"Growing Old"
Craik published A Woman’s Thoughts About Women when she was 32 years old. She married her husband George Lillie Craik at age 39 and a few years later adopted a baby girl named Dorothy in 1869. Craik started her family life much later than the majority of women in that time period, depicting the value she placed on establishing her writing career and individuality before starting a family.
In the chapter “Growing Old,” Craik describes her position on the beauty of aging and how instead of fearing age, women should embrace the wisdom and greater self-understanding that comes with time. Speaking to women of all social classes, Craik conveys how middle-aged women have greater independence and better know themselves as individuals: “she will be mistress over herself—she will have learned to understand herself, mentally and bodily” (Craik 264). In spite of recognizing that it is a difficult time in a woman’s life when she realizes that she is “not so young as she used to be,” especially for single women, Craik unfolds the pleasures of growing old (Craik 245). She states how women have a “greater capacity for usefulness in middle life than in any previous portion of her existence,” and this statement in particular is depicted through Craik’s personal life and her decision to create a family in the later half of her life (Craik 263).
Even though Craik did marry, she writes that a woman doesn’t need a man to be happy. Instead, she conveys that building personal character and confidence are truly invaluable to establishing selfhood:
“Would that, instead of educating our young girls with the notion that they are to be wives, or nothing-—matrons, with an acknowledged position and duties, or with no position and duties at all—we could instill into them the principle that, above and before all, they are to be women —women, whose character is of their own making, and whose lot lies in their own hands” (Craik 266).