Radio was king in the 1930s. Experts in the brand-new field of ratings reported that Americans were collectively spending “nearly one billion hours before the loud-speaker.” Those speakers were still pretty bulky and confined to the house, so during the day, the target audience was mainly homemakers. It was a breakthrough in modern communications—mass entertainment that was directed at women who weren’t particularly young. By 1936, half of all the daytime programming consisted of 15-minute, long-running melodramas whose sponsors gave them the generic name of “soap operas.” The shows’ heroines were people like Ma Perkins, the wise and kindly owner of a small-town lumberyard, the mother of several grown children, and a woman spunky enough to break up a black-market baby ring or foil a team of Soviet secret agents. And there was The Romance of Helen Trent, “the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who, when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair, fights back bravely, successfully, to prove what so many women long to prove in their own lives: That because a woman is 35 or more, romance in life need not be over, that romance of youth can extend into middle life, and even beyond.” Helen, whose travails ran through 7,222 performances from 1933 to 1960, never married any of her 28 suitors and never turned 36.
Helen Trent had a rather glamorous life as a Hollywood designer, but many of the soaps’ leading ladies were simple housewives or widows running a family business—Ma had to take over that lumberyard when Pa died. They had endless adventures, demonstrating that a woman over 35 could not only find romance; she could also solve murders, outwit gangsters, and survive plane crashes. The heroine of The Story of Mary Marlin was appointed to the U.S. Senate to replace her husband, who disappeared in Siberia. Stella Dallas told the saga of a humble farmhand’s daughter who “saw her own beloved daughter, Laurel, marry into wealth and society and, realizing the differences in their tastes and worlds, went out of Laurel’s life.” But she came back, due to a stupendous run of emergencies that included one crisis in which Laurel was kidnapped by a sheik. “I had to go to the Sahara Desert and try to save her,” the actress who played Stella recalled. “On the way I saved a lot of people from a train wreck.”
The 1930s were, metaphorically, one long train wreck. The decade began with the collapse of the stock market, and hard economic times continued until the Depression smashed into World War II in 1941. At the peak of the 1930s, a quarter of the working population was unemployed and the average family income dropped 40 percent. The flapper was useless when mortgages were defaulting and furniture was being repossessed. Blondie Boopadoop, the party-loving cutie who had a long-running fling with Dagwood, a dim-witted billionaire’s son, in the popular comic strip Blondie, suddenly seemed wrong for the times. Her creator quickly married the pair off, disinherited Dagwood, and turned his heroine into a sensible, rather harried housewife whose husband was a low-watt office worker providing the comic relief. The time for frivolity was over and the ideal woman acted like a grown-up. Her shoulders got broader—even literally, thanks to the fashions of the day.
On the home front, women returned to old, inefficient, but inexpensive ways of housekeeping—the sale of glass jars soared as women stopped buying canned food and began putting up their own preserves. The media, which still had ads to sell, tried to depict spending as prudent and sometimes downright patriotic. Harper’s Bazaar extolled Grandmother, who helped the economy by getting nice little extras for her carriage: “When Grandmother made the opportune purchase of a quality product she saw an economic law working out in her own little world, she received exceptional value for her money, and she enjoyed the gratifying sense of being a public benefactor.”
You’ll notice that Grandmother wasn’t going to work. The nation definitely preferred to think she didn’t need to. When the Depression hit, many housewives were compelled to look for a way to make money to help their suffering families. But they faced double prejudice—for being older and for taking employment away from men. The career girl had been eulogized in the ’20s, but during the Depression, the media was trying to celebrate the women who kept the hell out of the job market. Magazines helpfully published articles with titles like “You Can Have My Job: A Feminist Discovers Her Home.” The new villain was the woman who worked for “pin money”—extra cash she didn’t really need. Even Frances Perkins, the future secretary of labor, denounced college graduates who thought it was fashionable to work at jobs that could have gone to their less educated, needy sisters. She complained that their “flimsy pay envelope acts as a sop to the fashion… even if it drains the pockets of their male relatives and forces out of a job another unskilled woman who needs to work in order to live.”
