Most of the women I know began to fly because a perpetual turnover of women leaving to marry, have babies, or enter premature cronehood, but replacements were always waiting in the wings: in 1955, some 20000 women applied for 347 available posts at American.
1983 — David Quammen, The Zolta Configuration, Doubleday & Company (1983), →ISBN, page 18:
Both hands are now clasped tight on her lap and she seems to have shrunken at least one dress size further toward cronehood since this subject came up.
1985 — Barbara G. Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power, Harper & Row (1985), →ISBN, page 144:
Younger women should also uphold the ideals of feminine authority, so their own later cronehood will not be blighted by fear or contempt.
1991 — Shekhinah Mountainwater, Ariadne's Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic, The Crossing Press (1991), →ISBN, page 160:
In mythopoetic terms, the year has a life span like any other living creature on earth. She has infancy, maidenhood, adulthood, and motherhood, cronehood, death and rebirth.
1991 — Norman Rush, "Love Itself", in Mating, Knopf (1991), →ISBN, page 358:
But there were no phones in Tsau and never would be until I was in cronehood, if then.
1992 — Demetra George, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess, HarperSanFrancisco (1992), →ISBN, page 221:
If a woman has chosen motherhood, her cronehood may be timed by her last child leaving home or when she becomes a grandmother. Cronehood can also be marked by retirement from a career or mainstream job, or by the death of her parents or spouse.
For grief had seized up her womb. She did not have her monthly bleed as women her age were meant to. She did not go through the phases of desire. She considered herself to be in cronehood.
Women, and perhaps especially white middle-class women, are trained to believe the only way to win love and approval is to be a good little girl until well into cronehood.
She smells like an old woman despite the eau de cologne — maybe because of the cologne. Lemon blossoms, always. Looking at Camilla's miniature figure, her squished-up face with the same characteristics as mine, I see my own cronehood in the mirror.
"It's not all your fault, I know. You're both barbarous idiots, as far as I'm concerned. If I weren't so spineless, I'd tell the two of you to go fly a kite and live out my cronehood in solitude, but so be it. I'm a coward."
Many circles create ceremonies to mark a woman's passage into cronehood and designate special status to crones
2006 — Ashleen O'Gaea, Family Wicca: Practical Paganism for Parents and Children, New Page Books (2006), →ISBN, page 213:
An archaic term, really, but I like it. crone: A menopausal or post-menopausal Wiccan. The time at which a woman assumes her cronehood is intensely individual.