Top Quotes: “No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History” — Gail Collins
Background: OMG!!! What an incredible book. I wish everyone could read this — it should be required reading in high school. There are so many fascinating women highlighted in this who I’ve never heard of at all and many more whose names I’d heard but not much else. The author is a brilliant storyteller and I was captivated throughout.
Introduction
“In American history, scarcity has tended to benefit women. A 50-year-old widow could start her own business while choosing from among a dozen eager suitors if she happened to be one of a handful of females in a gold rush town in the middle of the 1800s.”
“Eras in which older women were able to earn money or increase their family’s assets were eras in which they were…popular! In colonial times, a widowed grandmother who was a skilled spinner or sausage maker got plenty of respect. Jump ahead 100 years, move to a city, and your middle-class housewife had only one job to do: have babies and rear them. When the kids were grown, she was consigned to a rocking chair in the corner — frequently literally.”
“Some canny strategists in the mid 19th century came up with a pseudo compromise. They stayed home, raised the kids, and then took off on their lecture tours, bearing their gray hair as the proud proof that they’d followed the rules. Now it was time to raise hell and fight for abolition and women’s rights.”
“During the period between the Civil War and WWI, female entertainment celebrities tended to be older. You could be a glamorous singer at 50 and a famous beauty on the stage at 60 or 70. This was the age when ‘popular entertainment’ meant lectures and theater.”
“Then came the movies, with their unforgiving close-ups, at the same time that an enormous economic boom put outrageous new consuming power into the hands of the young. Older women were no longer in vogue or in view. In the popular films of the day, they were usually busy dowagers sternly disapproving of their male counterparts, who swanned around speakeasies with showgirls.”
The Colonies
“Legend has it that in 1630, a ‘romping girl’ named Anne Pollard was the first colonial woman to set foot in the new settlement of Boston. Whether Anna was first or not, she definitely stayed for quite a while — she died there in 1725 at the age of 104, leaving behind 130 descendants. In the years between, she married, opened a tavern with her husband, and later ran it herself as a widow. As Anne grew older and older, she became a local celebrity and a lucky visitor who dropped into the tavern might be invited to share a ‘social pipe’ with the city’s most famous matriarch. Her story is a useful reminder that while early American settlers did not generally live as long as we do now, some of them did get to be very old. Of the woman who managed to reach 21 in the late 17th-century Plymouth Colony, about 7% made it past 90. You just had to be very, very lucky.”
“If New Englanders had a shaky life expectancy, it was absolutely nothing compared to the situation in the early southern colonies, where, thanks to the malarial swamps, mortality rates before 1624 ran as high as 37%. The upside was that women who did manage to survive had a raft of opportunities. Their tenure as prime marriage candidates could stretch out until menopause. The open attitude toward age on the part of the male population had a lot do with the fact that there was only one woman for every six men.”
“The southern colonies were an excellent example of an important rule in American history: when there aren’t enough people, outsiders, who wouldn’t normally get a chance to shine, are suddenly in demand. If you were a middle-aged black woman in 19th-century Massachusetts, your work options were probably limited to doing laundry or somebody else’s household chores. However, if you were a black pioneer in the West, you could own the only bar in town or be the stagecoach driver.”
“Margaret Brent in 17th-century Maryland stepped up and saved her colony. She threw herself into the business of lending money to the newer settlers and spent much of her middle age in court, suing her fellow colonists 134 times, mainly for debt repayment. She generally won. That’s why she’s referred to — rather loosely — as America’s first female lawyer. Maryland’s governor was so impressed that he made her executrix of his estate. Later, when mercenary soldiers were threatening to level the colony, the dying governor put her in charge of restoring the peace. She did — by raising enough money to bribe everybody to go away.”
“Given the poor chances of living for a very long time, old people were often regarded as having been singled out by the Creator as particularly worthy.”
“No specific milestone signified passage into old age among colonial women. By 40, many had already lost a husband and offspring. Many 60-year-olds were still raising their children — the average housewife was 63 when her youngest left home. Every woman who was capable of lifting a finger was expected to take part in household chores. And nobody was going to tell you to slow down because your hair was getting white.”
“Women applied bacon to their faces to avoid wrinkles, or used a paste made from eggs and alum boiled in rosewater. Tactics of that kind were socially acceptable, as long as the family could spare the bacon and eggs. But the revolutionary era regarded cosmetics as…un-American — a sinister trap to trap unwary males into marriage with women who were older, or less attractive, than they appeared. Some people apparently believed cosmetics were illegal when Americans were under British law.”
“Teeth were a problem for older colonists of both sexes. There was no dentistry as we know it. Barbers and mechanics were sometimes called in to treat rotten teeth, but their only remedy was to pull them. The toothbrush had been invented, but the early versions were generally made of hog bristles, which were very expensive. Toothpaste didn’t become widely used until the late 1800s, and if a colonial woman did try to clean her teeth, the process involved a coarse linen cloth and, occasionally, a mixture of honey and sugar to theoretically wipe away decay. If you lived into adulthood in colonial America you probably would not, alas, have all your teeth. George Washington had famously bad teeth and ill-fitting dentures. Very few people were wealthy enough to acquire false teeth of any type, and the average colonial woman was forced to live with a premature look of toothless old age. Eyeglasses were expensive, too — and a luxury that women doing close sewing by candle at night must have yearned for.”
“Bleeding was a favorite prescription. It was based on an ancient theory that physical distress was produced by too much blood in the system. Or the wrong kind. The real attraction was probably just that it was something the doctor could do, to look as if he had a plan. If a patient was complaining of back pain from rheumatism, for instance, the doctor might use a ‘scarificator’ that pushed 15 or 20 small blades into her back to reduce the amount of blood.”
“In an age without aspirin, let alone antibiotics, people of both sexes suffered from many ailments we can cure today with a pill or at least simple surgery. Women were also tormented by damage from childbirth that would be easily reparable today. Perhaps the worst nonfatal childbirth damage involved a tear in the wall between the vagina and the bladder or rectum, leaving victims unable to control a constant leakage of urine or feces. They were usually doomed to live confined to their rooms, permanently uncomfortable and treated like pariahs because of the stench.”
