Women Writers’ Fictional, Autobiographical, and Epistolary Responses to Medical Discourses About Women’s Ageing, 1900–1930

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers how other kinds of women writers, who were not medical researchers, doctors, or midwives, responded to medical discourses about their ageing during the period of particular French fascination with women’s reproductive ageing in the late nineteenth century and up to 1930. For the generation of educated women born in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching midlife between 1880 and 1930, the medical concepts of their ‘critical age’ around the ages of 45–50 years—when their ageing suddenly began but which they should also not worry about, because that too would make them sick—was now widely disseminated in French society. The chapter compares four women writers who were all born and raised in the nineteenth century and who wrote about ageing in fictional, epistolary, or autobiographical ways through the peak period of French medical discourses of the critical age, the âge de retour and menopause. Section Headings: • Yvette Guilbert, Les Demi-vieilles, 1902 •Comtesse de Tramar (Marie-Fanny de Lamarque de Lagarrigue), L’Amour obligatoire, 1900 • Marthe Bertheaume (Anne Darcanne-Mouroux), L’Âge mystique, 1928 • Colette, La Naissance du jour, 1928