    to paint and at the age of 83 started getting commissions again.  Last
    time we visited her we found out that in her prime she had painted
    portraits of the likes of J. Paul Getty and Man O' War.  And she and I
    shared stories of how we had each chased after the men who had mugged
    us.  She's in every way a Georgian belle and, to use her phrase, a
    precious treasure.
    
    Me, I'm counting the grey hairs and looking forward to being a wise old
    crone.
    
    Nancy  

    I wonder whether .17's grandmother really "wasted" 50 years of her
    life simply because she didn't support herself monetarily?  Some
    women do, no doubt, but sometimes the baby-boomer preoccupation
    with money and status makes us overlook the richness of other
    lifestyles and the strength of the quiet woman who chooses to make
    her life quietly.
    
    My mother isn't quite a crone yet, but she's getting there.  She
    gardens.  She reads a lot, and thinks about what she read.  She
    paints.  She sews -- mostly lovely amusing stuffed toys and dolls. 
    She could call them soft sculpture and sell them for a lot of
    money, but she does them for love.  She has her friends.  She has
    always loved working with older people and spends much of her
    spare time driving her elderly friends to doctor's appointments,
    etc.  She works part-time cooking meals for the Senior Center,
    mostly for the social contact and the helpfulness.  
    
    Conventional?  Yes.  Traditional?  Very much so, and she's very
    traditionally feminine.  Weak?  No way.  Wasted years?  I doubt it
    very much and so do the people whose lives she has enriched. 
    
    --bonnie

    re .20:
    
    .17 was me, and my grandmother doesn't *do* anything except
    shop and worry about how she looks and what otther people will
    think and about when her next headache is going to come.
    Unfortunately, this isn't very different from how she's lived
    the last 50 years of her life.
    

    I am absolutely looking forward to being an Outrageous Old Lady.
    Maybe with a Harley. (And *mauve* leathers, eh, Bonnie?) :-)
    
    <I apologize in advance for this, but sometimes I just simply
    cannot help myself>
    
    SO if one of these old women throws together some cream, sugar,
    eggs and flavoring, churns and freezes it, is she an ice-cream crone?
    
    <I know, I know....sorry...> :-}}}
    
    --DE
    

On the word "crone" itself... I find it jarring to see it used in discussions
like this, because the way I learned the word it carries very negative
connotations.  Basically, I think of it as an insult to old women, sort of
like "hag" or "old bag" or whatever...an ugly, whithered, mean, witchy looking
woman, the type who always appear in Bloom Country, beating people over the
heads with umbrellas.

Apparantly others do not share this negative connotation of the word "crone".
(I respect my grandmother, and would never refer to her as a "crone")...so
what connotations do other people get?  Where did I get my warped image of
the word?

D!

    I had never expected a favorable connotation for "crone."  The
    dictionaries on my desk both say "a withered old woman" which is
    neither good nor bad but does not have the connotations expressed here. 
    I've been watching this discussion just to see what the expectations
    and understandings of the word were.
    
    I suppose I should check one of my good dictionaries later.
    
    ed

    re .23, where do we get the warped image of the word "crone" -
    
    from the people who brought us the warped image of the crones
    themselves, i.e. the old women?
    
    It's a little like the word "feminist", isn't it? Or for that matter,
    the word "woman", which I keep noticing that some people (particularly 
    members of the older generation) have trouble saying - they'll use
    all kinds of alternatives first, like "lady" or "gal", before finally
    saying "woman."
    
    I've looked "crone" up in several dictionaries and several say it's
    from the same root as the word "carrion." Mary Daly takes issue
    with that though - I'll try to look up that reference. It makes
    you wonder though, if "crone" is related to "carrion", how come
    it means old woman and not old person? (Though one dictionary did
    give as a second definition, something like an old man who acts
    "useless or womanish" due to senility. Which makes you wonder even more...)
    
    Dorian 

I began trying to like the word Crone when I began attending the WITCH lectures
(Wild, Independant Thinking Crones and Hags). It's a good place to start; it's
a lovely phrase to put it in.
	Mez

    
    I don't know why but "crone" to me means a wise old woman.  It doesn't
    feel negative to me.  Visually, she's the grandmother in a fairy tale. 
    
