Conceptualizing Gender Metamorphosis

Hags, Bags, Silly Old Women
 and Crones

							Gail McCabe
Word Count: 7,452

Gendered Bodies.
I am not usually given to looking at my body in mirrors or, for that matter, examining myself closely in the flesh. You might well ask why that is and not so very long ago, I would have replied that “My body is fat and ugly!  And I hate it!”  As a veteran of the ‘gender wars,’ my body bears the scars of many sieges. So now, I figure my body fat as a badge of honor won through many bouts of deprivation and excess; a cyclical pattern of starving, bingeing and purging that I attribute, in large part, to my efforts to ‘live up’ to social expectations for female gender in Western tradition. 
I am referring here to the pressure for women’s bodies to conform to an idealized thin body image, despite strong evidence that all efforts to do so are counterproductive, resulting in obesity or even worse, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia.  Of course, there are a number of other expectations for females that are also fixed in the body and require rigorous, often painful and pathological self-fashioning: breast implantation, face lifting, tummy tucking and electrolysis, for example.  A discussion of these goes well beyond the scope of this essay. I mention my own particular brand of body manipulation only because it is the primary way that I have experienced my female body and self as alienated products of gender oppression. 
Here, my contention is that the heroic efforts women make toward fashioning their bodies evolve from a social configuration that conflates female gender with the body. So that women can only gain social, political and economic purchase through the alienation of their own subjectivity and the reconfiguration of their own bodies as sexualized objects, maternal vessels and/or as domestic workers caring for other human bodies. 
Once in a while now, when I do look in the mirror or catch a glimpse of myself in a store window, I am taken aback on several counts.  Firstly, I think myself more attractive now than ever before. I have beautiful long gray hair, a few wrinkles around the eyes and mouth that lend character to my round, moon face, and although my eyes are slightly bleary, the gaze is still sharp.  I find my countenance and my body have not changed so drastically although I do bear the inevitable marks of aging. In fact, I am larger than ever. Yet, I have undergone a transformation that results in strong satisfaction with my bodily proportions: from “fat and repulsive” to “solid and attractive,” from an inner me trapped in an outer casing to a powerful integrated entity. It’s as if I have undergone a metamorphosis akin to that of any moth or butterfly: from lowly earth-bound larva to full-fledged adult, wings outspread, flying free, from earth unbound. 
This essay is an exploration of my changing state configured through the lens of gender and grounded in the experience of other shape-shifters such as I, collectively subsumed under the sign of Crone. I begin with a discussion of gender modalities as a basis for theorizing gender metamor-phosis. My analysis is aimed at troubling the gender binaries and binary sex categories so deeply entrenched and naturalized in Western socio-cultural understandings of the body. How useful is the concept of metamorphosis for configuring gender and what are the dangers inherent in the metaphor?  In the next section on Crones, Berdaches and other thirds, I briefly examine the debate on third genders and gender transmogrification. How well does the experience of these others reinforce a model of gender metamorphosis?  The final section explores the lived experience of Crones through feminist Crone re-constructions.  Here, I argue that re-inventing the Crone is materializing gender as a cultural, spiritual and political project. For women, at the menopause, Crone metamorphosis presents a powerful alternative to becoming a hag, bag or silly, old woman in the Western tradition. 
Gender metamorphosis and other modalities.
 In her article, “Gender: Division or Comparison?,” Marilyn Strathearn describes two modes of “gender differentiation” that reflect two divergent configurations of gender (1994: 40).  The first mode configures gender as either male or female; two distinct and separate ideal types ascribed at birth to an anatomically particularized sexed body.  In that configuration, “differentiation is made manifest in comparison” (Ibid., 40) and individuals will work to conform more or less to the gender ascribed at birth.  Moreover, the distinctiveness of the two genders infuses a discourse of difference and competitiveness that has been characterized as ‘the battle of the sexes.’ Strathearn suggests that in Euro-American society the mode for configuring gender is comparative (Ibid., 38).
	In the second mode of “gender differentiation,” individuals are conceptualized as androgynous entities encompassing both male and female gender in a single entity. This model configures gender as a whole or a continuum and individual persons as “socially composite, and divisible, entities” (Ibid., 39).  The attribution of gendered traits, female or male, is accomplished through division of the whole, so that the work of the sexes is “to divide themselves off from each other” (Ibid., 40).  Strathearn relies on a number of cross-cultural ethnographic studies as evidence for the gender androgyny model and the case for gender as division.
	Given my intentions of troubling gender binaries, Strathearn’s delineation of two distinct forms of gender differentiation, comparison and division is quite significant. Gender as division is a useful construction that collapses the notion of gender as a binary configuration, since ostensibly, division could eventuate in any number of categories.  Moreover, the occurrence of both male and female gender within a single individual is significant.  Unfortunately, Strathearn does not enumerate a model with more than two categories in her review of empirical data. 
Of greater significance for my purposes is the conceptual framework for gender that informs Strathearn’s arguments. Here, gender is figured as a social construction, a historically specific accomplishment negotiated through any number of culturally specific practices, and Strathearn cites a wealth of empirical data in support of her contention. Ivan Illich proposes a similar conceptual frame-work in his analysis of gender. “Social gender [is an] eminently local and time-bound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances and conditions that prevent them from saying, doing, desiring, or perceiving “the same thing’ ” (Illich, 1982: 20).  Illich envisions duality as an “asym-metric complementarity” that will eventuate in equality for men and women. This is opposed to the “polarization of homogeneous characteristics” constituted through the “regime of economic sex,” a configuration of capital accumulation (1982: 20).  Illich contends that “[o]nly the transmogrification of the commons into resources can be compared to that of gender into sex” (Ibid., 21). 
