The Weekend Australian · Compact
Daughters Who Will Never Be Mothers
The existential price of female autonomy—and the forms of meaning modern societies have lost alongside motherhood.
Read in CompactSociologist · Feminist theorist · Writer
Susan
Pickard
Writing about sex, freedom, ageing, embodiment—and the contradictions of modern life.
Read selected writing
University of Liverpool
“The theory has to fit
the bloody world.”
01
Recent writing
A selection of essays for readers beyond the university.
Compact
Jan Morris and the Limits of Gender Fantasy
On sex, self-invention and the stubborn reality of the body.
Compact
In ‘Candyman,’ Race Erased Class
What the remake lost when it exchanged material inequality for racial allegory.
The Critic
How the War Wasn’t Won
Why the legal recognition of biological sex has not ended the institutional struggle over women’s rights.
Beauvoirian Feminism
Sex realism from the ruins of feminism.
Essays on feminism, freedom, ageing, universities and culture.
Visit the Substack02
Recent books
Ageing, gender and the lived body.
In press
Refiguring the Menopause
Edited collection · Liverpool University Press · Publication due February 2027
Forthcoming
Mapping Frailty and the Fourth Age
Disciplinary Perspectives and Agendas · Co-edited with Paul Higgs · Liverpool University Press
2019
Ageing, the Body and the Gender Regime
Health, Illness and Disease Across the Life Course · Co-edited with Jude Robinson · Routledge
2018
Age, Gender and Sexuality through the Life Course
The Girl in Time · Routledge
2016
Age Studies
A Sociological Examination of How We Age and Are Aged through the Life Course · SAGE
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Research
Biology matters. It never tells the whole story.
Menopause & health
Interdisciplinary research on the biological, social and cultural experience of menopause across different lives and places.
Ageing & frailty
How ethnicity, inequality, medicine and everyday life shape the meaning and experience of ageing.
Beauvoir & freedom
Feminist and existential approaches to embodiment, temporality, sex and moral responsibility.
04
Selected peer-reviewed articles
A selection across feminism, ageing, embodiment, menopause and frailty.
2026
Embodied Transitions: Cultural Framings of Menopause among Minority Ethnic Women
Journal of Women & Aging · Open access
2025
Les Belles Images: Simone de Beauvoir’s Prophetic Vision of One-Dimensional Woman
Simone de Beauvoir Studies
2025
What Frailty Can Tell Us About Successful Ageing: Towards a Different Paradigm for Ageing Well
The Gerontologist · Open access
2023
The Red Dressing Gown
Simone de Beauvoir Studies
2020
Waiting Like a Girl? The Temporal Constitution of Femininity as a Factor in Gender Inequality
The British Journal of Sociology
2020
On Becoming a Hag: Gender, Ageing and Abjection
Feminist Theory
05
About
Susan Pickard is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Liverpool.
Her work brings together sociology, feminist theory, ageing and the life course, health and embodiment, and cultural and existential approaches to lived experience. She is particularly interested in how lives are shaped by biology without being reducible to it—and how freedom, identity and inequality unfold across time.
She has led major interdisciplinary projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Medical Research Council. She directs Liverpool’s Centre for Ageing and the Life Course and is Series Editor of Ageing, the Life Course and Society at Liverpool University Press.
Contact & links