Dartmouth Events

Before the word “menopause” was coined in the 1820s, the biological changes that happen to women around the age of 50 were acknowledged by French physicians but poorly understood. But aging is more than a biological process. “Old age” and the expectations that came with it were also culturally constructed and performed. Literary, theatrical, and visual representations of women during their “critical time” were often malicious, focusing on what women had to lose as they grew older, namely their beauty and the supposed power it gave them. The focus on what was lost in the later decades of women’s lives was often at odds with their lived experiences. This talk explores how women navigated the gendered expectations of life after 45 by examining the representations of older women in eighteenth-century visual culture.

Dr. Jessica Fripp is associate professor of eighteenth-century art history and coordinator of the undergraduate art history program at Texas Christian University. She is the author of Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France (University of Delaware Press, 2021) and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Her next project is an interdisciplinary study of the representation of menopausal and elderly women in eighteenth-century French visual culture. Her first essay on this topic was published in the volume Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth-Century (University of Delaware Press, 2022). Her research has been supported by the Kress Foundation, the French Embassy’s Chateaubriand fellowship, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.

Co-sponsored by the Early Modern Incubator @Dartmouth.