Illich’s framework is somewhat problematic in that it further entrenches a gender binary; duality is integral to his configuration and his notion of ‘asymmetric complementarity’ seems naïve in the face of lived experience. Gender binaries seem always to have privileged males at the expense of females. Moreover, it seems that such hierarchical configurations emerge from antiquity and can hardly be attributed solely to capital accumulation.  Nevertheless, Illich’s configuration of social gender is useful for my purposes on two counts. Like Strathearn, he defines gender as locally constituted, emerging through socio-cultural practices.  More significantly, he suggests that political and economic considerations can and do underlie the constitution of gender at the level of the social and he explains the entrenchment of sex as just such a configuration. His explanation is corroborated in the work of Laqueur, Foucault, and Fox Keller, all of whom have documented the turn from a dynamic and fluid gender configuration to a more stratified sex binary with the Enlightenment, the turn to modernity and industrial capitalism. 
	Now let us turn to my notion of gender as metamorphosis. The metamorphosis model is one of development through stages.  While each stage is apparently separate and self-contained, in the life of a moth or butterfly, one stage leads to the next through genetic programming.  In some respects, this developmental model is analogous to the experience of physical maturation through the life span of human beings. Women, in particular, experience remarkable physiological changes, which might be compared to those of the butterfly.  Beginning with the menarche, women experience menstrual cycles, which continue somewhat regularly unless the woman becomes pregnant or experiences some other episode until the menopause or cessation of menses, which follows a period of gradual abatement, the perio-menopause.   
The dangers of configuring gender as a social metamorphosis grounded in the physiology of women is patently clear. The model comes dangerously close to the biological determinism that historically has characterized women as sexualized objects and maternal vessels and constrained their life activities within that characterization.  Moreover, it is biological determinism that constructs postmenopausal women as hags, bags or silly, old women, who have outlived their ‘biological usefulness.’  Nevertheless, a key strength of the model lies in its reconfiguration of the aging female body from biological obsolescence to phenomenal productivity on the ground of shifting shapes, gender metamorphosis, transformation, and new beginnings. Moreover, this is an interpretation validated by the women, themselves, through their own narratives and practical action agendas.  
The notion of Crone as gender metamorphosis can also be read through the work of Judith Butler as a subversion of Western sex/gender normative systems.  According to Butler’s theory, “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time … through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 1989: 88). If the body “assumes its sex in the culturally mandated practices of everyday life,” possibilities present for “restyling that body in non-normative and occasionally subversive ways” (Morris, 1995: 573). 
Crones, Berdaches and other thirds.
In this section, I want to briefly touch on the concept of third genders as they have been characterized in Western scholarly tradition. More specifically, I want to examine the usefulness of these studies for my inquiry? According to Morris, Laqueur’s “monumental” history, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud characterizes the body as a site of ambiguity in Western tradition (Morris, 1995: 569). Indeed, Laqueur does document numerous experiences of shape-shifting, spontaneous sex and gender transformation as well as an evolving discursive configuration of sex and gender categories grounded in Western social and cultural contexts. 
Morris also reviews the debate emerging from theories of gender performance, practice and performativity as applied in Western social contexts and cross-culturally through anthropological and ethnographic research on Berdache and other third gender configurations.  Morris problematizes the notion of third genders when they are applied to “various forms of multiple and ironic identification … .” (Ibid., 581). In figuring sex and gender, she argues that “thirdness and transgendering may be better understood as forms of identity that are embedded within other sets of gendered relations in a variety of ways and in a range of temporalities” (Ibid., 581).  
I take her point as a cautionary note that ‘third gender’ configurations cannot simply be extrapolated from the socio-cultural formations in which they present and applied to the ground of a universal theory of gender. Such interpretations are too often mediated through the lens of locally situated knowledges and cultural practices. Moreover, Morris argues that such practices emerge from “[a] fantasy of utterly unfettered, purely elastic gender” that can eventuate in the “ironic effacement of gender itself” a sort of “ ‘genderal’ emptiness” (Ibid.: 585).  “… when does that emptiness become the vehicle for an asocial, ahistorical idealism?” she asks (Ibid., 586).  Certainly, her question calls for an investigation that goes beyond the scope of my paper.  Nevertheless, I take seriously her reservations and address them through the use of “grounded theory” methodology for exploring the lived experience of Crones without reference to other possible ‘thirds’ (Kirby and McKenna, 1989; Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). 
Crone Re-constructions.
Crone archetypes.  When I talk about Crone re-construction, I am suggesting that the project to re-invent the Crone involves reclaiming a conceptual entity with a prior history and refiguring that entity  for present purposes. This leads us to interrogate the origins of the Crone. Why Crone? What is a Crone? What is the source of the Crone concept?  Here, I want to tease out just one of a number of possible Crone chronicles or originary narratives. I am not suggesting that all Crones are Goddess worshippers or that they experience gender metamorphosis through a spiritual conduit. In fact, I have chosen the work of Carol Christ from a number of possible exigeses of the Goddess because Christ approaches her subject from a number of perspectives and she discusses the implications of each.  
In her essay, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological and Political Reflections,” Christ explains the feminist turn to Goddess worship as an expression of women’s need for spiritual empowerment in the face of exclusion within the Judaeo-Christian tradition most prevalent in traditional Western religious observance.  She uses an evocative quote to convey the move from despair to joy experienced with the recognition of self as part of the ‘sacred’   
At the close of Ntozake Shange’s stupendously successful Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf,” a tall beautiful black woman rises from despair to cry out, “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely” (Christ and Plaskow, 
1992: 273).