The idea that women—especially married women—were only working to get money to buy “extras” was commonly held. George Gallup, the pioneer polling expert, said it drew a level of public prejudice usually reserved for “sin and hay fever.” 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 percent 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 from the White House. Even if a woman was living with relatives who had jobs, Eleanor reasoned, “the day her earning power ceases she becomes an economic liability to her family and her country.” The First Lady felt discrimination against older female workers was worse than discrimination against older men, reasoning that for a man “it may eventually be possible to find a place in farm work or in forestry work or in some other industry, but what is to happen to the woman who after working twenty to thirty years in one industry finds a slip in her pay envelope saying, ‘Next week your services will no longer be required’? She knows no other skill or trade; she has been trained to the knowledge of only one machine.”
The idea that laid-off middle-aged men could seamlessly slip into jobs in forestry belongs in the same pleasant-fantasy category as the female steeplejacks we saw in the 1920s. But Roosevelt was fighting against a major-league prejudice, and she was well aware that times were tough even for women who appeared to have lots of advantages. Those college graduates who were grabbing up the clerical openings were often trying to support themselves after their old professional jobs disappeared or were given to men. The women who did manage to keep working often got less pay. Strapped school boards kept cutting teachers’ salaries. Their compensation averaged about $1,600 a year during the Depression—the equivalent of about $24,000 today. Even worse, some teachers discovered their paychecks never arrived, or that the envelope just contained the equivalent of an IOU. “As professionals, we’re entitled to starve to death quietly and with refinement,” Elsa Ponselle, a Chicago elementary school principal, dryly told the writer Studs Terkel. While the teachers protested, she said, there were no strikes or walkouts because “that would hurt the children. We determined on one thing: We were not going to hurt the children. We went on teaching whether we were being paid or not.”
Businesses that employed older women as a matter of course—like department stores—began to mutter about younger workers being more flexible and, of course, cheaper. The only occupations where age was not a real drawback were “the needle trades, beauty culture and cafeteria work,” said Ollie Randall, an official at an emergency work bureau in New York. “It is extremely difficult for a woman over 40 to get a job today, and many of the women now out of work were dismissed because of their age.” Older black women were facing a triple threat when it came to discrimination, with race piled on top of age and gender. Over half of black female workers lost their jobs in the Depression, compared to about 30 percent of white women. The Philadelphia Public Employment Office reported 68 percent of the job availabilities it handled in 1932 and 1933 were for “Whites Only.” Domestic service, where so many black women were employed, was in a free fall—the maid or nanny or cook was the first luxury to go when families faced economic problems.
Some of the few bright spots of the Depression were the accounts of beleaguered women supporting one another. “Back in the Thirties, when it was really tough, and nobody was working, we divided whatever we had with each other,” Mrs. Willye Jeffries, a union official in Chicago, told Studs Terkel.
In Chicago, labor union members tried to wring money out of the local relief office to bury the indigent dead. On one occasion, Jeffries said, they mobilized under the leadership of “a white lady, weighed about two, three hundred. We called her Ma Kuntz,” who waved a stick to keep the protest marchers in time while looking out for police who might attempt to break up the demonstration. The police finally arrived, Jeffries remembered, stared at Ma Kuntz and her stick, and then went away. “We stayed over two weeks on that first floor. We had blankets, we moved a piano in and we had a big time. We had plenty to eat ’cause those that weren’t picketing saw that we had food every day.”
The press was not all that enthusiastic about populist uprisings, preferring to promote the theory that things were getting better on their own. A New York Times story on a convention of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women reported that “much optimism was expressed by vocational experts” regarding job opportunities for the “beginner after 40.” The report exhibited no skepticism whatsoever when a featured speaker—the personnel director of a department store—told the delegates, “The chorus line is almost the only line that should give pause to the mature woman job seeker.”
Some women who couldn’t find jobs tried to go into business for themselves, and the cheerleading media embraced the idea that those self-starters were likely to succeed. “I am now daily confronted, on Fifth and Madison Avenues, by thousands of prosperous lady milliners, lady dress designers, decorators and agents of various sorts, not to mention the ten thousand other ladies of breeding who are scattered among the city’s fashion magazines, small shops, travel bureaus, picture galleries, publishing houses, tea shops and department stores,” wrote a possibly overenthusiastic Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. In truth, most of the female entrepreneurs were running beauty parlors in their kitchens or performing other one-woman services. And the chances of making any real money were minimal. A 1936 survey of single women on relief in Chicago found that the vast majority of the older recipients had been employed in the past, many of them running exactly the kinds of businesses other women were then being urged to start: dressmaking, hairstyling, or managing a rooming house.