    CQ

	There are three images of the Goddess:

		Maiden, Mother and Crone

	These refer to the Moon:

		Waxing, Full and Waning

	They also relate to a woman's life:

		before menstration starts, menstration and after menstration
			stops

	Three has always been a "universal" concept of the devine.

	_peggy

		(-)
		 |
			Years do not bring wisdon alone
			living those years usually does.

    Barbara Walker has written an entire book on the subject.  It's
    available in paperback.
    
                                cathy
                                

    Crone (from Gyn/Ecology) n : Great Hag of History, long-lasting
    one; Survivor of the perpetual witchcraze of patriarchy, whose
    status is determined not merely by chronological age, but by
    Crone-logical considerations; one who has Survived early stages
    of the Otheworld Journey and who therefore has Dis-covered depths
    of Courage, Strength, and Wisdom in her Self.
    
    Crone-logical (from Gyn/Ecology) adj : be-ing in accordance with
    the clarifying logic of Crones; able to see through man's
    mysteries/misteries; marked by a refusal to be sidetracked by the
    tedious, tidy, tiny, and ill-logical steps of male methodology/
    methodolatry
    
    					Websters' First New
    					Intergalactic
    					Wickedary
    					of the English Language
    					ISBN 0-8070-6733-4

    re: -.1
    
    Yeek!  I love it!
    
    -Jody
    

    Skip this unless you really love etymologies!
    
    Crone, sb.  Also 4 krone, 6 croen, 6-7 croane, 7 chrone.  [In the
    sense 'old ewe' the word appears to be related to early mod.Du.
    _kronje_, _karonje_, 'adasia, ouis vetula, rejecula' (Kilian),
    believed to be the same word as _karonje_, _kronje_, MDu.
    _caroonje_, _croonje_ carcass, a. NFr. _carogne_ carcass; see
    CARRION.  As applied to a woman, it may be an Eng. transferred
    application of 'old ewe' (although the evidence for the latter does
    not yet carry it back so early); but it was more probably taken
    direct from ONF. _carogne_ (Picard _carone_, Walloon _coronie_) 'a
    cantankerous or mischievous woman', cited by Littre' from 14th c.
    App. rare in the 18th c., till revived by Southey, Scott, and their
    contemporaries]
    
    1.  A withered old woman.
    c 1386 Chaucer _Man of Laws_ This olde Sowdones, this cursed crone
    [v.r. krone].  1572 Gascoigne _Flowers, Divorce Lover_ That croked
    croane.  1586 Warner _Alb. Eng._ Not long the croen can liue. 
    1622-51 Burton _Anat. Mel._ She that was erst a maid as fresh as
    May, is now an old Crone.  1640 Brathwaite _Boulter Lect._ This
    decrepit chrone.  1733 Pope _Ep. Cobhams_ The frugal Crone, whom
    praying priests attend.  1795 Southey _Vis. Maid of Orleans_ There
    stood an aged crone.  1848 Macaulay _Hist. Eng._ An ancient crone at
    war with her whole kind.  1873 W. Black _Pr. Thule_ Some old crone
    hobbling along the pavement.
    
    b.  Rarely applied to a worn-out old man.
    In quot. 1844='old woman', applied contemptuously.
    1630 Brathwaite _Eng. Gentlem._ A miserable crone, who spares when
    reputation bids him spend.  1822 W. Irving _Braceb. Hall_ The old
    crone lived in a hovel...which his master had given him on setting
    him free.  1844 Disraeli _Coningsby_ The Tory part...was held to be
    literally defunct, except by a few old battered crones of office.
    
    2.  An old ewe; a sheep whose teeth are broken off.  Also _crone
    sheep_.
    1552 Huloet, Crone or kebber sheape, not able to be holden or kepte
    forth, adaria, adasia.  1577 Gascoigne _Dulce bellum_ The
    sheepmaster his olde cast croanes can cull.  1767 A. Young _Farmer's
    Lett. People_ Fifteen old crones sold fat, with their lambs.  1805 R. W. 
    Dickson _Pract Agric._ The crones are constantly sold at for or five 
    years old.  1854 _Jrnl R. Agric. Soc._ In many districts, as on the
    heath lands of Norfolk, it often happens that...the centrally placed
    teeth are broken across their bodies, by the rough plants on which
    the sheep graze.  Such animals are called 'crones'.

