SOURCE: Rubenstein, Roberta. “Feminism, Eros and Coming of Age.” Frontiers 22, no. 2 (June 2001): 1-19.

In the following essay, Rubenstein explores how feminist authors have portrayed female aging and maturity in their works, particularly in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and French's My Summer with George.

Nearly a half century ago, Simone de Beauvoir observed that the interval between “maturity” and “old age” is an especially problematic time for women. In her view, women who have outgrown their once clearly delimited social and biological functions as mates and mothers find no clear cultural scripts to guide them during the years and decades that succeed procreation and maternity. As she phrased it:

From the day a woman consents to growing old, her situation changes. Up to that time she was still a young woman, intent on struggling against a misfortune that was mysteriously disfiguring and deforming her; now she becomes a different...