When all else failed, you moved in with your relatives. The number of three-generation families rose in both urban and rural areas. Older women generally fit more comfortably into their children’s homes than men, but no extra mouths were all that welcome when people were having trouble feeding themselves. Chicago relief workers reported countless stories of elderly women whose children wouldn’t take them in. Maude, a 51-year-old widow living with her daughter, lost her job and then cashed in her insurance policy to make ends meet. The daughter, who had been planning to inherit that insurance money, was so angry at its disappearance that she turned her mother out. Black families had traditionally welcomed needy relatives, but the strain was affecting them, too. The Chicago social workers told the story of Mary, a 53-year-old widow who had supported herself and her family for 40 years working as a domestic. When Mary lost her job in 1932, one of her sons refused to contribute to her support. Another was willing to take her into his home until it became clear Mary and his wife couldn’t get along. The third had no home to offer and could give her only 25 to 50 cents each payday.
The Depression was bankrupting even people who had assumed they’d put away plenty of money for retirement. Carey McWilliams, a Los Angeles lawyer, watched its impact on “the kind of widows who are legion in southern California. Who had brought money out from the Middle West and had invested it in fly-by-night real estate promotions. They began to lose their property.… There was a feverish activity in foreclosures.” Middle-class parents generally didn’t have to worry about homelessness, but if they moved in with their children, the hostility did seem, at times, to be pretty intense. A writer in The Nation picked up on the venerable satire “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift and suggested, “Doctors will have to be warned to cease their pernicious efforts to lengthen the span of human life.”
The media, looking for an upside, churned out stories on how to live happily in a multigenerational household. The unnamed but very cheerful author of “I Am the Mother-in-Law in the Home” reported in the Saturday Evening Post that while she had endured the death of her husband and two children, along with crushing financial reverses, the specter of living with her married daughter seemed like the most unendurable blow of all. However, after many struggles with her offspring and her high-strung businessman son-in-law, she won them over by learning to play piano and type, and reading her way through college courses at the library. The final triumph came when the author started listening to the radio to educate herself about sports and charmed the pants off a very important dinner guest by talking about racing “and then in progression mentioning the names of horses and riders with easy familiarity, which evoked veritable gasps from my astonished children.”
In 1936, Marjorie Hillis, an editor at Vogue, wrote a bestselling advice book, Live Alone and Like It, for women over 30—divorced, widowed, or never married. As we’ve seen, a lot of people couldn’t afford quarters of their own whether they wanted them or not. But economics aside, women who lived alone had always been regarded as either loony or pathetic. Now times were changing. A quarter-century later, Hillis’s message would be echoed in Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 smash hit that urged unmarried women to stop being “mouseburgers” and have a no-holds-barred social and romantic life. Hillis was not particularly enthusiastic about the sex angle, which she seemed to regard as something left over from the frivolous ’20s. When it came to fornication, she warned, “the Woman Pays.” But she was not at all opposed to the woman picking up the tab if she went out to dinner with a gentleman who was more strapped for cash than she was. “After all,” she philosophized, “it’s better to be brazen than neglected.” Most of all, Hillis wanted each reader to be “a gay and independent person.” So there were tips on how to throw parties in even the smallest apartments, how much to tip when traveling, how to mix cocktails, and how to cook for company. “A reputation for good cuisine,” she counseled, “is an almost certain step towards popularity.”
Like those optimistic female essayists of the nineteenth century, Hillis believed the answer to both aging and loneliness was to do something. But her list of suggestions was somewhat different. Instead of helping others, she wanted her readers to do things for themselves. Settlement houses didn’t come into the conversation. Hillis urged her readers to focus on “friends, hobbies, parties, books and almost anything else that keeps you interesting.” At one point, after offering a long list of options, Hillis added, “Be a Communist, a stamp collector or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake be something.” Aiding the poor was better than nothing, but she didn’t seem to find it nearly as appealing as antiquing.
