Introduction

This edited volume is an invitation to rethink many of our assumptions about age, women, and gender. While it is certainly the case that ‘women and children’ have all too often been run together in situations that are too numerous to recount, it is equally true that feminist politics does not have a ready-made articulation of the significance of age for thinking about gender and women more specifically. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory – class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, and from a range of perspectives – questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined. While it is certainly true that subjects like mothering are as old as feminism itself, it is also true that the child and its correlates – the infant and the adolescent as distinct from the adult – are much more recent subjects of gender and feminist inquiry.