“No one in the 18th century could cure these problems, but when it came to the ordinary ailments of day-to-day life, it was usually the oldest woman in the family who had the remedy. A young woman would seek medical advice for herself or her child from her mother or an older neighbor. The same thing was true if a chicken failed to produce eggs or the bread didn’t rise. Women who had spent their lives as homemakers retained influence as they aged because they knew things.”
“The basic form of government for the Iroquois was the clan — an extended family in which the older women chose which man would be chief, and had the power to remove him if he failed to meet with their approval.”
The 19th Century
“Under the law a married couple was one person, and that person was the husband. A widow, on the other hand, could do what she pleased, if she had the income with which to do it.”
“Thomas Jefferson was a terrible male chauvinist. He once warned his daughter not to go out without a bonnet ‘because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.’”
“Within the slave communities, the oldest women were relied upon as healers. The ‘old woman’ looked after the sick, delivered babies, and made herbal remedies. And, at least in some cases, they specialized in conjuring. When the white folks were out of sight, the other slaves bowed down to the oldest woman and did what she said.”
“But for most slaves, getting old presented the danger of being regarded as useless. They were often simply given a plot of land and told to support themselves with what they could grow. Moses Grandy, a slave, recalled that when his mother became old she was ‘sent to live in a little lonely log-hut in the woods’ without any food except whatever their relatives could squirrel away and take to her at night. ‘Many a time, when I have drawn near to my mother’s hut, I have heard her grieving and crying on these accounts,’ he said. It was illegal for an owner to simply free a slave and kick her off the plantation when she got old, but Southern cities had a suspiciously large number of elderly black residents, which suggested the rule was widely ignored.”
“Tabitha Moffat Brown headed for Oregon at 66 with her brother and two of her adult children. The little company wandered hundreds of miles off track into the Utah desert and ran out of food during a mountain crossing through the snow. When Brown did make it to her destination, she instantly took a six-and-a-quarter-cent piece she’d found and used it to start a small business sewing buckskin gloves. Within two years, she’d managed to open a school for pioneer children and orphans, which eventually grew into today’s Pacific University.”
“The health reformers of the 19th century weren’t exactly taking over the nation, but they did attract a following, mainly among the growing urban middle class. And they marked an important shift of thinking about aging — the idea that people were responsible for how long they lived and how robust they were during their later years. Decrepitude was no longer a misfortune to be endured patiently; it was a sign you had not made the proper effort. William Alcott, an influential writer on health issues, said that in the future, a child who was a good Christian would live to be 100, but the wicked would be lucky to get to 50.”
“Feminists of the late 19th century saw drinking as something that separated husbands from their families. Wealthy men went off to their private clubs, and the working class flocked to saloons — in Chicago in 1897, the saloons outnumbered the total of grocery stores, meat markets, and dry goods stores combined. While they were a source of friendship and support for many men, saloons existed mainly to encourage their clientele to drink as much as possible, as fast as possible. Left behind in the wreckage were the wives and children, and many middle-class reformers saw banning alcohol as the best way to solve the problem.”
“Women of all ages were doing more of everything. They were becoming more economically important, both as customers and as a workers. Wives were making almost all the family purchases — many of them, store owners began to notice, were buying their husbands’ clothes as well as their own. They were going out to restaurants with their friends, without male supervision. While the laws giving husbands control over their wives’ property still needed a great deal of improvement, widows were no longer inevitably stuck living at the whim of a male heir. By 1890, more than 90% of the elderly women who lived alone or with their children on a farm owned the property in question.”
“Women’s clubs allowed housewives with dwindling family responsibilities ‘to write papers, address audiences, to preside over meetings.’ And to try to change the world. ‘These same elderly women who, in their youth, had been sheltered from any knowledge of crime and the ways of criminals…were often responsible for securing matrons in the police stations, teachers in the jail, the establishment of juvenile courts and the abolishment of vice districts,’ Jane Addams wrote, going on to credit club women with fighting for proper sanitation, school nurses, and vocational schools.”
The Early 20th Century
“Women’s clubs were booming by the end of the 1800s. It all may have started with a snub. In 1868, when Charles Dickens visited New York, he was feted at a dinner hosted by the New York Press Club. Among the members who had been looking forward to the event was June Cunningham Croly, a writer who had successfully broken into the new world of women’s-page journalism. When the male members of the Press Club decided that women weren’t invited to the Dickens dinner, Croly founded a group of her own that barred men. By the end of its first year, it had 83 members, including artists, editors, poets, teachers, and writers, along with philanthropists, a historian, and two physicians. The idea spread across the country, but most of the new clubwomen weren’t professionals. It was just the opposite — the clubs were a path to the outside world for women who had spent their early years as homemakers.”
“Over time, as women’s education improved, some clubs grew less excited about listening to their members deliver research papers and more interested in community activism.”
“These were the women Addams praised for everything from establishing kindergartens to lobbying for laws ensuring a clean milk supply. And — no small point — creating a fuller life for themselves in their middle and later years. It seemed like a perfect second act — helping the world and defeating loneliness at the same time.”
“Most of the black women’s clubs needed very little time to morph into centers of social action. The Women’s Era Club of Boston quickly moved from delivering papers on African civilization to protesting a lynching in South Carolina.”
“Harriet Tubman was still working and traveling in old age, suffering the indignities of segregation while she was on the move. In 1905, she shared a ride to Rochester with a white friend, both planning to attend a suffrage meeting the next day. But after they parted at the train station, Tubman quietly went back to the station lobby and sat there all night, aware that there were ‘no lodging which would take in a woman of color.’ But in 1908 at age 85, Tubman achieved her longtime goal of opening a proper residence for black needy elderly in her hometown of Auburn, New York.”