Christ documents women’s experience of corporeal rejection as well. Women’s bodies have also been denigrated as “more carnal, fleshy, and earthy than the culture-creating males” (Christ and Plaskow, 1992: 279).  Above all, feminist resurrections of the Goddess aim to facilitate “the process of naming and reclaiming the female body and its cycles and processes” (Ibid. 281). This process is accomplished symbolically through the configuration of the three aspects of the Goddess: “youth, maturity and age, or maiden, mother, and crone” (Ibid. 281) and in practice through ritual celebrations. Here, Christ characterizes the Crone aspect as well as the ritual observances that infuse the aspect with meaning: 
“Z. Budapest believes that the crone aspect of the Goddess is predominant in the fall, especially at Hallowe’en, an ancient holiday. On this day, the wisdom of the old woman is celebrated, and it is also recognized that the old must die so that the new can be born” (Ibid.: 282).
So the Crone can be read as an appropriation of the symbolic; Crone is the gynepomorphic archetype of the Crone aspect of the Goddess.  Moreover, her archetypal configuration is symbolically invested with the qualities represented by the third aspect of the Goddess.  The Crone is the “wise, old woman who knows from experience what life is about, the woman whose closeness to her own death gives her a distance and perspective on the problems of life” (Christ and Plaskow, 1992: 281).  
It is this process of naming and reclaiming the female body that underlies my own analysis of Crone metamorphosis as ‘the reconfiguration of the aging female body as a phenomenal variation of corporeal existence that might ground social gender’ (Refer to p.5, this paper).  In the lived experience of women such as myself, the Crone reflects “positive, joyful affirmation of the female body and its cycles and acceptance of aging and death as well as life” (Christ and Plaskow, 1992: 282).  From a practical action perspective, Crones collectively aim to deconstruct the discursive taboos that invest female bodily functions, menstruation, pregnancy and birth, and particularly, menopause with negative or destructive connotations.  The notion that ‘life ends at menopause,’ so women should resist aging is particularly noxious to the Crone.
Christ describes a particularly stirring summer solstice invented by women worshipping the Goddess:
The women simulated a birth canal and birthed each other into their circle. They raised power by placing their hands on each other’s bellies and chanting together. Finally they marked each other’s faces with rich, dark menstrual blood saying, ‘This is the blood that promises renewal. This is the blood that promises sustenance. This is the blood that promises life.’ From hidden dirty secret to symbol of the life power of the Goddess, women’s blood has come full circle (1992: 282).   