It was, in its way, a turning point. Hillis was hardly breaking new ground in urging readers to take care of their bodies and get exercise. (Mrs. deW, one of the book’s many good examples, devoted so much time to physical improvement that “at home recently, she entertained the guests by standing on her head.”) But the book’s main secret for a happy later life was self-gratification: having the most elegant home possible, pampering oneself with breakfast in bed, lots of massages, and fun activities that make great cocktail party conversation. Her heroines took trips to the Andes or gave glamorous buffet lunches with the help of a low-cost “colored-maid-in-for-the-afternoon.” They did not do community service. One of Hillis’s cautionary tales was Mrs. O, a middle-aged divorcée who was “active in women’s clubs and the movement to promote birth control” but lacked “any ability for graceful living at home.” Some of O’s friends, Hillis said crushingly, “have also thought that perhaps it was not so surprising that ten years or so ago, Mr. O ran off with his pretty stenographer.”
While Americans were obsessed with radio in the ’30s, they still got their visual models of glamour and the good life from movies. Given the times, audiences lost interest in the silly-teenager model of the flapper era. Most of the top stars were independent-looking women in their 20s or early 30s—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and a somewhat recycled Joan Crawford. People still loved a story about a little girl, but now the big child star was mercifully an actual child: Shirley Temple.
The ’30s are widely regarded as a golden age of film, and as movies got bigger and their plots more complex, older women got a wide range of roles. Billie Burke played the blond and beautiful good witch in The Wizard of Oz when she was 54; Margaret Hamilton, the bad witch, was 38. It may have been payback in a way for Burke’s being denied a leading role in The Great Ziegfeld, the Oscar-winning 1936 biography of her late husband, Flo Ziegfeld. The studio had decreed that she was too old to play—herself. On the other side of the coin, in the Marx Brothers movies Margaret Dumont personified all the things middle-aged women didn’t want to be, a dignified dimwit who never got the joke. In reality, Dumont was an accomplished actress with an impeccable sense of timing who knew how to make her co-stars look good. When Groucho Marx got an honorary Oscar in 1974, he failed to mention his brothers in his brief speech, but he made sure to credit Dumont.
Jane Darwell, a late bloomer who made her first movie when she was almost 40, put in her time in five Shirley Temple films, usually as a helpful grandmother or housekeeper. But she also starred in the ultimate Depression drama The Grapes of Wrath and won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the stolid, brave, beleaguered migrant family matriarch who tells her husband, “We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.” Spring Byington demonstrated if not range, at least the extensive opportunities available to an actress who specialized in playing wise and kindly mothers—she appeared in 47 movies throughout the ’30s. Marie Dressler, a veteran theater trouper, had trouble finding work in what she called the “youth-mad” ’20s. But when talking pictures arrived, she won a lucrative contract with MGM, and in her 60s she became Hollywood’s top box-office attraction until her death in 1934. Dressler starred in one of the decade’s smash hits, Min and Bill, a comedy-drama in which she got to have a romance—although hardly a glamorous one—with a hard-drinking fisherman played by Wallace Beery. She was not only a superstar honored on the cover of Time but an icon who could be brought into any American’s home with Marie Dressler dolls or puppets or dresses. “She was the best-loved star of her time,” wrote movie historian Earl Anderson. “She looked like your grandmother, or yourself. To hell with young love, to hell with getting rich. We had Marie.” Dressler was wryly aware that her well-padded body had no relation to the normal ideals in women’s magazines. “That’s all me!” she told portrait photographer George Hurrell, patting her rear end when she posed for a series of film-star shots that were totally true to her sense of self. When she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Min and Bill in 1931, Dressler laughed that she was pitted against Hollywood’s most glamorous young women: “Imagine this old mud hen running competition with a star like Norma Shearer. Probably some pal tossed in my name to give me a plug and the crowd a good laugh.” Dressler got the last laugh, however: she won.
In 1937, Walt Disney produced his first full-length animated movie, Snow White, which introduced generations of children to the idea that the evil witch was an old hag who spent her time trying to destroy youth and beauty. Not as cheering as the Marie Dressler story but in keeping with the theme: there were myriad movie roles for women who had passed 35, as long as they didn’t involve sex appeal.
Then there was Mae West.