“When Alva Vanderbilt was in her 40s, she divorced her husband for adultery, shattering the tradition that a well-bred woman never got a divorce, let alone publicly pointed out that wealthy American males had a predilection for bedding people other than their spouses. She then married another rich man. After his death, Alva, then in her 50s, became a generous supporter of the women’s rights movement. She underwrote Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party and draped the walls with purple-and-gold banners announcing: ‘Failure Is Impossible!’ She also commissioned a thousand-piece tea service with cups inscribed ‘Votes for Women!’ In 1912, Alva, 65, led a suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue, dodging tomatoes thrown from the crowd and comforting a terrified young marcher: ‘Brace up, dear. Pray to God. She will help you.’”
“Actress Lillian Russell — who eventually went from eating contests to advice columns chronicling her war against weight — announced she was getting in shape through a regimen of rolling over 250 times every morning.”
“Americans followed the exploits of Nellie Bly, one of the first foreign reporters to make it to the Russian and Serbian conflict zone. Bly had been a barrier-jumping newspaperwoman since the 1880s, and thanks to her, Americans had gotten used to the idea that certain female reporters were going to do daring things in order to get a story. Inspired by the famous novel about an adventurer who goes around the world in 80 days, Bly circled the globe by herself in 72 days. She had herself committed to an insane asylum in order to expose its dreadful conditions. When the war broke out, she was 50, but the question of whether she was too old to be leaping into the trenches under fire never seemed to come up: ‘I was not afraid. I would not run,’ she assured her readers. ‘I thought another shot would follow. It will doubtless be better aimed. If it does, we shall die. And if so, what then?’”
“Mother Jones wore black throughout her career, in memory of her husband and four young children, who had died in a yellow fever epidemic. She found a new family in the union movement, and from the time she was 50 she lived without a home, moving from one site of labor turmoil to another. ‘My address is like my shoes,’ she declared, ‘It travels with me wherever I go.’ She was most identified with the United Mine Workers, men who worked underground in caverns where women were prohibited. ‘She came into the mine one day and talked to us in our workplace in the vernacular of the mines,’ said one man who met Jones when he was young and she was in her 60s. ‘How she got in, I don’t know; probably just walked in and dared anyone to stop her.’ The tiny gray-haired figure had a special genius for attracting publicity. In 1900, to drive off strikebreakers in Pennsylvania, she marched 15 miles with a parade of women wearing aprons, brandishing brooms, and beating on pans. The sheriff allowed them to pass, not foreseeing trouble. But as Mother Jones put it, ‘an army of strong mining women makes a wonderfully spectacular picture,’ and they successfully shamed the scabs out of the mines. In 1903, she led the strikers’ children on a three-week march from the textile miles in Pennsylvania to New York City.”
“We call the time between the late 1800s and 1920 the Progressive Era, and there certainly was a lot of progress. Airplanes! Zippers! Hearing aids! The hamburger bun! Henry Ford’s moving assembly line! Henry Ford’s millionth car! Cities were exploding in size, immigrants arriving in multitudes, factories popping up everywhere. And politically, a reform movement tried to tackle the downside of all this change through better education, public health programs, anticorruption campaigns, and government initiatives to help the downtrodden. It was the age of trustbusting — Theodore Roosevelt’s crusade against the corporate monopolies that were ruthlessly crushing competition, which he began after reading a series in McClure’s written by Ida Tarbell. In ‘The History of the Standard Oil Company,’ Tarbell documented how John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in America, colluded with the railroads to crush his struggling competition. It was probably one of the most influential pieces of journalism in American history.”
“One of the only House members who voted against entering WWI was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, serving her first term as the first woman ever elected to Congress.”
The 20s
“As decades go, the 1920s look pretty darned good. ‘Our Wages Highest in World’s History, Hoover Declares,’ headlined the New York Times in 1927. A subhead reported that Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, was expecting the country to enjoy perpetual prosperity. That part, um, turned out to be wrong.”
“While the big boom in business was enjoyed mostly by the people who were already pretty wealthy, it was hard for average citizens not to feel that things were skyrocketing for them, too. When the decade started, about a third of American families had cars — 10 years later, it was more than three-quarters. The impossible models of the earlier years, with the dreaded start-up cranks, had been replaced by versions that were easy for women to use, and women drivers were everywhere. You could buy a car or a house or a new appliance with credit, and ominpresent advertisers were urging people to do just that. Americans were moving to the cities in droves — for the first time more than half the population lived in urban areas. The world of homemaking was transformed by the arrival of refrigerators, toasters, electric vacuum cleaners, and, gradually, washing machines. Along with the growing expectation that housework not be so much work.”
“It was a great time to be a woman, but it wasn’t so great to be older. The prior New Woman, who could be any age, gave way to the flapper, who most definitely could not. The flapper was the era’s icon — daring and flashy and, to be honest, a bit of a brat. She was thin, with a boyish figure — the only foundation garment that was popular with the young was a bra that could flatten, rather than enhance, the bust. Curves were out of style. The flapper wore light, short skirts that showed off her legs, only partially covered with flesh-colored hose that she rolled down to the knee.”
“A lawmaker in Ohio, in keeping with the grand and glorious tradition of state legislatures, introduced a bill to ban skirts that did not ‘reach to that part of the foot known as the instep.’ Someone in Utah proposed ‘fine and imprisonment’ for anyone whose skirt rose ‘higher than three inches above the ankle,’ while a Virginia legislator, turning his attention upward, wanted to outlaw anything that displayed more than ‘three inches of her throat.’”
“The flapper stayed out late, danced with abandon, smoked and drank, and made it clear that she had little regard for the rules about sex and decorum that her parents had obeyed. While a great many woman didn’t get any closer to the flapper model than a new hairstyle, the whole nation got the idea: the younger generation intended to live life full force and, of course, never get old.”
“Zelda Fitzgerald was the perfect example of the fact that young, attractive women were no longer excluded from public platforms. While she was a talented writer, Zelda had a national profile in her 20s simply for being beautiful and outrageous and the muse of a famous novelist. Other women, far less dependent on a male partner, were also finding that if you wanted the world to pay attention to your message, there was nothing better than being young and comely. The time when women found it easier to get the nation’s attention if they were unthreateningly matronly had vanished.”
