America left the nineteenth century behind, but the publishing industry kept churning out those books of essays and poems targeted at the senior market—many variations on the theme of Looking Toward Sunset for the new generation. In 1915, the novelist Amelia Huddleston Barr came out with her entry: Three Score and Ten: A Book for the Aged. It was mainly a collection of conversations between Barr and her friends, all of whom seemed to have a convenient tendency to ask her opinion about everything under the sun. (“There is another question, Amelia. What keeps the soul in the body?”) Between discourses on topics from bread making to the history of playing cards, Barr told her readers that in order to have “a vigorous old age” it was important to keep busy. She did not think that women should meddle in politics, but she very much approved of a 62-year-old friend who decided to fill up her spare time by investing in a hat store.
It’s not clear how many 70-year-olds would have loved to receive A Book for the Aged, but Barr was definitely popular. And productive as hell. When she celebrated her 87th birthday in 1918, the local paper in her New York neighborhood noted that she was the “author of nearly 80 books” and had published three novels in just the last year. Parts of her Remember the Alamo would resurface much later in a John Wayne movie. Barr was feeling very upbeat, even though the United States had recently entered the hostilities that would come to be known as World War I. She told the reporter that the war would be “a good thing for America.” The men who fought in it, she predicted “are coming back from battle better men than when they went in, and the women are going to rise to meet them.”
Barr was right about ushering in a new era—though whether the men on the battlefield would have agreed that they were going through an improving experience is a different question. The war marked the real beginning of the twentieth century. Outside Amelia Barr’s world, the options for older women went way beyond hat shops. Readers had been following 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. 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?”
Bly didn’t have to find out. Soon she was out of the trenches and reporting from Hungary, where she was stopped by local soldiers who wondered if she was some sort of spy. A translator was brought in, and when she introduced herself, he cried, “My God! Nellie Bly!” Next, she proudly reported, he began speaking rapidly to her captors, explaining, “I have told them every child seven years old in America knows Nellie Bly.”
So age was not an issue in Bly’s World War I adventures. Except possibly to Bly herself: in 1918, she was trying to get permission from the Austrian ministry to tour Budapest, armed with a letter that described her as “born May 4, 1877”—13 years later than her actual birth date. No one seemed to think it was unusual when other middle-aged women sailed off to France to do volunteer work. One of them was 50-year-old Molly Brown, who was famous as the “unsinkable” survivor of the Titanic disaster. “I am a daughter of adventure,” Brown told the Denver Post. “This means I never experience a dull moment and must be prepared for any eventuality.… That’s my arc, as the astrologers would say. It’s a good one, too, for a person who had rather make a snap-out than a fade-out of life.”
There did still seem to be some benchmarks—Jane Addams assured the world that there were plenty of energetic community activists “between the ages of fifty and seventy,” but she didn’t quite make it clear what would happen when the chairwoman of the town’s anticorruption campaign turned seventy-one. Yet the media—in the grand tradition of the media—was ready to move on to the next big, or in this case older, thing. In 1911, the magazine World Today profiled “Some Grand Old Women” in the energetic army of “the whiteheads of the modern age.” They ranged from a sixty-seven-year-old lighthouse keeper who was still rowing out to rescue distressed sailors to a centenarian who enjoyed taking rides in a race car to Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who was still preaching at eighty-three, “and her discourses are not back numbers, either.”
Not everybody shared World Today’s enthusiasm. The Atlantic Monthly moaned that the “old lady” of 1907 lacked “the quiet serenity of life’s afternoon.” The problem, according to the magazine, was not so much the hard-rowing 67-year-old lighthouse keeper as the fashionable golfers who competed with their granddaughters “in their activities social, philanthropic, educational, and worldly.” Ladies’ Home Journal seemed to be yearning for that good old rocking chair. The magazine warned that no woman was going to be able to count on respect in old age if she is “on a dozen visiting committees to hospitals and asylums.” All this, plus those club papers for the literary society—the magazine worried the new old woman would lose “that magnetism with which age and gentleness always appeal to men.”