A stage star who specialized in comedy and—particularly—sex, West went to Hollywood in 1932 when her old pal the actor George Raft suggested she be cast in what was supposed to be his breakthrough movie. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons described the newcomer as “buxom blonde… fat, fair and I don’t know how near 40.” In fact, she was 39, and although her role was originally both minor and boring, West rewrote her part of the script, adding a bit in which another woman admires her jewelry and says, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!”
“Goodness had nothing to do with it,” retorts West, in what remains one of the most quoted lines in Hollywood history.
Raft, who was totally overshadowed, said his friend “stole everything but the cameras.” West also changed the tempo of the dialogue, speeding everything up until the veteran comic Alison Skipworth protested the way she was being pushed around. “You forget I’ve been an actress forty years,” she told West indignantly. “Don’t worry, dear. I’ll keep your secret,” said West, who was about to start breaking the age ceiling herself in the most public way possible.
Part of her genius was ambiguity—her ability to deliver the most salacious lines with an apparent tongue in cheek. That was somehow easier for middle-class audiences to accept from a woman who was, at least age-wise, not supposed to be doing that sort of stuff at all. It wasn’t an act that lasted forever—by the 1940s West’s career had collapsed. But in 1933, she was the biggest box office draw in Hollywood. She changed the ideal figure back to the Lillian Russell model, billed as “the gal with the hourglass figure that makes every second count.” “I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond,” she said airily. A Paramount publicity man posed her on a keg of beer, with the line “Mae West says drink beer and you’ll get curves, gals.”
It was quite a decade for films, and the grand finale came in 1939 with Gone with the Wind. It was based on the wildly popular novel, in which Scarlett O’Hara spends her 20s trying to survive the Civil War and the storms of love. Most of the older characters weren’t all that much of a help, except, of course, for Mammy. We meet her at the beginning of the movie, disciplining the young Scarlett (“If you don’t care what folks says about this family, I does”), and watch her stand by Scarlett and Rhett through their greatest crises. Mammy had no known personal life outside her devotion to the O’Hara family. She was even less independent than Aunt Jemima, whose rag-doll version at least had a husband and children. Hattie McDaniel, the veteran entertainer who played Mammy, was an old hand at that kind of role, having been Mae West’s maid in I’m No Angel and Shirley Temple’s maid in The Little Colonel. “Why should I complain about making $700 to play a maid?” she once demanded. “If I didn’t, I’d be making $7 a week being one.” McDaniel, 44, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her Mammy portrayal—the first Oscar given to an African American. “I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry,” she told the assembled diners at the awards gala. To accept the statuette, McDaniel had to make her way through a sea of tables—the first black guest ever invited to the dinner, she had been seated way in the back of the room.
While the movies treasured the memory of those pre–Civil War mammies, in the real South they were few and far between. Historian Catherine Clinton thinks the image of the asexual, middle-aged devoted slave who ran the whole household was conjured up as a counterpart to the young black women who were sexually exploited by the white men who controlled them. Being older—and generally unattractive—was important. So was the idea that Mammy loved her white charges more than herself. In 1934, the movie Imitation of Life presented an updated version of the same character in Aunt Delilah, a black maid who gives her boss, Bea, a pancake recipe that Bea turns into a successful company. When Bea offers Delilah a (minority) share in the business, the maid reacts in terror to the idea of being able to afford a house of her own. “Oh, honey chile, please don’t send me away,” she begged. “… I’se your cook. And I want to stay your cook.” Delilah was played by Louise Beavers, who, like Hattie McDaniel, had also played a maid-confidante to Mae West. There was frequently a black maid in West’s movies, and her job was mainly to admire whatever West’s character was wearing or help the plot along by expressing approval of her next move. However, none of them gave the impression that they’d turn down a fortune in order to maintain the privilege of staying by West’s side.
The Depression could be… depressing. The country decided rather quickly that one thing it needed was a good stiff drink, or three or four. In 1933, Utah provided the last necessary state ratification for repeal of Prohibition, and relatively few Americans were sorry to see it go. A study by Fortune in 1937 showed 30 percent of women regretted its demise, but only 15 percent of men. People were also eager for diverting gossip, and one of the most sensational stories of the era involved the newly crowned bachelor king of England, Edward VIII, who announced in 1936 that he was abdicating the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a 40-year-old twice-divorced American. “I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love,” he said in what was regarded as—depending on your perspective—one of the most romantic or one of the most ridiculous moments in the history of the royal family.