“The theater, which had long celebrated actresses with large voices, large gestures, and large figures, was no longer the most popular form of mass entertainment. Movies had taken hold — American producers were cranking out an average of 800 feature films a year for an eager national audience. In the all-American city of Muncie, Indiana, a survey found that movie attendance was higher than church attendance. Casting directors wanted their heroines to have delicate figures and no facial lines that would be magnified on the big screen.”
“Middle-aged women were no longer being given tips on how to look as if they were closer to 30. Now the prescription was that 19 was everyone’s ideal. A skin cream company ad in 1923 featured a girl announcing, ‘Mother, you’re looking younger every day!’ — which was pretty obvious since the mother and daughter had the same face in the picture. Scanning through the media of the 1920s, you might be excused for assuming women consisted of three types: 19-year-olds, women trying to look as if they were still 19, and those for whom the ship of youth had sailed entirely. After a stretch of progress in which older women found social acceptance, the tide had shifted.”
“People quickly became used to the idea that women were voting, and there was little or no talk of ever going back. The 19th Amendment was a complete success on that count. But it was a flop in terms of effect. The women’s vote — which was supposed to deliver clean politics, better education, healthcare for the poor, and a long list of other social goals — never really materialized. Women didn’t turn out as often as men, and when they did, they voted pretty much the same as their husbands, brothers, and fathers.”
“The best example of the failure of suffrage to live up to to expectations was the sad case of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. It wasn’t a large program — just a modest effort to provide clinics in poor, mainly rural areas and to educate poor women about infant care. But it was exactly the kind of legislation female reformers had talked about. Congress passed it in 1921 with the expectation that the politicians who had voted for it would be rewarded by their new constituents. When one of the opponents argued that the bill would promulgate maternity clinics run by ‘ladies who have not had babies,’ a supporter noted pointedly that ‘old maids are voting now.’ Then in 1929, the act was repealed. Partly it was due to lobbying by the American Medical Association, which felt Congress was enroaching on doctors’ turf. Partly it was due to the increasingly conservative temper of the times — the public, with its eye on all that perpetual prosperity, worried about Bolsheviks and immigrants and militant labor unions. But none of that would have mattered if politicians hadn’t discovered they didn’t really need to worry about the women’s vote.”
“Alcohol had always divided women from men in urban America. Middle-class husbands went off to their clubs to smoke and drink in female-free atmosphere. In polite society, men retired together after dinner to share some port while their teetotaler wives went into another room to sip tea. Working-class husbands went off to the local saloon while their families worried whether Dad would blow his salary on whiskey. The impetus for Prohibition was the very real problem saloon life posed for poor women and children, but middle-class women’s hostility to alcohol also had a lot to do with that dividing line. Most of them had no experience with drinking, and they could not comprehend that wine or beer or whiskey could be anything but a terrible social evil. As it turned out, Prohibition made everything worse. Older women still stayed at home with their tea, but men of all ages flocked to speakeasies, and the younger women went with them.”
“In 1906, Wellesley professor Margaret Sherwood begged young women who were going to college for fun to consider another path: ‘If she longs for dramatic activity, is there not a stage? If she yearns for the trapeze, is there not a circus? Will she not leave behind our beloved college what it was intended to be, a place for training the mind?’”
“Work was a new frontier for women in the ’20s. One reason advertisers were so obsessed with flappers was that a lot of them were wage earners. People living in the decade seemed convinced that the sky was the limit when it came to jobs. ‘Within the space of a single day, one can ride in a taxi driven by a woman, directed by traffic signals designed by a woman, to the office of a woman engineer, there to look out the window and observe a woman steeplejack at her trade or contemplate the task of the woman blacksmith whose forge was passed on the way,’ announced one writer in 1929, going a little over the top. The chances of encountering a woman steeplejack were really pretty remote. And while the number of women professionals was soaring, most of them were in the traditional occupations, like teacher, librarian, social worker, and nurse. Nevertheless, the fact that opinion makers thought female engineers and taxi drivers were a good idea was quite a leap.”
“The idea that women — especially married women — were only working to get money to buy ‘extras’ was commonly held. When the American Federation of Labor urged that ‘married women whose husbands have permanent positions…be discriminated against in the hiring of employees,’ a 1936 Gallup poll showed 82% of Americans agreed. Congress even passed a law making it illegal for the government to hire ‘married persons’ whose spouses already had federal jobs. But in the real world it was hard to find people who didn’t need their paycheck. A woman who looked like a possible ‘pin money’ pursuer to casual observers ‘may be supporting a family, she may be all alone in the world,’ argued Eleanor Roosevelt.”
The 30s
“During the Depression, Jane Addams experienced another surge of popularity — economic trauma reminded the country of what they had loved about her. She received a flood of honorary degrees, Good Housekeeping gave her a sort of national equivalent of that Best Woman in Chicago award, and in 1931 she was awarded the Noble Prize. She happily embraced both FDR and the New Deal, sending Roosevelt telegrams urging him to take various positions or congratulating him on the wisdom of doing what she had already recommended. Addams believed the secret to staying young was to be ‘continually filled with a holy discontent,’ and her targets only expanded as time went on. She fought against segregated housing and capital punishment, and led a drive to increase public sympathy for unwed mothers and their children.”
“The 48-year-old First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1933 did not seem much different — or much older — than she was at 30, and it would be the same way when she worked at the UN in her 60s. Eleanor traveled all over the country as First Lady — she was on the road more than she was in the White House. She visited slums, miners’ homes, impoverished farm families, correctional facilities. One day, when FDR asked where his wife was, his secretary replied, ‘In prison, Mr. President.’ ‘I’m not surprised, but what for?’ retorted FDR. When the ‘bonus army’ of unemployed workers marched on Washington, Eleanor led them in a round of old war songs. She was at the head of the first presidential fact-finding tour of Puerto Rico. She wrote a daily newspaper column and, with the help of two assistants, personally answered up to 400 letters a day. Many desperate women wrote to the First Lady begging for secondhand clothes.”