The blood of women has not been so celebrated in Western tradition as it is within the circles of Goddess worship.  Quite clearly, collective practices, such as ritual magic, spiritual celebration and spell casting are implicated in empowerment. Here, Christ claims that “the positive valuation of will” is at issue.  “Women who celebrate in Goddess circles believe they can achieve their wills in the world … women is encouraged to know her will, to believe that her will is valid, and to believe that her will can be achieved in the world” (Ibid., 283-4).  This is powerful ideology for women whose  will power has been grossly devalued in a patriarchal context.
	In my discussion thus far, I have represented the Crone through her most benign and positive image as a ‘wise, old women.”  I would be remiss if I were to leave out what Elinor Gadon describes as the “dark side of the feminine,” the linkages between the Crone, the Hag and the Witch:

When the balance changed, the dark side of the feminine was also suppressed. The Goddess had been a model of women’s nature in all its fullness. The irrational, the chaotic and the destructive, which had been acknowledged when the Goddess reigned supreme, were split off from divinity and became feared. Women could no longer express their complete psychic reality (in Rountree, 1997: 213). 

D.J. Conway’s writings emerging from New Age religious traditions also reflect this darker side of the Crone. In her book, Maiden, Mother and Crone, she describes the Crone aspect of the Goddess as the “least understood and most feared of the three aspects” (Conway, 1994: 77). Conway raises the links between the Crone and death that seem to underlie much of the fear and antipathy aimed at Crone constructions as well as older women. 

She has been called the Terrible Mother, the Hag, the Dark Mother, the Wise One. Because she deals with death and the end of cycles most people tend to avoid this face of the Goddess. Black is her color, and sometimes dark blue and the deepest of purples. Black is the absorber of all light, the color of darkness where all life rests before rebirth. The Crone is winter, night, outer space, the abyss, menopause, advancement of age, wisdom, counsel, the gateway to death and reincarnation, and the Initiator into the deepest of Mysteries and prophecies (Conway, 1994: 77). 

In Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess through Myth, Art, and Tarot, Vicki Noble provides a particularly, rich description of the Crone, which I have reproduced in Appendix II of this paper along with Noble’s rendering of the Crone as a tarot card.  While I am not ascribing any particular academic validity to her descriptions or to Conway’s, at the very least, their work is reflective of Crone folklore as it is circulated through the discursive space of modern Crone collectivities.  The following quote from Noble exemplifies the more sinister aspects of the Crone:

The Crone is the Hag who knows how to call down the power of the moon, to converse with spirits and work magical spells. She is Hekate, Greek goddess of the underworld and mother of the witches, who predated Olympian gods and probably originated in Thrace, a province known for its magic (Noble, 1983: 76). 
Now consider the equally ominous image of the spider-woman Crone in the following reference. 

… The Crone is the spinster, the creative spider-woman who weaves the world from her own substance. “Weaving a cocoon out of the substance of one’s own life is the necessary prerequisite for the emergence of psyche: in withdrawing we prepare a way out.” (Ibid., 77).
I found this particular reference particularly meaningful on at least three levels. Firstly, the description is quite reflective of the schizophrenogenic construction of women in Western traditions. There is the paradoxical representation of the spider-woman as ominous; her kiss quite poisonous; but at the same time, she is represented as fashioning the world from her own substance. Without her creative enterprise, all life would cease. Secondly, her activities in weaving the cocoon from which her psyche can emerge is quite startlingly evocative of the gender metamorphosis process as I envision it, although I was not privy to this quotation at the outset of my inquiry.  Thirdly, the reference offers some insights into the proliferation of birthing metaphors used by Crones. Quite clearly, the spider-woman in the reference is creating the entire world from her own substance and not simply reproducing humankind.  My contention is that almost invariably, Crones take up birthing terminology in this metaphorical sense in order to generalize women’s creative powers beyond stereotypical paradigms of biological motherhood. They are rarely intended to glorify women’s maternal roles as essential to women’s nature, although certainly Crones want to include and valorize those roles as one aspect of women’s lives and their creative potential.
In the light of the Conway and Noble representations, it makes perfect sense that such a powerful being as the Crone needed to be contained in the crucible of fire or the less threatening discursive spaces of maiden, mother and silly, old woman.  Barbara Walker also delves into the roots of “man’s inhumanity to woman” in her book, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power.  She attributes man’s “slaughter of the mothers and grandmothers of his race: the so-called witch mania” to a sense of male inferiority in the face of the “female archetype of power” and to their experience of that power in their relationships with their own mothers (Walker, 1985: 125-135).  She also alludes to the political nature of the witch-hunts, which focused on women 