Watching Simpson create an international sex crisis at 40 was something. The British public had many objections. One was her age, although her lover, who was referred to as “the young king,” was actually a year her senior. There were persistent rumors that her hold over Edward was due to some sexual secret—perhaps erotic tricks she had learned during a sojourn in China. Whatever it was, most of the public decided they preferred Elizabeth, the plump, cheerful spouse of Edward’s brother, who became queen. Wallis, who dieted on a single egg per day whenever she gained the slightest bit of weight, disparagingly referred to Elizabeth as “Cookie.” After the abdication, Edward and his wife embarked on a new life as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Nothing in their later history suggested the British had lost much in the bargain—for one thing, they spent a lot of time hanging out with Nazi sympathizers—but the duchess gradually did become a fashion icon, with her simple, rather severe style of dress and her super-slender frame. She had her pillows embroidered with the motto “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
The rich part was probably true, but given the fact that so many people were worrying about starving to death in the ’30s, extreme thinness wasn’t all that popular. Fashions tended toward fuller figures—skirts were longer, and shoulders were padded. The change in the ideal of the perfect figure was so dramatic, “one might almost have thought a new anatomical species had come into being,” said one commentator. Corsets were back in a less rigid form, and bras came with cup sizes. Perhaps the biggest fashion discovery was pants. Sporty young women had begun playing golf or tennis in them, and the film star Katharine Hepburn wore trousers all over the place: “Any time I hear a man say he prefers a woman in a skirt, I say: ‘Try one. Try a skirt.’” But it was hardly a trend that swept the nation. Studio executives tried to confiscate Hepburn’s pants and were dissuaded only when she threatened to walk around the lot naked. During World War II, four female pilots who had been grounded by the weather in Georgia were arrested for violating a local law against women wearing slacks on the street at night. It was going to be a slow transition, but these were the first stirrings of a change that would eventually spread so far that even older, full-figured women would feel comfortable wearing pants everywhere from church to the campaign trail.
While the nation may have abandoned its obsession with 19-year-olds, it had most definitely not lost interest in urging older women to look “youthful.” And when it came to the beauty industry, the battle was still frequently described in ways that made the first wrinkle sound as traumatic as, say, the first spot of leprosy. “Many women do not realize that day by day the pitiless hand of Time is writing a tragic story on their faces,” said a 1930 ad for Dorothy Gray skin products. “First he traces fine little lines at the corners of eyes and mouth. These lines seem harmless enough, but they lead to a cruel sequel. They mark out an easy path for deep, unsightly wrinkles. The ugly wrinkles swiftly follow, to stay and destroy your loveliness.” Actress Edna Wallace Hopper, who was in her 60s, urged the readers of women’s magazines to purchase Edna Wallace Hopper’s Special Restorative Cream. “I’ve been booked from one theatre to another as ‘The One Woman in the World Who Never Grew Old,’” her ads announced. “At a grandmother’s age I still enjoy the thrills of youth.” Edna claimed she often got come-ons from “boys scarcely above college age.” It was, perhaps, the new version of bragging that people mistook you for your daughter.
It’s not surprising that women were seduced by the idea of battling time, since some of the arguments for growing old gracefully were depressing in the extreme. Thurman Rice, a physician who published innumerable pamphlets and books on the question, cautioned people who were approaching 40 not to panic, since the woman “who can relax a bit at this time and smile indulgently at the mad struggle for beauty and youth has before her many happy days of comparative quiet and serenity.” Married couples, he promised, could have lives “of placid, uneventful domesticity,” while unmarried women… well, the unmarried women would probably have to resign themselves “to the prospect of a lonesome and possibly bitter old age.”
On the brighter side, the media seemed to be rediscovering the middle-aged market, and Americans of both sexes were reading books like Life Begins at Forty and Who Says Old! Walter Pitkin, the author of Life Begins at Forty, theorized that middle age would be particularly terrific for well-educated women, who spent their thirties getting over the effects of women’s colleges, which he seemed to feel included both over-cerebration and unattractive dress. Pushing the thought much further, women’s magazines went back to running articles celebrating the glories of aging. “Here is a woman of seventy-five who is eagerly interested in life and about to undertake a new business of some scope,” offered one. “Another woman of eighty drives herself alone across the continent from Minnesota to California and back every autumn and spring.”