“Eleanor loved being on the move, preferably by herself. She was disappointed when Franklin wanted her to ride from New York to his presidential inauguration on a private train full of friends and future cabinet members. She had planned to take the family dogs to Washington in her blue Buick convertible. As First Lady, she refused to allow a Secret Service agent to be with her every time she went for a drive. In a compromise with the White House security officials, she agreed to travel with a revolver, which she practiced shooting until she was fairly proficient. She was stunningly approachable. Once in 1933, while she was sitting in her car at a gas station, a young homeless man approached Eleanor begging for money. She gave him $10 — and an invitation to call at her New York residence. The man followed through but was sent away by a guard. When the First Lady heard what happened, she went out and found him lingering at the corner. She invited him for dinner, then later found him a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he rose in the ranks, all while corresponding with Eleanor, who eventually became godmother to his daughter. When the future civil rights leader Pauli Murray wrote criticizing the president for his failure to do more for minorities, Eleanor herself wrote back, triggering a correspondence, an invitation to come and ‘talk things over,’ and eventually a lifelong friendship.”
“The New Deal brought a flood of women to Washington, and for the first time they were working at key points throughout the government. Frances Perkins took over the Labor Department and became — this is ironic, but remember we’re talking cabinet titles here — the first female secretary. It was quite a group. Barbara Armstrong, the first woman law professor in America, was the architect of the administration’s historic Social Security program.”
“In 1938, Rep. Mary Norton shepherded a bill through the House that abolished child labor and created the first minimum wage — 25 cents an hour. It was, she said, the high point of her public life.”
The 1940s
“Jeannette Rankin, the Montana Republican who was elected to Congress even before the nation had universal suffrage, and then promptly lost her seat when she refused to vote for America’s entry into WWI, in 1941, at age 60, had finally made her way back into the House after spending more than two decades working for peace, consumer rights, and other causes that had been on the original suffragist agenda. She was less than a year into her term when Japanese planes attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Her life went into an awful rewind. ‘As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else, she said, casting the single ‘No’ vote. As she left the House, an angry mob went after her, forcing Rankin to lock herself in a phone booth until the Capitol police could escort her to her office, where she again had to barricade herself in. Everybody disagreed with her. Papers issued angry editorials. The famous editor William Allen White denounced Rankin’s vote, then added, ‘But, Lord, it was a brave thing.’ It was also the end — again — of Rankin’s congressional career.”
“The public has always had a handy ability to blank out inconvenient realities. Red Cross volunteers, who drove their ‘clubmobiles’ into the war in Europe and North Africa to make donuts and serve coffee to the troops on the front lines, were almost always referred to as ‘girls’ although a number were in their 30s when they entered the war. More than 50 died in service. During the Battle of Mignano, a clubmobile came under direct fire that took out both the women’s latrine and their beloved donut machine. The military didn’t go out of its way to tell the folks at home that it had women in their 40s risking their lives to serve coffee to the soldiers.”
“The new President Harry Truman asked Eleanor to go to London as a delegate to the UN, the new world body Franklin had struggled so hard to establish. She had to prove herself, and as the only woman in the American delegation, she was determined to be better prepared than any of the men. She pored over State Department papers, reading everything that could possibly be of use, putting in 18 to 20 hours a day. If she failed, she felt, there would ‘never be another woman on the delegation.’ Overachievement worked out wonderfully, and the delegates elected her to chair the committee drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It began, originally, with the idea that ‘all men are born free and equal,’ but the opening was amended to declare the equality of ‘all human beings.’ Despite foot dragging from the Soviet Union, the Declaration was adopted in 1948. Eleanor Roosevelt had embarked, at 64, on another incarnation.”
The 1950s
“By 1950, the average female worker was in her 40s. Younger women, keenly aware of the shortage of men due to war casualties, were beginning to obsess about early marriage. In 1940, just a little more than half the young women ages 20–24 were or had been married. By 1955, it was more than 70% and the prospects for the other 30% were portrayed as bleak in the extreme.”
“In the runup to Margaret Chase Smith’s election, she was on a congressional trip to Iran when the plane’s engines faltered. The lawmakers were put into life jackets in anticipation of a possible crash landing over the ocean. To calm her fellow passengers, Smith coolly pulled out several harmonicas she had purchased for her young relatives and led everyone in singing. When the plane landed safely, and the survivors were marveling over her performance, one admiral who had been on board offered: ‘An amazing woman — don’t know how she stays single.’ The plane story — plus another moment when she slipped on the ice while campaigning, broke her elbow, had the cast set, and still managed to make it to her next appearance — convinced the electorate that if she was not manly, she was definitely spunky. Smith won the election in a landslide.”
The 1960s
“Flight attendants were all women at the time — and women who were required to retire if they got married or when they reached 35. It was, airline execs insisted, a crucial perk for business travelers to be greeted by a young, attractive, single woman when they got on a plane. ‘What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?’ demanded Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan, when the House held a hearing on the matter. It was because of Griffiths that the flight attendant got their hearing in the first place. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was wending its way through Congress, a few Southern conservatives proposed adding an amendment that would protect women as well as minorities from discrimination in hiring and promotion. Most members took it as a joke, or an attempt at distraction, but Griffiths grabbed on to the amendment and — with the help of Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate — pushed it into law. After it passed, flight attendants were the first people in line to press their complaint. They had double ammunition, since the Civil Rights Act had been followed by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. But passing a law and changing the world are always two different things.”
“When the 60s began, only about 7% of American women dyed their hair. Within a decade, the practice was so common that the government stopped putting hair color on passports.”
