A Taste of the Banquet

As I’ve interacted over the years with the marvelous women who create Crone Culture, I’ve often wished for one place where we could see it all: the books, the podcasts, the shows and movies that celebrate women past midlife. A place to learn more about the vibrant women who are pushing back on stereotypes and telling the stories of our lives as we really live them. Because I never found that place, I decided to build it.

Creating CroneHub.org has been a multi-year adventure for my partner Graham Bird and me. Graham is the guy told me a decade ago, “You could launch your own imprint and keep the revenues from your books instead of the royalties.” He made that happen with Baubo Books, our own publishing venue. Graham created the stellafosse.com website and encouraged me to write the essays that evolved into my latest book, Rock On: Power, Sex and Money after 60.

Now he’s the tech wizard (or self-described Web Imp) behind CroneHub.org, which we’ve both worked on in the background for years. The site launched on the first of this month. I love exploring its many riches and hope you will too.

Do you like TV Shows about older women?

As we were building the website, I knew we had to include Happy Valley. The series stars Sarah Lancashire as Catherine Cawood, a powerful police sergeant nearing retirement in Yorkshire, England. Lancashire’s acting is superb. The show is raw and real as it contrasts her professional assertiveness with the complex challenges she faces in her home life, including raising her grandson. This boy is the son of Cawood’s daughter who died after being assaulted by a man who leaves prison near the start of the series—where work and home life collide.

Then I discovered Riot Women, a show about five Yorkshire women who come together to start a punk band while dealing with menopause, grown children, and age discrimination in their work lives. The stories in this series don’t shy away from the most challenging things we’ve lived through to get where we are now, which makes the celebration of our creativity even more powerful. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hungry for music by and about women our age. I practically stood up and sang with the band on their song refrain, “Give. Me. HRT!” Turns out a second series of this show, which features an incredible ensemble cast, is now in production.

And then there’s Last Tango in Halifax about a widowed woman rediscovering a long-lost love in… you guessed it… Yorkshire. Made me wonder what it was about Northern England that inspires so many great stories about post-midlife women.

It turns out all these amazing shows were written by the same Yorkshire woman: screenwriter, director and producer Sally Wainwright, 62. Sally wanted to write from the time she was a child. She worked as a bus driver while attending the University of York, and then wrote for radio and television series that we would call soap operas. Wainwright turned her first career to good use when she wrote Jane Hall, a series about a woman bus driver.

Her miniseries Unforgiven, about a woman released from prison after serving time for shooting two police officers, won multiple awards. She went on to write much more, often about the gritty side of life in Northern England, and to direct as well. Wainwright has said that directorial control gives her the freedom to ensure the scenery and dialog reflects her native Yorkshire.

Sally Wainwright has written that her vibrant women characters arrive in her mind fully formed. From the matriarch who secretly wins the lottery in At Home with the Braithwaites to the nearly invisible schoolteacher who comes up with the punk band in Riot Women, these characters transform after midlife, rediscovering their power and their hidden potential for creativity. These are exactly the kind of women that CroneHub was built for.

There is so much more to discover on the website: Podcasts by and for women after midlife, with marvelous conversations about our journey. Both fiction and nonfiction that celebrates us. Blogs and Substacks with our voice. Movies that showcase us, and more shows like Riot Women. And on top of all that, the women influencers like Sally Wainwright who are making our culture happen.

Many thanks to those of you who have already discovered the site and asked what you can do to help. The main thing is to get the word out. Please do share CroneHub.org with your friends and on your own platform.

CroneHub is designed to be a work in progress. We welcome your ideas and suggestions. If you have a resource to recommend, whether it’s your own book or blog, or another woman’s work that you love, please check the criteria on the About page and send us your suggestions at the link you’ll find there. Let’s build our culture together.