When it came to a rejection of quiet serenity, the champion might have been Mary Harris, a labor organizer universally known as Mother Jones. The list makers at World Today seemed to feel compelled to include her in their survey of overachieving seniors despite Harris’s distinct lack of the apolitical middle-classness that popular magazines treasured.
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 defied 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 strikers’ children on a three-week march from the textile mills in Pennsylvania to New York City.
In some ways, Mother Jones approached her career like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That little-old-lady image was useful in softening views that could have been otherwise seen as threatening. (Urging strikers to bring their guns to one confrontation, she said, “If you should kill a rat, you are doing something everybody approves of.”) When she arrived in Colorado in 1903, the Denver Republican reported: “You are surprised, astonished, incredulous to be informed that this eminently respectable and strictly conventional appearing old lady… should know aught of anything save the economy of a well ordered household.” Like Stanton, Jones also prided herself on being a good traveler, no matter how unladylike the challenge. In one letter she described how she walked down a goat path in the mountains after midnight to get to her next rally: “I had to slide down most of it.… My bones are all sore today.”
Mother Jones found her age so handy that she exaggerated it—she celebrated her 100th birthday when she was 92. “If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight,” she told one group of insufficiently militant laborers. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, actually to the Lord you ought, just to see one old woman who is not afraid.” In her 80s—or what she said were her 80s—Mother Jones was working with striking miners in West Virginia. She was arrested and tried by a state military court for conspiracy to commit murder, which carried a possible death penalty. “Whatever I have done in West Virginia I have done it all over the United States and when I get out I will do it again,” she said, refusing to offer a plea. The decision of the tribunal was secret, and while it appeared that Jones had been convicted, nobody was enthusiastic about executing, or permanently imprisoning, someone who looked like a great-grandmother. She was eventually freed to raise hell again.
Mother Jones was, obviously, one of a kind. And for all the new open-mindedness about age and women, the traditional patterns were still in effect all around the country. In 1906, Harper’s Bazar published a series of essays by “An Elderly Woman,” who said she was leading the life of an average middle-class grandmother—living with her daughter, trying to be useful, but aggrieved when there was a community problem to be solved and the younger people ignored her offers of help. “My fault was the irreparable one of belonging to the generation of those whose business it is to sit comfortable in the shade and wait—who can say for what?” she wrote. Elderly Woman found some joy in being able to support her grown children in times of trial and being a companion to her grandchildren when they had nobody else to play with, but she reported the same sense of ostracism older women had wrestled with a century before. Although to be fair, she did have a national magazine interested in publishing her complaints.
All the talk about how age shouldn’t be a barrier came at the same time when physicians and social scientists were thinking a lot about the elderly and erecting new roadblocks of their own. A cynical person might conclude that when the experts first took the trouble to really think about the older people in their midst, their immediate conclusion was that they should be nudged out of the picture. Businesses began to impose mandatory retirement; welfare advocates pressed for pensions and old-age homes for the needy. Their plans were well intentioned and frequently welcomed. But the coin had two sides. One was to create the first threads of a national safety net for the people who were about to become known as senior citizens; the other was to increase the barriers between elderly Americans and the world of the young.
That was hardest on men. Most women still didn’t work for wages, and those who did usually labored in jobs they’d have been happy to trade for a pension if one was offered. Men, whose lives were tied to their image as breadwinner, were going to have a painful transition into the world of mandatory retirements if they worked at jobs they liked. Amelia Huddleston Barr, whose range of acquaintances was somewhat limited, class-wise, felt the whole idea of retirement for men was terrible: “If they only sat in their office and read the returns, their business would gain in every good way by their presence.” In 1919, the Pennsylvania Commission on Old Age Pensions studied what happened to people who could no longer live in their own homes and concluded that children were much more willing to invite an elderly mother to stay with them. “Aside from the sentimental reasons involved, the presence of an old woman around the house—unless she is absolutely invalided—entails little burden, as she can be made useful in numerous ways,” the commission reported. “This, however, is not the case with an aged man.”
