On page 4, she states (emphasis mine) "The idea that middle-aged (and older) women's perspectives might be of value, not just on the male-default assumption that knowledge builds over time but because of what it means to experience sexism as a cumulative process across the female lifecycle, is of little interest even to mainstream feminism."

Now maybe this is just me misunderstanding what Smith means here, or maybe this is actually yet another case of me believing a misogynistic idea without realizing it, but... knowledge objectively does accumulate over time? That's how learning works, even if we weren't living in a sexist world?? Right??? I just really don't understand how this is a concept related to or influenced by male supremacy in any way.

The only other way I can parse this is as a very poorly phrased way of saying "even if we ignore the misogynistic prevalence of female perspectives being dismissed in general, and simply look at middle-aged women's knowledge as having been built over time and therefore valuable objectively..." But if this was Smith's intent, it's again very poorly phrased in my opinion. This really took me out of the book, I had to reread it several times to make sure I didn't misread the words haha.

I worry how common this seems to be for me with radfem/rad-leaning writings, where the author has such accurate and deep-cutting insights and analysis of sexism 90-99% of the time and I'm totally on board with her... and then randomly, inevitably she has a take that goes off the rails to another universe and she loses me entirely, and I wonder whether she just turned off her intellect for a second to say something shocking for the sake of getting a reaction, or whether maybe I should question the rest of her writing entirely since it seemingly came from an entirely different mentality. But with how undeniably true the rest of her writing is I feel it makes more sense I'm just of a different opinion and I should take what I find useful and leave the rest, like it goes with everyone. Am I alone in this? I really hope not.

Any insight into this would be very much appreciated!