living free of male control: self-supporting single women, or widows. There are records of widows so determined to escape another stretch in the prison of marriage, as they saw it, that they fought off amorous suitors as firmly as they could. Men also persecuted women of any unusual skill, knowledge, of physical ability that might make them independent (Ibid., 134).
My inquiry suggests that it is this manifestation of women, the autonomous, independent agent,  being materialized through gender metamorphosis and Crone reconstruction. 
In her journal article, “The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone,” Kathryn Rountree also raises the connections between the Crone, the Witch and the Hag:

The movement is known alternatively as “feminist witchcraft” or “Goddess spirituality.” People outside the movement, I have found, frequently balk at the idea that these two names refer to one phenomenon. The idea that witches and goddesses could be one and the same is deeply unsettling when we are used to thinking of the hideous hag and the divinely beautiful goddess as opposites (Rountree, 1997: 213).   
For her doctoral project, Rountree examined the ways in which feminist women “deconstruct the stereotypical images of the witch and the goddess, assign them new meanings and values, reveal the connections between the two images, and learn to embody both images …” (Ibid., 213).  My work expands on her investigation and diverges from it by looking at the ways in which women actually live in the world as Crones and the ways in which these women are reconfiguring the meanings and values ascribed to the aging female body.
Crone Consciousness.  If today’s Crones are indeed constituted through the reconfiguration of the aging female body from biological obsolescence to phenomenal productivity on the ground of gender metamorphosis, it is crucial to examine how that reconfiguration might occur.  I propose that consciousness is a useful concept for figuring this process of becoming a Crone. 
Sociologist Herbert Blumer fixed on consciousness as a key component in understanding human action as a response to individual interpretations arising from social interaction (Wallace and Wolf, 1991: 254-5). According to social psychologist, William Gamson, “[c]onsciousness concerns the mesh between cognition and culture – between individual beliefs about the social world and cultural belief systems and ideologies” (Gamson in Morris and Mueller, 1992: 65). At the cognitive level, individuals are actively processing meaning as they negotiate socio-cultural contexts (Ibid., 65). Nevertheless, on the cultural level meaning is always already organized into interpretive frames, so that “[a]ny change in consciousness involves an uphill symbolic struggle” in order to negotiate ideological and discursive spaces and “cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds [the oppressed] to the world of oppression” (Freire in Gamson, 1992: 65). 
The Book of Eve, Constance Beresford Howe’s narrative of an elderly woman’s search for selfhood provides some insight into the process of coming to consciousness experienced by many older women. The protagonist, Eva, a woman of seventy, simply “walks out on a sick and blameless husband after forty years” in an unplanned escape from the “solitary confinement” of her life (Howe, 1994: 1).  Here, in a letter to God, she describes her lived experience as a middle class housewife:

Do You realize, I wonder what submerged identities women like me can have? How repressed and suppressed we are by a life that can give us no kind of self-expression? Unless You really are female after all, as the Women’s Lib girls insist, even You can’t know what it’s like to be invisible for years on end. To live locked up. Never spontaneous. Never independent. Never free, even to use those four-letter words we all know, because the chief duty of females, we were taught, was to practise the restraints of civilization, not explore its possibilities. So my solitary confinement has been pretty hard to distinguish from death itself (Ibid., 9). 
As the narrative unfolds, we become fellow travelers with Eva as she refashions her life, making do on her pension check, seventy-eight dollars a month, and the “findings” of a ‘bag lady.’ According to Betty Nickerson, a self-identified, real life Crone, this “learning to do more with less” is a talent that distinguishes “Age Mates” (her term for Crone women) from the general population (1994: 249).  Moreover, in Eva’s life, learning to do more with less is a rite of passage that she welcomes fervently and it is through the travail of become self-sufficient that she is transformed.  At the outset of her journey, she characterizes herself as a “fat old parasite, member of the third sex now, an irrelevant and uncalled-for detail of the human race” (Howe, 1994: 26). At journey’s end, she has really remade herself as an autonomous individual, a sexual being and a self-contained entity; she has achieved a state of self-approval and self-acceptance (Ibid., 162, 170). At the heart of the story is the “croning process” or Crone metamorphosis; she is refashioned as a powerful self-contained entity. 
In her book, Old and Smart: Women and the Adventure of Aging.  Betty Nickerson describes numerous insightful examples of Crone metamorphosis from her own experiences and those of her Crone friends.  “Celebrating age is choosing wholeness” she tells us (Nickerson, 1994: 69). Here she describes a Crone celebration:

A writer friend approaching fifty (which seems young to me) invited us to a Croning Party, because from now on people have to respect her maturity! Among the earliest meanings of crone was crown, reflecting ageful women’s crowns of silver hair; the crowning achievement of long life. This delightful, moving event, filled with love and laughter, so impressed me that I resolved to create such a ceremony for as many Age Mates as we could fit into a large hall. This became the Amazing Grays … If you find it difficult to admit the number of your years, a Croning Party will transform your attitude … 
Nickerson takes such celebrations seriously as spiritual and political rites and practices of empowerment. 

How many of us thought to celebrate menopause or even evaluate our feelings as our child-bearing bodies brought that part of life to its conclusion? Such an event is a milestone in a woman’s life and deserves recognition.
	Let’s not deprive ourselves of our right to enjoy mature age. We have reached that time in life we once could only imagine. At our age we are free to make of life what we will, to reflect, grow in grace, and give wise counsel. Let us gather dressed in flowing robes crowned with flowers and ivy, and bring new sisters to the doorway of our age. Let us sing and laugh together in welcome, read poems of praise for wise women, and dance a circle dance to the beat of ancient drums. The third age of woman is achieved, we have graduated to be ourselves, a composite of all our experience along the way – first as maiden, second as life-giving mother, and third as wise crone. We are repositories of wisdom. We are again at the beginning (Nickerson, 1994: 69).
Quite clearly, the process she is describing here is very like a metamorphosis in which prior stages of life are bound up at a new beginning.  Her experience of graduating to being ourselves resonates with Howe’s description of Eva whose transformation is at bottom the birthing of a new self. 
	Now, consider this description of a croning ritual excerpted from “Women embracing cronehood,” Globe and Mail, November, 1997.

Candles illuminated the darkened room, the smell of incense filled the air and 200 women were singing when Else Kennedy formally became a crone. She was handed a small gift and a certificate that recognized her years of wisdom. 
The ritual transformed the 69-year-old Vancouver Island woman’s life.  “Once I became a crone … I said, “To hell with it. I’m going to be me,” recalled Mrs. Kennedy, who is taking correspondence courses in women’s studies. “I’ve become assertive. I don’t cringe any more.”
In a society obsessed with youth, older women are challenging perceptions about age and femininity. Across Canada, in small groups and at large gatherings, they are celebrating their accumulated years and gray hairs. To mark the rite of passage, they have appropriated the old English word “crone” and reinvested it with a more positive meaning (Globe and Mail, November 1997). 
In fact, it is somewhat inaccurate of the journalist to suggest that women are reinvesting the word “crone” with a more positive meaning.  I suggest that they are reinvesting their lives with a more positive meaning. As Nickerson, Kennedy and other Crones point out, they are taking charge of their lives and they are going to be themselves; but first, like Eva, they need to discover who that self might actually be. The choice of the word Crone is significant because it is already invested with aspects of wisdom, age and power.
 	Moreover, as indicated by many of the references to croning, it is a process that is not specific to menopausal women; not a momentary ritual, but a lived experience that unfolds over time. This is apparent in the labeling of younger women as Crones-in-process, Crones-in-training, Crone wannabees and in the recognition by younger women of the croning process (Nickerson, 1994: 16; Globe and Mail, November, 1997).  For example, in a recent dialogue with a younger woman regarding my Crone project, she quite spontaneously identified herself as an “incipient Crone.”  I find this a highly appropriate designation and one which I now apply to myself.  
Crone Lives.  My contention is that many women are experiencing or have experienced gender metamorphosis and are now living Crone lives as opposed to the alternatives for aging women. The following quotation from Nickerson somewhat elucidates contrasting possibilities for aging women:   