“Rep. Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey was in her 60s when she was elected to the House. She was a fiscal conservative who had a passion for truth, justice, and the underdog. There was something about her age, honesty, and outspokenness that made her compelling. The real-life Fenwick had spent the Depression trying to raise her two children on a limited income while swimming under the debts of the fashionable husband she’d divorced. She had worked as a feature writer for Vogue and in 1948 had authorered Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. Her grandson remembers that Fenwick would describe her Vogue days as ‘a waste of time’ when she would have much rather been working on civil rights. While researching the etiquette book, his grandmother went to the Pentagon to find out whether civilians should wear military decorations they’d received during past service. ‘The chief of protocol didn’t have an answer. So the two of them sat down and wrote the rules.’ ‘It was not dull to be around her,’ her grandson continued, ‘Not warm and fuzzy, but really interesting.’ Fenwick was nearly six feet tall, thin, with perfect posture, and a speaking voice that reminded many people of Katharine Hepburn’s. A reformed cigarette chain-smoker, she decided to substitute a pipe after her seventh grandchild was born. ‘I thought I reached an age when my conduct would not scandalize society.’ Fenwick became involved in the civil rights movement well before it was a popular cause for white Northeners. ‘When she was with Vogue, she made sure black models were in the pictures,’ said her grandson. She worked with the NAACP and, later, a fair housing group and the Legal Aid Society. It was an era when liberal Republicans could do that sort of thing, and Fenwick was also active in party politics. When she ran for the New Jersey state assembly in 1969, she became one of only two women in the 80-person body. And since she was the pipe-smoking grandmother of eight with the Katharine Hepburn voice, she was noticeable. In 1974, Fenwick decided to try for a newly available seat in the House. There was a general assumption that Fenwick, who was 64, would defer to her colleague Tom Kean, who was 39 and had been a leader in the state legislature. Fenwick said later that she might have complied but ‘there was something about that assumption that got under my skin.’ She stuck it out and won the primary by 76 votes. During the race, her driver-assistant, a recent college grad, was floored by Fenwick’s ‘enormous bundle of energy…She worked me to death, I’ll tell you that.’ In the final election, voters couldn’t help but noticing that during debates, she easily outlasted her much younger opponent. ‘I’d be glad to stay and talk as late as you like,’ she wickedly told the audience as the Democrat appeared ready to topple. She won and became a freshman in Congress at 64. Her election was described as a ‘geriatric triumph.’ So many people believed she was the Doonesbury cartoon’s Lacey Davenport character — and she did proudly display one of the original cartoons in her bathroom. In the real world, Fenwick carried around a bag full of constituent letters to which she’d respond — with her own handwritten missives — while sitting at her desk in the House during debates and speeches that almost no one else ever stayed around for. ‘She said she could learn a lot from just listening. She thought that was her job,’ her grandson recalled. Early on, Fenwick found the idea of staff so intrusive that when constituents would call, she’d pick up the phone herself and say, ‘They are too busy. Talk to me.’ She had an impressive attendance record — at one point in her House career it was estimated she was present for 99% of the votes. While her language was elegant (‘I think that’s something you will come to regret saying.’), Fenwick was fearless when standing up to even the most powerful members of Congress. She had a long-running feud with the irascible chairman of the House Admin committee who had power over the day-to-day operations of Congress — like elevators. When one elevator operator offended him, he had the operators’ seats removed so they had to work standing all day. ‘That was the sort of petty thinking she hated,’ her grandson said, ‘She’d confront him and get threatened. He said he’d take away all her staff.’ On her 65th birthday, Fenwick went on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam and Cambodia with a congressional delegation that included another nationally famous woman from the House: Bella Abrug, the outspoken New York Democrat who was 10 years her junior. Abrug once said of Fenwick, ‘We both have a sense of ourselves. We’re both women of the world.’ At one point the two went on a long side trip to investigate allegations about wrongful imprisonment in Vietnam. Fenwick thought the claims were unfounded. Abrug disagreed. They got into an intense fight during which Fenwick said, ‘Listen here, Bella Abrug. I can scream just as loudly as you and I’ve got just as bad a temper.’ When the encounter ended, Abrug nudged Fenwick and said, ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’”
“Fenwick was one of just 19 women in the House when she came to Congress. It was a small but formidable crew. There was, for instance, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, of Brooklyn, who in 1972 had became the first black politician to run for president on a major party ticket. Her campaign was hopelessly underfunded, and resented by some of her major colleagues, who seemed to feel a black man deserved to be first. (Chisholm later said she felt ‘far more discrimination being a woman than being black.) Despite it all, she did receive 152 first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention.
The 1970s
“The idea of the isolated, older woman left on her own after a lifetime of keeping home had a particular resonance now that a younger generation was being trained to expect that women would have careers and the ability to bring home some money of their own. The women who had gotten married under the old rules were facing divorce when the idea of alimony was becoming increasingly unpopular. It had never really existed for most people — only about 14% of wives whose marriages broke up were awarded any kind of spousal support, and less than half of those actually got the payments their husbands were supposed to provide. But at least society believed, in theory, they deserved compensation for their years of family service. Now judges felt even freer to demand that ex-wives — especially ex-wives whose children were grown — be able to take care of themselves. For most of the older generation, the idea of life without a husband and his financial support was terrifying. ‘We’re a minority you may not have thought much about,’ 55-year-old Laurie Shields told the Chicago Tribune, ‘But our plight is very real, especially those of us recently divorced or widowed. People our age were raised to believe that marriage meant security…The assumption, unfortunately, is unwarranted.’ Divorce, of course, wasn’t the only cause of displacement in the 70s. More than half of women 65+ were widows. Combined with older women who were divorced or had always been single, that left two-thirds more or less on their own. And there weren’t many services available if they needed help. ‘If a town had a lunch program for the elderly, that was considered a big deal,’ recalled Ron Wyden, who was then a young Oregon lawyer. It was a problem waiting to be noticed — and in order for that to happen in America, it was necessary for someone to give the problem a media-friendly name. That happened in the early 70s when Tish Sommers, an organizer for NOW, was carrying a chicken casserole out to the porch were her housemates — a commune of older women activists — were ready for dinner. ‘How about ‘displaced homemaker’?’ she asked her friends. And from there, a movement was born. Sommers was in her 50s. She had money, thanks to a family inheritance, but she was experiencing all the disorienting feelings that come with being suddenly single at a later age. Always a NOW activist, Sommers started a special task force that eventually grew into the Older Women’s League. Besides being one of the great acronyms of the era, OWL had the advantage of Sommers’ financial support, which funded training-counseling centers for the first wave of newly single women who now knew they were displaced homemakers.”
