Maga Woman Magazine - issue #1

Who is the
Maga Woman?
Written by Angela Counsel
Over the past few months I have
found myself wondering where
I fit in society. I am a mid 50s,
menopausal woman who still has
children at school, I run a business
and I certainly don’t think that I am ready for
the retirement village yet. But at my age I actually
could move into a retirement village, I can
get insurance through Aust. Pensioners Insurance
and most corporate marketers would consider
that my opinion doesn’t count because
they direct their marketing to either women a
15 years younger or 15 years older than me.
After speaking to quite a few women who are
of a similar age to me I realised that I was not
alone feeling like this. There seems to be a segment
of society who has been forgotten.
This sent me on a quest
to find out more.
If we go way back to Greek mythology, there
was a goddess known as the Triple Goddess
(Persephone, Demeter and Hecate) which
represented the stages of a woman’s life. The
3 phases were – maiden, mother and crone.
The maiden phase was birth to menarche (first
period), the mother phase was child birth until
menopause and the crone was menopause
until death. It is important to remember that
in the past women lived to an average age of
45 years, had their first child at 14 and was a
grandmother at around 30 years. When you
understand this lifecycle you can understand
why there were only 3 life phases.
Life has changed a lot since then.
Life has changed since our mother’s and grandmother’s
generation. Women today are having
their children later in life and it is not unusual
for a woman to be moving into menopause at
the same time as her daughter is getting her
first period, this can lead to ‘interesting’ times in
the household. Women today are working and
running businesses well past their 60s, in fact
some of the most successful women in business,
politics and the arts are over the age of
50. I knew there was another stage of life that
hadn’t been a part of our history, there was a
stage between mother and crone and I wanted
to find out if anyone had defined this.
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Maga Women Magazine