In real life signs of old womanhood are not supposed to be seen. Women are socially and professionally handicapped by wrinkles and gray hair in a way that men are not. A multi-billion dollar “beauty” industry exploits women’s well-founded fear of looking old. This industry spends megafortunes to advertise elaborately packaged, but mostly useless, products, by convincing women that their natural skins are unfit to be seen in public. Every female face must be resurfaced by a staggering variety of colored putties, powders, and pastes. Instead of aging normally through their full life cycle, women are constrained to create an illusion that their growth process stops in the first decade or two of adulthood.
	There is an enormous gulf between a society like this and earlier prepatriarchal societies where elder women were founts of wisdom, law, healing skills, and moral leadership. Their wrinkles would be badges of honour, not of shame (Walker in Nickerson, 1994: 74).
There are numerous examples of women living and writing about Crone lives.  I document the work of Artist Helen Redmond since her approach is highly creative and also reaches out to a huge audience through the World Wide Web. Redmond’s web site is framed as “Birthing the Crone: Menopause and Aging through an Artist’s eyes” (Redmond, 1998: www document). Her site has links to useful locations and material for individuals who want to learn about Crones including a Lecture Bibliography as well as a comprehensive list of Suggested Readings for Crones. There are links to colour representations of her art and a Project Resume that encompasses her exhibitions. Following is her description of the web site and her own experience of Crone metamorphosis:

This presentation is about bringing to life my Wise Woman Crone, birthing it, so to speak, through my art. The word CRONE has too long been defined by society’s disdain for old women. Today those of us who choose to name ourselves CRONES do so to confront the stereotype and to raise consciousness around issues of aging (Redmond, 1998: www document).

