From 'The Space Crone'
Ursula K Le Guin, 1976
From The Space Crone (1976, Ursula K Le Guin):
But the change is not trivial, and I wonder how many women are brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it. Well, at least I don’t get the Curse any more, they say, and the only reason I felt so depressed sometimes was hormones. Now I’m myself again. But this is to evade the real challenge, and to lose, not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a Crone.
In the old days women who survived long enough to attain the menopause more often accepted the challenge. They had, after all, had practice. They had already changed their life radically once before, when they ceased to be virgins and became mature women/wives/matrons/mothers/mistresses/whores/etc. This change involved not only the physiological alterations of puberty—the shift from barren childhood to fruitful maturity—but a socially recognized alteration of being: a change of condition from the sacred to the profane.
With the secularization of virginity now complete, so that the once awesome term “virgin” is now a sneer or at best a slightly dated word for a person who hasn’t copulated yet, the opportunity of gaining or regaining the dangerous-sacred condition of being at the Second Change has ceased to be apparent.
[…]
The entire life of a woman from ten or twelve through seventy or eighty has become secular, uniform, changeless. As there is no longer any virtue in virginity, so there is no longer any meaning in menopause. It requires fanatical determination now to become a Crone.
Women have thus, by imitating the life condition of men, surrendered a very strong position of their own. Men are afraid of virgins but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin’s virginity: fucking. Men are afraid of Crones, so afraid of them that their cure for virginity fails them; they know it won’t work. Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.
[…]
Old age is not virginity but a third and new condition; the virgin must be celibate but the crone need not. Loss of fertility does not mean loss of desire and fulfillmnet. But it does entail a change, a change involving matters even more important—if I may venture a heresy—than sex.
The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. […] That pregnancy is long, that labor is hard. Only one is harder, and that’s the final one, the one that everyone else must also suffer and perform.
