What is a Queenager?

What is a Queenager?

We use that word a lot here on NOON and it’s gained attention both here and across the pond. About 18 months after I started writing my Queenager newsletter and building this community, the word was picked up as one of the word’s of the year for 2022 by Cambridge Dictionary and has been featured on Bloomberg and The Washington Post as well as here in the UK media.

But what exactly is a Queenager and why do midlife women need a new name?

We are a different generation

For one, we midlife women – aka Queenagers – are a new phenomenon.

There have never been women like us before in history. We are the first generation to be born into a world where women have some notion of equality (I know, there is a long way to go. But we’ve come a long way too.)

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We were expected to work and half of us are the main breadwinners in our families. Many of us are parents but nearly a third of university-educated women aged 45-60 don’t have children. In 2019 women over-40 started earning more money than women under-40 for the first time ever. That means as a group we have financial agency, choices and options that women before us did not.

So, what is a Queenager?

As middle-aged women we’ve had a lot of life already under the bridge – but because we have benefitted from huge scientific changes and advances in lifespan, according to the statistics, we’ve probably got as much time again to come. So rather than feeling done, washed up, invisible (as I’m afraid too many women feel at midlife because we live in a culture that heroes youth), I wanted a word that immediately makes this part of our lives feel fresh and exciting.

What age is a queenager?

This is the great thing about being a Queenager – there is no upper age limit! In general we think of our Queenager lives beginning from our mid-40s and continuing on from there. It’s all about the next act of life, when our priorities reorganise and we want to start living a different way.

What the term ‘Queenager’ embodies

I like our new branding because I feel it captures both the sense of our experience, our wisdom, our dignity, our grace, our sense of ourselves as leaders and elders at midlife.

But it also touches on the excitement of a new phase – of the shift that is possible from what we have been from the previous period of age 25 to 50 into a new incarnation at our halfway point. After all, in The 100 Year Life (if you haven’t read Linda Gratton & Andrew Scott’s book with that title, then do!) 50 is only halfway through. (That’s also why I called my site and community NOON – the midpoint.)

How our community defines ‘Queenager’

I asked that exact question on our social media a while back. Here’s some of what you said:

“The best thing about being a Queenager is losing the requirement to be a people pleaser – you can be your authentic self!”

“Totally agree that your 50s are the most exciting period. You are not spinning the same number of plates when you are building your career and family together. You have more time for yourself.”

“I feel I have moved into my life’s true purpose, doing the work I love and I’m at my best in terms of mastery and I’m still learning.”

“Feeling comfortable in my own skin, knowing myself deeply including my limitations and being clear on my priorities and where I can make an impact”.

7 key elements that define being a Queenager (we think)

1. Purpose: This is a key to queenager-dom. Discovering your purpose right now, living that purpose, serving it, enacting it every day. We may not necessarily achieve our purpose every day, but we’re more focussed on it throughout our days – and better equipped with the tools to lean into our purpose and achieve it.
2. Not giving a monkeys what other people think: I interviewed Trinny for the NOON Book Club and Liz Earle for The Telegraph. Both great Queenagers. Both talked about how in their 50s they developed the confidence to go beyond the naysayers – to even gain vigour from proving them wrong
3. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway: I was terrified when I lost the cosy berth of my big job, became an entrepreneur at 50 and started NOON … but it is the best thing I ever did. Being a Queenager doesn’t mean not being scared. It means not letting the fear stop you
4. Letting go: There is a fair amount of shedding that goes with being a Queenager. It sounds harsh, but we have to do this: sloughing off the people who don’t serve you, coming to terms with what aspects of your life are the result of parental/social expectation, discovering what’s actually truly YOU and what you love – that is the work of the Queenager. By the way, this is a painful process. “Letting go” sounds like a ribbon slipping out of your fingers. In my experience it’s more like having limbs lopped off without anaesthetic. Painful but definitely worth it in the end! It’s a pruning… drastic but necessary.
5. Being kind: Having enough empathy and experience to intuit what the people you love need and providing it for them because you want to. For instance – one of my best friends is estranged from her family and her mother died before she was ten. She is now a single mum of two. Every Christmas she makes a huge effort to get her kids great presents, stockings, all the trimmings. I realised she hadn’t had a Christmas stocking herself for 40 years: So every Christmas now I make her one. The first time I did it, she wept with happiness. I think there is something very Queenager about both realising our limitations and boundaries but also going the extra mile when we know we can do something that will mean a huge amount to others.
6. Feeling that sense of “If not now, when?”: I meet so many Queenagers who say, “I’ve always want to do xxxx.” Well, if that’s you, then now is the time…
7. Appreciating nature: For me, my #queenager years are tied up with swimming in the pond in Hampstead every day … and a bigger appreciation not just of the natural world but of the fact that we are all connected. There are no “others”. The more we recognise that we are all in this together and that everything matters, that we are all citizens of one finite planet and are all human beings sharing this experience, the better!

I hope that explains a bit about Queenager and why we use it. By the time we hit 45/50/55/60/65/70 and beyond (there is no upper age limit to queenager-dom) we need to give ourselves a free pass to be whatever we want to be. That’s really the point of being a #queenager!

It’s an optimistic term that changes the narrative to one more reflective or reality and fit for purpose.

It creates an instant rebrand of this moment, this generation, this time – telling a new, more optimistic and positive story about what older women are capable of and “what we’re for”.

We are not done or invisible. We are #queenagers moving into a fabulous third act.

That is the very essence of my Queenager purpose and everything we do at NOON.

– Eleanor Mills