“Meanwhile, the issue caught on with the media. In 1976, Ladies’ Home Journal published ‘The Discarding of Mrs. Hill,’ the story of a 53-year-old lifetime homemaker who lost her husband to stomach cancer. Since he’d died before retirement, his wife got no pension, and she was stunned to discover that she was too young to be eligible for Social Security. The family savings had been depleted by Mr. Hill’s illness, and when his wife tried to find a job, employers were unenthusiastic about a middle-aged applicant with no prior experience. Her grown daughters sent her money — not enough to help much, yet enough to make her feel guilty. It was a story guaranteed to unnerve any reader who was counting on living out her life with a husband’s support.”
“Ideas about what to do were springing up everywhere. The Gray Panthers, like OWL, was sparked by the frustration of a political activist facing old age. Maggie Kuhn had worked for the Presbyterian Church, overseeing social welfare programs. But even the church had mandatory retirement, and when Kuhn turned 65, she was out of a job, and starting a new movement of her own. The fact that her new group’s name was a play on the Black Panthers was a pretty good hint that it was not going to be middle-of-the-road. The Panthers were intergenerational and all-purpose, fighting for nuclear disarmament as well as displaced homemaker legislation; they opposed both federal cuts to student loans and compulsory retirement. They also pushed for smaller, more immediate issues — in New York, the Panthers successfully pressured the city’s Transit Authority to acquire buses that could ‘kneel’ for the elderly and other riders who had trouble negotiating the first 16-inch step. Age, Kohn argued, was ‘a great universalizing force’ — everybody, whatever race or gender, was growing older every day.”
“While older women were worrying about a lonely, impoverished old age, younger women were getting a pretty clear message that, for them, times had changed. The American economy, so strong since WWII, suddenly faltered. Good paying union jobs in manufacturing began to disappear. American families were going to find it harder and harder to maintain a middle-class standard of living on one salary. Girls in high school and college understood that when they went out into the world and married, they’d probably still be expected to help bring in income. For the first time more than half of adult American women were working outside the home for pay. It was a new middle-class model. Girls went to college to find a career, and then maybe a husband. Boys dreamed of a future wife who would be attractive, sympathetic — and a good earner. Inevitably, the country lost all interest in groups that tried to make nonworking wives feel more connected to the outside world. In 1974, the LA Times reported a ‘poignant indication of the state of things: Norwalk Women’s Clubhouse was purchased by Weight Watchers, that group apparently being larger, stronger, richer, and with a more secure future than the once-dominant women’s clubs.’”
“Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers, didn’t like the idea of segregating seniors, and she was living at 75 with a ‘family of choice’ in Philadelphia that included seven younger men and women, ages 21 to 39, along with six cats, a poodle mix, and a tank of tropical fish. One of the younger residents admitted, ‘At first I was little bit hesitant about moving in with an older woman. I have gentlemen friends, and I worried what Maggie might think about me having them over. When I mentioned it to her, she said, ‘It’s all right with me. Do you mind if I have them over, too?’ In her autobiography, Kuhn wrote that denying sexuality in old age ‘is to deny life itself,’ and described some of her own affairs, including one with a university student 50 years younger.”
“But in most of America, the idea of communes never took off. Nursing homes started booming. Almost nobody went to them enthusiastically, but older women, schooled in the dark feature stories about grandmother-in-the-bedroom, had stopped expecting they would wind up living with their offspring. In middle age, they were already telling each other they didn’t want to be a ‘burden.’ And there was more money to pay for their keep — along with Medicare in 1965, Congress had authorized Medicaid to pay for the healthcare of low-income Americans, and a large chunk of that spending went to nursing homes. The vast majority of nursing home residents were elderly women, almost all widows.”
“Women were far more likely to use tranquilizers than men. By the 70s, one in five American women were using them, and an estimated one to two million women were addicted to them.”
“Simply a new kind of rebranded sedative, the tranquilizer Miltown came out in 1955 and quickly became a favorite in Hollywood, where entertainers spread the word to the public. By the end of the decade, Miltown was popular across the country, and although the presumption was that hardworking men would be the natural market, women picked up on the idea first. A 1957 time capsule buried in Tulsa that was supposed to show the future what life was like for typical Americans included a women’s purse, containing bobby pins, gum, cigarettes, a compact — and a bottle of tranquilizers. Betty Friedan thought they were a symptom of the ‘problem that has no name’ and the horrors of full-time homemaking. ‘You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there’s no point in going on another day like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it’s pointless.’ The nation was certainly being urged to worry — newspapers and magazines in the early 70s were full of headlines like ‘Housewife is a Junkie.’ Physicians complained at a Senate hearing that drug marketers were recycling the rhetoric of the women’s liberation movement — one such ad recommended Ritalin ‘for environmental depression…engendered by such problems as the constant assault of noise…ecologic pollution and social unrest.’ An ad for a tranquilizer antidepressant showed a housewife in an apron, staring unhappily at a huge male foot. ‘FAILURE…She had a hypercritical father in her formative years. Her husband follows in that same pattern,’ said the copy, ‘They have whittled away at her self-confidence considerably — which causes anxiety and depression.’”
“Ford had been president just a few weeks when his wife, Betty, underwent a mastectomy. ‘When they told me I had to be operated on,’ Betty recalled later, ‘I protested and said I had a schedule to keep and couldn’t possibly take time out.’ She went back to her schedule, hosted a tea for Lady Bird Johnson, and then entered the hospital the next day for removal of her breast. Her openness about what had happened was, by the standards of the day, stunning. The public knew about the mastectomy before she went home. And this was a time when nobody talked about having cancer, and certainly not breast cancer. The general presumption was that cancer was a death sentence, and one so grisly it should not be shared, period. ‘Some people didn’t even tell their own children.’ Ford’s story, with its good news ending, changed the conversation entirely. Women flooded into clinics and began self-examining. One of them was Happy Rockefeller, the wife of Vice President Rockefeller — who found a small lump and also had a mastectomy. The double White House saga stunned the nation. Breast cancer was a major cause of fatality in middle-aged women — deadliest for women in their early 40s. Mammograms were just being introduced, and very few women performed self-exams — the feeling was that if cancer was fatal, there was no point in trying to find out if you had it. Ford became the national model for a new way of thinking, and she was happy to be a symbol for early detection and treatment. ‘There had been so much cover-up during Watergate that we wanted to be sure there would be no cover-up in the Ford administration.’ But in general, she simply expressed gratitude that she could be useful. ‘I’m sure I’ve saved at least one person — maybe more.’ She was definitely a help. In part because detections were coming earlier, breast cancer survival rates improved, particularly for older women.”