Among the women who had been living—and fighting—in the public eye for years, aging in action was a natural theme. “Instead of slowing down, as a woman who is older than she used to be is supposed to do, I seem to be taking on new responsibilities every day in every way,” said Mary Church Terrell, the civil rights leader, when she was in her 70s. “I do not feel old. I intend never to grow old.” Her friends, Terrell noted, kept telling her to take it easy, but “I am just not built that way. I can walk faster and farther than either one of my daughters without feeling it. And I have greater power of endurance than either one of them has. I can dance as long and as well as I ever did although I get very few chances to do so.” The fact that there were few dancing opportunities was a definite source of irritation: “There seems to be sort of a tradition that after a woman reaches a certain age she should not want to trip the light fantastic, and that even if she is anachronistic enough to wish to do such an unseemly thing, she should not be allowed to indulge in this healthful and fascinating exercise.” Frustrating as that was, Terrell, a tireless organizer and educator, was not left sitting bored in the cold. At 86 she was still out filing suits against segregated restaurants.
During the Depression, Jane Addams experienced another surge of popularity—economic trauma reminded the country of what they had loved about her all along. 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 Nobel Prize. Franklin Roosevelt, the eighth president she had advised, felt that Addams “understands more about the real people of the United States than anybody else does.” Addams had supported Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, remembering the work they had done together on international food relief during World War I. But 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. “They made me feel as if I were still in the frontline trenches,” she wrote to her nephew. “Probably one never gets over that feeling, though. I have always wondered when I should understand that I am an old lady.”
Perhaps never, since 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. In 1930, Addams celebrated her 70th birthday along with Hull House’s 40th anniversary. (They weren’t actually the same date, but like Mother Jones, Addams was perfectly happy to adapt her age to the cause at hand.) She no longer ran the settlement house on a day-to-day basis, but she was still an active presence, holding office hours every day so residents and visitors could come and talk. The Depression had sent a new flood of people, seeking help finding jobs, food, clothing, or just a sense of community. Some of the women who had come to work as Hull House residents had been there almost as long as Addams herself—at the anniversary party there were nine veterans of more than 30 years.
Addams was at home, recovering from surgery, when she received word she had won the Nobel Prize. She gave most of the award money to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. And she was sadly unable to go to Norway to give her Nobel lecture. She suffered from perpetual bronchitis, and her weight—which was close to 200 pounds despite her small stature—made it difficult for her to get around. But when both political parties held their presidential conventions in Chicago in 1932, she rode at the front of the peace demonstrators who staged a mobile protest march.
She still traveled, with her longtime companion Mary Rozet Smith. Their relationship had begun back in an era when women frequently had intense, lifelong friendships, sometimes sharing the same bed and writing passionate letters when they were apart. By the 1930s, the nation had passed through its Freudian period, and many people presumed their relationship was physical. No one ever really knew, but in 1934 when Smith died of pneumonia, Addams’s life pretty much ended as well. “Jane grieved every day after that,” wrote her biographer, Louise Knight. Her doctor had banned her from living at Hull House, and she stayed with various friends while continuing to write and pursue her lifelong quests for peace and helping the poor. In 1935, she was hospitalized with a sharp stomach pain that turned out to be advanced cancer. Addams was 74. She told her friend Louise DeKoven Bowen that she was not afraid to die: “I know I’ll go on living, and I want to know what it’s going to be like.” While they were waiting for that last ambulance, Bowen recalled, she went into Addams’s room to tell her the driver would not arrive for another hour. “That’s all right, for that will give me time to finish the book I’m reading,” Addams replied.
Her body lay in state at Hull House, where thousands walked past the coffin and the neighbors stood at tenement windows that looked down on the funeral service. She was buried near her parents and siblings, under a stone that read “Jane Addams of Hull House and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.”
