Out of Time: Lynne Segal in conversation with Susie Orbach - The Freud Museum

'Stay young and beautiful if you want to be loved.' These are the words the feminist writer and activist Lynne Segal sang on the first Women’s Liberation march. At the time, she found them funny. Now they haunt her. 

The doyenne of the left is now in her late-sixties and the personal has once more become political. She is to discuss her latest book, 'Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing', with Susie Orbach, who wrote the seminal 'Fat is a Feminist Issue' and became famous for being Diana, Princess of Wales's psychotherapist.  

Segal wrote her autobiography 'Making Trouble' back in 2007. She described herself as ‘a reluctantly ageing woman’ and mused about the need for ‘a feminist sexual politics of ageing’. Out of Time is her answer to these issues. With fear of ageing fed to us from childhood in stories and fairy tales full of monstrous, quintessentially female, figures, there is no better place to discuss the psychology of ageing than the Freud Museum. 

It's ways of having a good life in old age that interests Segal. 'We can always try to retain and express compassion for the lives of others...so long as our ethical imagination survives we remain attached to the world,' she told the Independent. In which case, she is well-placed.