None of this is to say that women who had an active professional life were any more eager to give it up than men were. In 1912, when Antoinette Blackwell was 87, she and another octogenarian minister, Robert Collyer, were honored at a Unitarian gathering. Finishing his address, Collyer turned to Blackwell and said, “Here we are, two old pilgrims, sitting in the sunshine waiting for the angel to come,” and bent over to kiss her forehead. Blackwell, who was nearly deaf, just smiled. The next day, when she learned exactly what he had said, she jerked her head up and announced that Collyer “may sit if he wants to, waiting for the angels. But I’m not waiting. I have too much to do.”
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, and it’s pleasing to report that the author was a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, the elderly woman who was dragged out of her sickbed and tried as a witch in Salem.
Tarbell was in her 40s when she published the Standard Oil stories, and one magazine declared that they made her “the most popular woman in America.” Or at least, the author amended, it would be a close race between her and Jane Addams.
In 1912, Roosevelt—then out of office and alienated from his successor, William Howard Taft—created the Progressive Party to mount a new presidential campaign. Addams seconded his nomination at the party convention. Her speech was another first-time-a-woman event, and not everybody was thrilled. Charles Eliot, the distinguished former president of Harvard, told a New York Times reporter that Addams’s starring role at the convention was in “very bad taste.” By putting an unmarried woman on the podium in such a prominent place, Eliot felt, the Progressives were setting a bad example for the rest of her gender, who ought to be marrying and repopulating the world. Addams was 51 by then and had a long-running romantic relationship with Mary Rozet Smith, a philanthropist and settlement worker. It’s unlikely Eliot had any inkling of that—he was just an example of the sentiment in some quarters that the only women who should be participating in politics, or other public activities, were married women whose children had grown up.
Addams was about to lose her most-popular status as America drew closer to war and she became increasingly identified with the anti-war movement. “Jane Addams is a silly, vain, impertinent old maid,” fumed a paper called New York Topics, “who is now meddling with matters far beyond her capacity.” A woman who could create the settlement house movement, speak to huge crowds at enthusiastic rallies, and lead battles against corrupt politicians without having anyone mention her age finally entered Old Maid territory by speaking out against a war.
One of the few House members who voted against entering World War I was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, serving her first term as the first woman ever elected to Congress. Montana was one of 12 states that had given women the right to vote by 1916. It was certainly a step forward—unless you chose to dwell on the fact that there were still 36 to go. Carrie Chapman Catt, the 57-year-old head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, had despaired of getting Congress to approve a constitutional amendment and pursued a strategy of trying to gain the franchise one state at a time. It was a noble but extremely dreary effort. When it was all over, Catt would estimate that during 52 years of struggle women had conducted “56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.” It was no wonder people got tired of the strategy.
By 1913, the NAWSA was facing a rebellion from younger, more radical members, led by Alice Paul, who had spent time in London, where women routinely chained themselves to fences, defied the law, got thrown in jail, and went on hunger strikes for the right to vote. The women of England, Paul said impatiently, “are now talking of the time when they will vote, instead of the time their children would vote.”
It wasn’t the first generational gap the movement had experienced. Back when Catt was new to the cause, Susan B. Anthony was complaining that every young suffragist believed that if only she had been put in charge, the vote would be long since won. But by the 1913 convention, Catt was part of the old guard. She had been working for the vote before Alice Paul was born, and as the arguments continued throughout the NAWSA meetings, she correctly predicted that the militants would eventually bolt. The only ones left behind, she said bitterly, would be “those of us who really want suffrage and not advertising.”
