In March 2020, on the cusp of Covid, Londoner Eleanor Mills was made redundant from her position in a British media company. She had been a senior executive for 23 years. Now, aged 49, she was out of a job.
Mills had always been the breadwinner in her family. But it wasn’t simply the loss of a steady income that threw the soon-to-turn-50-year-old into despair. Mills had fought her way up through the often patriarchal ranks of the English print media establishment. She had been appointed editorial director at the Sunday Times in 2012, one of a minority of women to get to the table with the big boys. Overnight her power and status disappeared.
Four years on from that time, Mills is publishing her first book – part memoir, part feminist manifesto – called Much More to Come: Lessons on the Mayhem and Magnificence of Midlife. She’s also become chief executive of her own specialist media consultancy, In Her Space; and set up Noon, a vibrant online platform and community that showcases inspiring stories of transformation and reinvention designed to empower women in midlife.
When I first did the research and I realised the huge monetary power of the queenager pound, I thought: this is a no-brainer
“We did a big piece of research at Noon,” says Mills, on video call from her London kitchen. “We found that over half of women, by the time they hit 50, have been through at least five massive life events: divorce, bereavement, redundancy, bankruptcy, some kind of mental or physical abuse, elderly parents needing care, caring for a disabled child, the empty nest, having a teenager who has an anxiety or mental health problem. And then you put in women’s health issues: the menopause; [some] women get breast cancer at this age. Often they hit together. It’s massively destabilising.”
There’s one fascinating upside to Noon’s research: “Our forged in fire research shows that the women who have been through the most intense midlife clusterf**cks – combining the greatest number of events – and who have survived, are ultimately the happiest.”
The midlife crisis, according to Mills, is really a midlife chrysalis. Hence her coining of the term “queenager” to describe women aged 45-74. In a Noon focus group, one of the “midlife ladies” described life in her 50s as “feeling like a teenager, but in my own house, with good sheets and proper tea”.
Mills writes that in Jamaica, where she has spent a lot of time, older women are referred to as “queens”.
“‘Queenager’ is a rebrand of women in midlife,” says Mills. “This time can be whatever you want it to be. There’s a sense with queenagerhood that you come into your power, as who you really are. You know what you want and what your centre is.”
“One of the moments that was very powerful for me,” says Mills, “was when I was at a Noon circle [a face-to-face meet-up for her organisation] talking about the queenagers who go swimming at Hampstead Heath pond, and the beauty of these older bodies. Quite a few of the women said to me, ‘That’s my edge – seeing beauty in older women’s bodies.’ It’s so sad that their way of looking at other women has been so conditioned by what they’ve been taught that men want – the male lens that I refer to in the book, which is one of the most important framing pieces of my argument.
“There’s a huge amount of internalised misogyny because women have been taught to see themselves through the male lens, so they despise their own wrinkles or the things that men don’t like. That’s an absolutely classic piece of patriarchal conditioning.”
Women in midlife are finding just how liberating it is to simply let go of those two narrow categories denoting fertility and what Mills calls “f**ckability”.
“You say, I can live my life in technicolour – I can be all these other things. And I think that’s very frightening to the male lens. Because remember, patriarchy is about control. It’s about power. All that conditioning is like us being groomed by patriarchy to be its useful handmaidens.”
When I started looking at beauty and fashion magazines, I found they’re all owned and controlled by men
“We have to do our own thing,” says Mills. “When I set up my business – and it was so interesting to me – because I’d been a media executive, and I’ve always been interested in the business side of media, as well as telling stories – and when I first did the research and I realised the huge monetary power of the queenager pound, I thought: this is a no-brainer. What I’ll do is just go and talk to a few [advertising] businesses and say, these women, 45-65, are behind 90 per cent of all household consumer spending decisions. And they’re gonna go, of course you’re right, we should be featuring lots more of them.
“But the reality was, even though they know that, they still don’t want to see us. The people making all the decisions within marketing and advertising and all the rest of it – the beauty and perfume and fashion industry – are like the military-industrial complex, but for women. It’s set up to make women spend an absolute fortune on grooming and stuff that they don’t really need, because it makes all these men money.
“When I started looking at beauty and fashion magazines, I found they’re all owned and controlled by men. They often have lots of women further down the ranks, but when you get up to the top, they’re mostly male-run, male-owned, male-managed.
“What makes women attractive – what makes any of us attractive – is confidence, energy, vitality. But you can’t put that in a bottle and sell it. So they say it’s having blonde hair, or a certain kind of skin colour. It’s all a massive con. I feel really passionate about this – about getting women to see how they’re being constantly made to feel bad about themselves.”
“At our Noon circles and retreats, there is such a sense of empowerment amongst the women,” says Mills. “They’ve been feeling like they’re on the scrap heap, and they realise that everybody else is feeling like that, too. You look around at these incredible women doing incredible things, and you say, you’re not on the scrap heap – you’re amazing! And then the women see their own amazingness.
“You see women coming into the circles in the putty phase, in the chrysalis, going ‘Oh God, who am I, what am I?’ And the other women are supporting them and nurturing them. You can see the women who are a bit further along on the journey, or others who are coming in who are where you were a few months ago. There’s this incredible wisdom and gentleness and love and community which is shared amongst the women, because everyone recognises that it’s not just their own individual problem; this is something systemic. Everybody is going through a version of it.”
What are her views on the forefronting of the menopause over the last few years? “I’m slightly ambivalent,” she says. “I think it’s incredibly important that [the subject of] menopause is no longer taboo, and that women who need it get HRT. I’m completely on board with all the health and equality bit.
[ Menopause: ‘We need to swing the pendulum to the middle and normalise it’Opens in new window ]
“Where I differ is that I don’t want women to be defined by their biology. There’s a patriarchal tendency to reduce women to biological parts. I don’t think it’s an accident that the only bit of this whole queenager thing which has been picked up by corporations is the menopause. It’s another way to write off older women. Just as we become free of our hormones, and, in fact, get a testosterone surge, – just as we start to be a bit less ‘pleasing’ – we get put into a hot pink sweaty menopause box.
“That’s why I talk about queenagers, not walking hot flushes. I don’t want to be seen through a menopausal lens, in the same way I don’t want to be seen through a male lens; and I think the male lens quite likes seeing older women through a menopausal lens, because [women can be dismissed as] medically dysfunctional, not rational, hormonal – a bit of a disaster.”
As a queenager myself, I’d love to bottle Eleanor Mills, so I could take a dose of her every morning with my vitamins. “There’s never been a better time to be a queenager,” she says. “Many of us have this huge bonus of this extra bit of life, with a health span where we can do the becoming, and tap into whatever it is that we haven’t done with our lives thus far.
“We’re coming into our prime. Many other cultures around the world know this, and our culture knew it – before it was taken away from us by the patriarchy, which was always scared of the power of the wise woman. Our great motto is, it’s never too late, and you’re never too old, to become the woman you’ve always wanted to be.”
Much More to Come: Lessons on the Mayhem and Magnificence of Midlife by Eleanor Mills is published by HQ. noon.co.uk