    I liked the etymologies.  But I do not think I would call my
    grandmother a crone if she had her dictionary around -- or her
    long handled spoon :-).  I looked in a couple of dictionaries
    and got things like "ugly withered witchlike old woman."  Not
    a good connotation at all and I don't think it would help to
    explain the history of the word to her.
    
    ed

    re .30, Mary Daly - 
    
    In her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly also says, "the beauty of strong, creative
    women is 'ugly' by misogynistic standards of 'beauty.' The look
    of female-identified women is 'evil' to those who fear us. As for
    'old,' ageism is a feature of phallic society. For women who have
    transvaluated this, a Crone is one who should be an example of
    strength, courage and wisdom." 
    
    

    So, "Crone" is a good thing to call a very literate older woman but you
    better watch your tongue in some cases!?
    
    ed

    When I was in grad school reading lots of late Medieval and early
    Renaissance drama, some grand and most mediocre to appalling, I
    learned that a lot of words that are heavily loaded with
    connotation today were simply denotative at the time.  "Slut" was
    one of them -- it identified a young, single working woman, it
    didn't comment on her probable morality.  "Crone" was another.  It
    identified a very old woman -- probably not a grandmother since
    not many women who had given birth to children would live to a
    ripe old age.  It didn't appear to have any particular
    connotations of witchiness, bitchiness, or other bad things,
    though it does connote a state of extreme wrinkledness and age. 
    "Hag" was the word for a witch or evil old woman.
    
    This isn't based on research into the etymology, only my sense of
    how the words were actually used in the times just before and
    during Elizabeth I's reign.
    
    --bonnie

    RE: ed
    
    I would say at this point, "Crone" is something you get to call youself
    if you fell you've earned it. Calling someone else one, unless you're
    sure of the territory, might be less-than-advisable. 
    
    I think "Crone" got the same treatment the word "witch" did. And it's
    still not commonly understood that being a witch might only mean that
    you practice the Auld Religion.
    
    RE: Neil
    
    I always thought I wanted a copy of the OED. I guess I still do, but
    I must admit, after about 4 lines of your note.....ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz.
    ;-)
    
    --DE
    

	re: 950.18 (Doctah)

	>> Why are all or most of the people who *do* dispense sage advice in 
	>> the media, male (e.g. Harry Reasoner)?

	> There are not very many female newscasters around Reasoner's age?

	Reminds me of a conversation from a while ago:

	"Imagine a female version of Walter Cronkite.  I.e., this woman
	has the same skills, the same background, the same drive as
	Walter, and also similar physical characteristics, but on a 
	woman, of course.  She has wrinkles, is a little overweight,
	etc.

	Would she *ever* have been put in front of a TV camera?"


	re: 950.26  (Mez)                         

	... the WITCH lectures (Wild, Independant Thinking Crones and Hags). 

	I've wondered what that stood for! 

	Is there a minimum age requirement for attending those lectures? 

								nancy b.

>	Is there a minimum age requirement for attending those lectures? 

:-)
Nope. Actually, I've never noticed anyone that seemed almost definately past
menopause there.
	Mez

    Maybe we need t-shirts that say "Crone in Training."
    
    --bonnie

    Wouldn't Dr. Ruth qualify as a crone, Walter Cronkite substitute?  (I
    know, I know, she didn't have the exposure Walter had in his salad
    days, but judging by what little TV watching I get to do these days,
    they're approximately equal today.)
    
    Karen

    re .42
    
    Well yes she probably would qualify as a crone. Notice, however,
    that her expertise is confined to the (traditionally female-associated)
    subject of sex, rather than politics or the international situation
    or the future of the world...

    re: .43
    
    With a little luck, that will mean that the international
    situation will be less and less important, and the serious
    concerns of the people in our own back yards will finally be taken
    seriously.  
    
    --bonnie

    Re .38: How about Barbara Bush? ;-) She may not have a background of
    professional journalistic training (or does she?), but I bet she could
    handle the job.
    
    Maybe if she gets on the air often enough, it'll start a new trend
    in grandmotherly anchorpersons. And wouldn't that be better than, say,
    Rather?
    
    -b