Paul’s radical faction had support from women of all ages. Harriot Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, was older than Catt, but like Paul she had spent a long time in London and was far more interested in drawing national attention with parades and demonstrations than in petitioning for more state referenda. Alva Belmont, who was in her 60s, was opening her pocketbook and her summerhouse to Paul’s National Woman’s Party. So was the “unsinkable” and wealthy Molly Brown. In the end, Paul’s demonstrations and Catt’s more moderate behind-the-scenes negotiating worked pretty well together. In 1920, for the first time, women got the right to vote across the nation in a presidential election. The winner was Warren Harding, who is generally regarded as one of the worst presidents in American history. It turned out that just having women in the mix was not a ticket to utopia. Lots of work lay ahead.
In 1915, a Kansas lawmaker proposed making it illegal for a woman to wear cosmetics “for the purpose of creating a false impression.” The bill didn’t go anywhere, but it’s worth mentioning that the legislation would have exempted women over 44. The danger, apparently, was only in potential husbands being sold a misleading bill of goods. Beyond the traditional mating period, it was all right to go ahead and use some artifice.
The industry of beauty had come of age. Younger women were being urged to make themselves look desirable. Older women were being exhorted to make themselves look younger. Advertisers insisted both goals could be accomplished with the purchase of as many beauty products as possible. And the mass media came down strongly on the side of the folks who bought those ads—in 1908, the magazine The Woman Beautiful announced that longer life spans were due “to the physical care in beauty shops.” There was still a strong prejudice against the idea of coloring graying hair, although a lot more women were beginning to try it. In 1919, Milady Beautiful ran an ad for “Dr. Olga Schiller’s Gray Hair Restorer” that assured readers “IT IS NOT A DYE.” Instead, Dr. Olga claimed to have come up with a magic wash that “brings back the original color of teh [sic] hair and keeps it so.”
Beauty was one industry that had at least a bit of equal opportunity. Helena Rubinstein, the daughter of Polish Jews, opened cosmetics salons first in Australia and then, in 1915, in Manhattan—the beginning of an empire. Madam C. J. Walker built a successful business around hair treatments for black women. In 1916, when Madam Walker was 48, she returned to visit her birthplace on a Louisiana plantation, and the local white paper reported: “World’s Richest Negress in Delta.” By then she owned an elegant Harlem townhouse and was renovating a 34-room place in the country. In 1917, the New York Times ran a feature entitled “Wealthiest Negro Woman’s Suburban Mansion” and described the home, in Irvington-on-Hudson, as having “a degree of elegance and extravagance that a princess might envy.”
Walker, who was born Sarah Breedlove, had had an unhappy childhood. She lost her parents at seven, got almost no education, and was sent to work as a laundress when she was very small. She married at 14, had a baby, lost her husband at 20, and moved north. Her second marriage was terrible, and possibly as a result of the stress, her hair began to fall out. Later, she would say she was on the verge of becoming bald when she had a dream in which “a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”
Walker’s treatment was marketed to women of all ages, and it may not have been anything more unusual than regular washings with a good shampoo, combined with scalp massages. But once she began offering to set women up in their own home salons with “Walker’s Scientific Scalp Treatment,” an associate reported that in Chicago and New York, black neighborhoods had “a Walker parlor on every corner.”
In 1910, Robert Dickinson, a gynecologist at Brooklyn Hospital in New York, published a paper detailing his exhaustive study of more than 100 corset-wearing patients. Nobody, he contended, could “scrub floors or pick up baby or tennis ball without squeezing the bowels and shoving things out of place.” There was no period in American history, it would seem, that didn’t have a corset controversy. But it was a sign of the times that Dickinson included the tennis ball question. More and more women of every age were riding bicycles, playing tennis, and exercising in other ways that did not permit the restriction of a super-girdle. Yet an essay on “How to Remain Young” in Harper’s Bazar warned every older woman that doing away with corsets was “an ill-advised experiment for one of her years if she wishes to look neat and trim and well-groomed.”
The corset would survive, in one form or another. But the mature, curvy figure it celebrated was about to go into eclipse. Fashions were becoming looser, skimpier—for the body “as straight and yielding as a very young girl’s,” decreed one commentator.
The nation was approaching the 1920s, when there would be way, way more of the same.