“Betty Ford never endorsed affairs — she just made it clear that she enjoyed sex with Jerry. When she told a Washington columnist that nearly the only question she had not been asked was how often she slept with her husband, the columnist asked, ‘Well, how often do you?’ ‘As often as possible!’ she replied.”
“She was a fun First Lady. On a trip to China in 1975 Betty took off her shoes and danced with the children at a school she was visiting. She pushed her unsuspecting and fully-clothed husband into a swimming pool while a photographer was recording a day in his life. When daughter Susan and a friend were having a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom, she put on a sheet, walked in, and terrified the girls by reciting the Gettysburg Address.”
“The children were off on their own, and Betty was alone — not a widow or divorcee but a kind of displaced housewife all the same. She was supposed to be writing her memoirs, but her long-term alcohol and prescription drug use, mixed with loneliness and a loss of her sense of mission, turned her into what Betty herself called a ‘dopey pill-pusher, sitting around nodding.’ Daughter Susan organized a family intervention. Just after her 60th birthday, Betty checked into an alcohol and drug treatment program. She was less enthusiastic about making her drug and alcohol use public than she had been about breast cancer, but she nonetheless was frank about her situation. And once again, Ford’s candor was transformative. Women who would never before have discussed such a problem picked up the phone. ‘The reverberations from her latest bombshell already are being felt in alcoholism treatment centers,’ reported the Chicago Tribune. ‘A spot check of such centers in the Chicago area shows a noticeable increase in the number of women seeking help for drinking problems as well as an increase in the number of husbands and children referring their wives and mothers for treatment.’ A rep of the South Suburban Council on Alcoholism told the paper, ‘Some women have told us that ‘if Betty Ford can do it so can I.’”
“Experts said the number of women alcoholics was about equal to the number of men. But their problem was less well known and carried a greater stigma. Ford’s candor was immensely helpful. She also began a fundraising crusade to create a facility with space divided equally between the sexes and opened the Betty Ford Center in 1982.”
“In 1974, Maggie Kuhn was invited to the Ford White House for the signing of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act, which established minimum standards for pension programs in private industry. It was a good day, and Gerald Ford jovially asked her, ‘Young lady, do you have something to say?’ ‘Mr. President,’ Kuhn replied, ‘I’m not a young lady. I’m an old woman.’ It was a salvo in the ongoing battle to get a little dignity. Helen Gurley Brown was attempting to make peace with women’s liberationists but ran into trouble with the nouns. ‘Twelve of us — I almost said girls, but they say I must stop that and refer to us as women — sat about and related our hang-ups.’ Brown wrote in an editor’s note about her first consciousness-raising session, admitting she had been on their eighth hang-up when she was told to relinquish the floor. The session was a success, but it was going to be rather difficult to get the author of Sex and the Single Girl and the editor of a magazine that defined its readership as ‘that Cosmo girl’ to drop the g-word. The problem of being addressed in an irritating-to-insulting way wasn’t limited to older women — the male versions of the 1960s New Left were still around and still referring to their female companions as ‘chicks.’ Madeleine Kunin, a state legislator climbing the very difficult ladder of politics in Vermont, went to a Democratic convention in Kansas with another female lawmaker, one of the state’s top political leaders. They were greeted on arrival by the governor, who called out, ‘Hello, girls.’ Kunin, who later became governor herself, recounted the story more than 30 years later. She had never forgotten the moment. The difference between ‘women’ and ‘girls,’ she decided, had become ‘the Maginot line of feminism.’”
“The only road out of ‘girls’ territory seemed to dead end at ‘gals.’ After a certain age, you could not be sitting around without being an ‘old gal.’ And then there was the media’s fondness for describing any older woman, whatever her achievements, as a ‘grandmother’ whenever possible. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee tried to call a halt, ruling that ‘words like divorcee, grandmother, blonde, brunette, or housewife should be avoided in all stories, where, if a man were involved, the words divorce, grandfather, blond, or householder would be inapplicable. In other words, they should be avoided.’ But a few months later, the paper announced that Lenore Ronney had been nominated for the U.S. Senate, ‘a 60-year-old grandmother making her first bid for elected public office.”
Recent Years
“The idea that older women can attract advertisers has been kind of revolutionary. Many makers of consumer products had shunned them because they believed older viewers didn’t buy anything — or at least wouldn’t buy anything new. That is obviously untrue, and a Nielsen survey found that consumers over 55 aren’t more attached to their brands than younger people.”
“Yes! We’ve got career triumphs for 90-somethings. Our 97-year-old park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, got her job at 85, giving popular history talks to park visitors in Richmond, CA. She made sure to give attention to the non-white side of the story. She received a presidential medal for her work. It was later stolen from her home, and although Soskin wasn’t able to stop the burglar, she did manage to tackle him and give his genitals a painful squeeze. President Obama sent her a replacement.”
“Betty White made one of her innumerable comebacks in 2010 when she was 88, playing touch football in a Super Bowl ad. That led to a hosting gig on SNL and a role in a new TV comedy. At 96, White was still appearing at parties and award shows, usually to get another prize herself. Pressed for the secret to a long, happy life, she generally recommended positive thinking, and threw in an occasional plug for vodka and hot dogs, ‘probably in that order.’”
“A spokesman for First Lady Clinton confirmed that Hillary ‘wears pants about once a week.’ She was the first, and so far the only, First Lady to pose for a presidential portrait in trousers. ‘Why must she dress that way?’ demanded fashion consultant Tim Gunn, ‘I think she’s confused about her gender.’”
