The social status of women in today's highly civilized nations is complex. As a percentage of population they increase with age, yet they are at a political and financial disadvantage with respect to men. On account of decreasing physical attractiveness in old age and the pertinacity of traditional gender roles, they are often doubly disadvantaged.

This state of affairs has a certain parallelism with research on women in the history of medicine. For a long time scholars concentrated predominantly on young women, especially with regard to pregnancy and birth – the only exceptions were the realms of midwives and witches. Only in the last twenty years has research increased on the pre-modern social history of older women and the history of menopause; but even in the latter, post-menopausal women have remained an afterthought. Although a wider range of sources has been given attention (parish registers, poor-relief documents, household listings, autobiographical writings, etc.), the available evidence for a geing women before 1750 remains slight. This is the case with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popular writings on dietetics and cosmetics that were intended for women in particular, but also to normative proto-geriatric and proto-gynaecological specialist literature (as the following study shows). Especially in the numerous extant texts on senescence, which treat the (grammatically speaking gender neutral) senex as (a masculine) norm, older women typically appear only on the margins, corresponding to their social status as the sexus sequior.