In 1992, as menopause shook my body, mind and spirit, I began to express this time of life in my paintings. At first, that translated into vivid hot flashing self-portraits and continual body scanning inside and out to capture the transformation and help me through it. During this time, I was also reading new books by women writers who were addressing menopause and the Crone years in a whole new light … Birthing the Crone is a live process, an ongoing creation of drawings and paintings, as well as dialogue with others (Redmond, 1998: www document).	
I have included a selection of Redmond’s work as represented on her web site in Appendix III.  It seems to me that her art exemplifies the humour and creativity that must also infuse the process of aging through Crone metamorphosis.
Crone Networks.  A key component of feminist Crone reconstruction is the development of networks that Crones can access for information, support, comradeship and communication with other Crones. In this section, I cite a sample selection, a typology of Crone networks with the qualification that since my inquiry is still in the initial stages, this sampling is by no means exhaustive. Judging from my findings on the Internet on a few forays at monthly intervals for the past four months, these networks are proliferating rapidly in congruence with the expanding Crone population that they serve.
Workshops on Creativity & Aging.  Helen Redmond conducts these workshops with the aim of helping “women claim their age and creative vitality in a variety of art forms” (Redmond, 1998: www document).  Topics include: What is Going on Inside Our Bodies; Our Relationship to the Life Cycle and Imaging the Crone Collectively. Sessions involve exploring a theme non-verbally through mixed media and artistic process then dialoguing in group sessions about the creative work and its meanings. “The sharing of perspectives, by women who range in age from their forties through the eighties, forms an invaluable part of the studio experience (Ibid.). 
Crone Chronicles. “Calling all Crones!” is the lead-in to the Crone Chronicles web site. The Chronicles is a ‘journal of conscious aging,’ founded by Ann Kreilkamp, whose goal was to provide a forum for celebrating Crones. According to the Globe and Mail article by Lisa Sarick, “Crone Chronicles … is doing for crones what Ms. magazine did for an earlier generation of feminists” (November, 1997). The journal, which boasts a circulation of 10,000, has developed from a “handful of photocopied sheets to a 72-page quarterly magazine published in Kelly, Wyo” (Ibid.). The Crone Chronicles web site offers a list of networking projects that includes: the Croneweb network, the Crone quilt, a booklet on Croning ceremonies, an anthology of Crone interviews and so on.
	One of the projects focuses on the ‘halting the weaponization of space.’ This is representative of Crone eco-feminist movement with its commitment to preserving the earth through ecological and ‘peacenik’ initiatives; what Betty Nickerson defined as “doing more with less.”  These themes are reflected in Jane Caputi’s, book, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth.  A focal point of her anti-nuclear stance is the critique of the “complex of patriarchal traditions ...producing conditions of analogous private and public horror (from the nuclear family to nuclear war) and tempting the “end of the world” (Caputi, 1993: xxi).  For Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones represent “female Powers” that she summons up to “confront and confound these atrocities and their perpetrators” (Ibid., xxi). 
Amazing Grays. The Amazing Grays is a group providing comradeship and solidarity for Crones. The group gatherings provide a “way to get together, a chance to share our experiences and support one another in this unscripted adventure into age” (Nickerson, 1994: 15).  The annual meetings are opportunities for Crones-in-Training to learn about croning and also to celebrate Crone metamorphosis through celebratory rites of passage (Ibid., 16). The Grays award a certificate to new Crones welcoming them into the “Sisterhood of Crones, an honour only Time bestows” (Ibid., 16). Nickerson also cites an American group, which meets similar needs through annual Crone Counsels (Ibid., 16). I was able to find a web site link from the Crone Chronicles site that described an upcoming meeting as Crones Counsel VI, slated for Salt Lake City, Utah on October 22-25 (Crone Chronicles, 1998: www document).
Moving Images.  Cathy Loewen and Lee McIntyre have produced a video entitled the Amazing Grays: A Celebration of the Crone. The video addresses six themes related to the aging process including: “the force of gravity, menopause, cronehood, role models, life passages, and feminine spirituality” (Moving Images, 1998: www document).
Betty’s Crone Web.  This is a networking service for Crones that fills the bonding need of Crones.  Betty Karr, the co-ordinator facilitates connections.  Common interests suggest are travel, sharing and forming groups.
Minyan of Crones.  In naming their group, feminist Crones with strong ties to Judaism have appropriated the term Minyan , the term for the quorum of males required to recite prayers in Jewish ritual.  This move can be interpreted as feminist practical action and it is indicative of the loose organization of Crone networks which allow for Crones to celebrate their power and spirituality through formal organizations and traditions of their choice.
	In summing up, I have tried to catalogue a selection of Crone sites for this typology of net-works that is representative of the rich possibilities for networking available to modern day Crones.
Croning the millennium.  
Future directions and implications.  As indicated earlier in this paper, my investigation has been quite superficial in scope given the parameters of this particular project.  What emerges from my inquiry is the potential for future investigations into the phenomenon that I have termed Crone metamorphosis.  Is croning merely a function of second wave feminist aging?  Or are there other influences that bear on an entire cohort’s turn to Crone consciousness? Those questions suggest the need to collaborate with Crones and other aging women more directly through survey and face-to-face qualitative interviews.
An interesting resonance between Goddess worship, fundamentalist religion, eco-feminism, anti-nuclear movement and Crone consciousness seemed to emerge from the various sources accessed for this project.  This resonance indicates an additional direction for investigation.  How is it that these themes, collectivities and social movements are conjoined?  What are the common threads or factors that bring them together?  Does Crone power offer simplistic answers to the eco-disasters  presenting on the cusp of the new millennium?  Is this a collective resurrection of the Mother Earth theory?  Can Crones save the world?
Another particularly salient issue is the ambiguous understandings and interpretations of Crone sexuality encountered in discussions with individuals and from various texts and resources.  How do aging women experience their sexuality?  Are Crones committed to celibacy or promiscuity? These questions bear investigation and clarification to deconstruct old myths and liberate us from stereotypical expectations of aging women.   .  
The case for gender metamorphosis.  In this paper, I have explored a model of gender metamorphosis for explaining the presentation of aging women who identify as Crones and to investigate the Crone re-construction projects conducted by primarily feminist women.  In light of my inquiry, I suggest that my conceptual framework needs further examination and must be analyzed and integrated within the complex of theoretical work on sex and gender.  It seems to me that in figuring gender we need to consider how we as social scientists engage with the process of definition.  To what extent do our collective efforts at figuring ontological and epistemological categories constitute social meaning and reify social categories?  How can we as feminist social scientists engage the debate in such a way as to clear a space for human diversity and complexity?  Whether we figure the Crone phenomenon as gender metamorphosis, Crone metamorphosis or the collective social movement of aging women, there is clearly a transformation in the process of aging and the lived experiences of aging women. The Crone phenomenon bears investigation and needs to be included in the dialogue on gender if only because the Crone diverges from stereotypical expectations and norms for old women. Finally, I should say that as an incipient Crone, I have approached this project with lightheartedness, a sense of humour and excitement. There is something about flying in the face of gender stratification that at the age of 30 was quite frightening; as an incipient Crone, the same project proved quite empowering and thoroughly enjoyable. That confession, in itself, makes a case for Crone metamorphosis.

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