Although the intersections of language and gender have been dwelled on and written about for decades, Discourses of ageing and gender is among the first to consider the ways in which accepted knowledge about language and gender is impacted by aging. Implicit in Anderson's framework is the assumption that representation in wider cultural forums, like politics or media advertisements, leads to personal acceptance, which can be tracked in linguistic forms. And yet, as this study details using a variety of methodological approaches and analytical tools, in the case of aging women, more public representation in fact leads to more ‘ambivalence, anxiety, distaste, and denial’ (6) about the outward appearance of the aging process amongst aging women in private moments.

Anderson uses three datasets in order to track the ways in which what she calls ‘macro structures’ of discourses about aging affect the ‘micro’, personal moments of reflection that older women experience when they, for instance, purchase an anti-aging cosmetic or look in the mirror. The macro structures that Anderson identifies as being culturally relevant to the discourse and experience of aging include those circulated by institutions, corporations, governmental bodies, and media industries. Chapters 4, 5, and 8 focus on discourses that arise out of anti-aging skincare advertisements, texts from lifestyle magazines, and a televised documentary to describe the normative images of aging femininity that are ‘allowable’, and that rely on either downplaying the aging process or accepting it in ‘productive’ ways, as exhibited by the appearance of aging that publicly visible older woman role models such as Judi Dench or Helen Mirren have cultivated.

In contrast, chapters 6 and 7 focus on data gleaned from qualitative interviews with older women (and a few men) in order to analyze the way in which such cultural discourses and images impact both talk about aging and personal experiences of aging (what Anderson calls ‘mirror moments’). The text describes how, in contemporary British culture, there has developed a complex negotiation between the culturally normative discourses about what aging looks like with the impacts such discourses have on women's actual experiences of aging. These experiences are nearly always evaluated negatively, and are framed around ‘loss’ or ‘lack’ in relation to youthfulness, which is seen as the desired feminized social state.

Anderson's findings suggest that with more visibility of older women in popular culture comes paradoxical frameworks with which to understand personal experiences of aging. These frameworks build upon those that orient experiences of femininity. As such, individual respondents to Anderson's study reflect a struggle to accommodate the reality of their aging body with balancing the complex series of ‘cultural rules governing the performance of aging femininity’ (251), which are upheld in public representations of ‘ideal’ aging female role models. Anderson concludes that ‘the process of aging is indivisible from its appearance’, and ‘all bodily changes are ascribed to the aging process and negatively evaluated as a result’ (252). The text ends with a proposition: if cultural attitudes were to dispense of their gendered overtones, perhaps the experience of aging would not be evaluated with such ambivalence and distaste.