In 2020, after 23 years as a writer and editor at The Sunday Times, Eleanor Mills was made redundant at 49. She turned the shock into Noon, a platform dedicated to championing women in their midlife and a community supporting their next chapter. Now, with a team of six, Mills oversees regular courses, events and trips for the community, leads research and consultancy, and hosts The Queenager Podcast. She is also a best-selling author.
After 23 years at The Sunday Times, being whacked was a big shock. Nobody ever talks about how horrible it is to be made redundant. It felt like a death. You get outcast from the tribe and no one wants to call you in case it’s contagious. I always thought being excellent at what I did would protect me. But when you get to a certain level, it becomes about personal politics and how expensive you are. A new editor comes in, and you’re out. I hadn’t seen it coming. I’d just got a worldwide exclusive with Sheryl Sandberg talking about getting remarried; I was running the most successful section of the paper.
I’ve always been a journalist. It’s what I’d done since university and all I ever wanted to do. I started at The Guardian and The Observer, and by 26 I was the youngest ever features editor at The Telegraph. By 28, I was news review editor and main interviewer at The Sunday Times. I had a kind of finger on the pulse of what people wanted to read about, what was interesting and what was gnawing away at people. It was thrilling being at the heart of the national zeitgeist, and I did that pretty well for three decades.
As editorial director at The Sunday Times and editor of the magazine, I felt I had this great Game Of Thrones-style cloak on, which carried a certain status. When that’s taken away you feel naked. You go from being so busy – 20 people wanting something from you at any moment – to your phone being tumbleweed. Maybe your children or husband send the odd text, but nobody else really cares. I felt like Samson with all his hair chopped off. Those were dark times, but what kept me going was a sense of something better. I realised it was me all along: I had the job because I could do all these things. I could still have an effect on the world.
The idea for Noon came before I left The Sunday Times. I went on a mushroom retreat in Jamaica with my great friend, journalist Decca Aitkenhead. On the last day they said: “Take anything you no longer need and throw it off a cliff.” I felt a golden beam of light coming out of my heart, blowing up my whole career. I came out with an incredible sense that I wanted to help other people transform their lives in midlife. Six weeks later, I was made redundant.
A friend gave me the number of a lawyer and asked a brilliant question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I said: “I’d do retreats for midlife women.” She said: “OK, I’ll back you.” She became my angel investor, and we set up Noon.
I was also the chair of Women in Journalism from 2014 to 2021, and the work I did there reminded me I stood for something, that I could run a different kind of organisation. I realised that while having my cloak removed had made me feel cold and exposed, it was also bloody heavy. Without it, I could speak my own truth and use my insights for myself.
The pandemic hit shortly after Noon launched, so retreats had to be put on hold. Instead, I started my Queenagers substack, a newsletter to build a community while we couldn’t meet. The idea of a “queenager” is that we become the women we always wanted to be in our 50s- I want young women to look forward to it.
As soon as the lockdown allowed, I ran my first retreat. It was brilliant. I loved being surrounded by women, everybody comes with something they want to say, and you have no idea what’s going to come out of their mouths.
The most riveting part of being a journalist was hearing people’s stories. I started monthly gatherings called Noon Circles; we’ve now got 25 across the UK and USA. One woman in our community qualified as a pilot in her late 50s. Another climbed a mountain. Another started a charity. There are so many boxes to tick off in your 20s, 30s and 40s. At 50, you finally get to say, “Well, what do I want?”
Mahanty was the youngest features editor at The TelegraphNoon grew from my distaste in how the media frames women. I’ve been in newsrooms where an editor would say, “brighten up the page,” which meant putting in a picture of a pretty girl. I hate the way our culture makes older women feel unseen, invisible, just because men aren’t necessarily interested in them. We’re interested in ourselves. Over 90 per cent of household spending decisions are made by women aged 45 to 65, yet they appear in less than 10 per cent of advertising. By 2027, over 60 per cent of privately held wealth in the US will be in women’s hands, yet they retire with 35 per cent less in pensions than men. Getting women to take control of that is vital.
I’ve now got more than 20,000 women on my newsletter and over 80,000 on social media. I’ve inspired so many other women to feel better about being over 50 – I know because I get emails everyday. The mainstream media still sees women like us in a narrow way: they show Helen Mirren because she looks great in a bikini, Miriam Margolyes because she’s funny, Judi Dench because she’s 80, or Claudia Winkleman because she doesn’t look 50. As a woman in that world, you’re having to fight the battle with one arm behind your back, because you have to become part of the machine in order to work within it.
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What we’re doing at Noon is saying: we see you, you matter and we can change the story they tell about women at this point. I realised I can leverage my passions and my insights for myself. I can speak about the things that I care about without being dependent on a proprietor and on a structure. Leaving that kind of system was so exposing, but it made me work out what matters to me, and that gave me a kind of strength that I could recreate for myself.
Moving on from legacy media was bruising. It dented how I thought about myself – not to mention having to get used to an enormous income reduction (I had a regular annual salary in excess of six figures before). I used to live on adrenaline – my heart racing, too much social media, always aware of what other people thought. Now 54, I’m so glad I don’t live like that anymore. I found it massively liberating to be able to write in my own voice, rather than in a voice which a newspaper expects. I love the autonomy I have now. Nobody can tell me what to say or think. It can be impossible trying to bring change in a big institution. Now I’ve built my business, I can just do it. By stripping everything away, you work out what really matters.
‘Much More To Come’ by Eleanor Mills (HQ, £10.99) is out now
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