Summary

The author begins this section with a recollection of a female elder she encountered at an all-woman public baths when she was younger – specifically, her recollection of the woman’s aged body, including her dangling labia. She reflects on the rejection of elder females, and of elder female bodies, by both society and literature, referring to a number of similar women in her past (and in her writing, particularly in this book) as her “sappy crones” (57). She describes one such woman in particular detail: one of her graduate school teachers, Christina Crosby, a strong and attractive woman whose privacy about her personal life and whose teaching methods were both eventually disrupted by students and the public who felt that these aspects of her example were inappropriate to the feminism-based ideas she was teaching.

This leads the author into a discussion of the...