The Depression gave the nation a new appreciation of the older reformers, who had been fighting for justice and equality for so long. As they died, there was a sense of a passing of the torch. In 1932, Alva Belmont, the battling suffragist socialite, died at 80. At her funeral the casket was draped, at her request, with a banner reading “Failure Is Impossible.” Mother Jones, the union leader who had exaggerated her age to shame young men into following in her fierce footsteps, celebrated her 100th birthday on May 1, 1930, when she was really turning 92. It was, she knew, going to be the last hurrah. She was living, mainly bedridden, in the home of friends in Maryland, and with some effort, she walked down the stairs to greet a crowd of birthday visitors, including labor leaders, politicians, and a delegation of 100 unemployed men. “A wonderful power is in the hands of women… but they don’t know how to use it,” she told the whirring news cameras. “Capitalists sidetrack the women into clubs and make ladies of them. Nobody wants a lady. They want women.” It was her last public appearance. She died six months later, and her body went by rail to a cemetery in Illinois, where she was buried near the graves of mine workers who had been killed during a strike. Thousands of mourners greeted the coffin.
There had been an earlier requiem Mass in Washington, where Mary Harris Jones was remembered before a church packed with both dignitaries and working men and women. “Her zeal and earnestness in behalf of the poor will be a pleasant memory long after her body is gone,” said the priest. Elliott Gorn, Mother Jones’s biographer, noted that those words “made her seem just another charitable old woman, not the fiery organizer who led angry workers in their quest for justice. But he was merely following a trend that reduced the militant warrior to an old saint that hid the angry matriarch of laboring families behind the sweet grandmother.”
Eleanor Roosevelt moved into the White House as a former settlement house worker. She had introduced her fiancé, Franklin, to the world of the immigrant poor, taking him on a visit to a tenement, where he “could not believe human beings lived that way.” After they married and he was felled by polio, she enabled him to continue his political career by becoming his “legs”—a mission that was much more to her taste than traditional marital duties. She helped build the organization that allowed him to run for governor of New York, working with labor unions and women’s groups, and eventually becoming an official in the Democratic Party herself. Her good friend the journalist Lorena Hickok claimed Eleanor “was better known to politicians around the state than her husband was.” It was a role she would carry on through his presidential campaigns and more than a dozen years as First Lady.
There are some people who seem middle-aged even when they’re young, and Eleanor was definitely one of them. (Her mother, to Eleanor’s great dismay, nicknamed her “Granny.”) The lucky ones also never seem to get old, chugging through a kind of energetic maturity forever. The 48-year-old First Lady 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 United Nations in her 60s. Her energy was prodigious. In the White House, she divided her day into 15-minute meetings, broken by stints of calisthenics, horseback riding, and laps in the White House pool. (She once visited the White House usher’s office for a meeting wearing her yellow bathing suit, an encounter the man never quite got over.) 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. The pleas for help were unbearable. Many desperate women wrote to the First Lady begging for secondhand clothes. “I can sew and would only be too glad to take two old things and put them together and make a new one,” wrote a woman in Philadelphia. “I don’t care what it is, any thing from an old bunch of stockings to an old Sport Suit or an old afternoon dress, in fact. Anything a lady of 40 years of age can wear.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was the ultimate embodiment of the Lydia Maria Child theory of successfully growing old: “If any one were to ask me what I want most out of life, I would say—the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be obtained.” Her home life never seemed to offer her real satisfaction; the Roosevelts’ marriage had devolved into a working partnership after Eleanor discovered Franklin was having an affair with her social secretary. She raised five children she loved, but she was never totally comfortable in a maternal role—Franklin’s overbearing mother kept telling her grandchildren that Eleanor will “only bore you. I am more your mother than your mother is.” But on the road, the First Lady was in her element, speaking and organizing and constantly taking controversial stands. She criticized the spending-cut strategy of the early New Deal and was far ahead of her husband on racial equality, inviting black leaders to confer at the White House. She was denounced as a “Jezebel” by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union for condoning drinking in moderation. She was hardly a fashion trendsetter—it took her years in the public spotlight before she gave up wearing her black hairnet. Never having been a beauty, Eleanor learned to be comfortable with her looks. “My dear, if you haven’t any chin and your front teeth stick out, it’s going to show on the camera plate,” she said with cheerful resignation. The administration’s critics constantly made sport of her appearance, but she managed to ignore it. “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide,” she said.
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 dollars—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 had 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 the while corresponding with Eleanor, who eventually became godmother to his daughter. When the future civil rights leader Pauli Murray, then a student at Howard University law school, 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. Carrie Chapman Catt, then in her 80s, proudly wrote to Eleanor that she had always had a “collection of statesmen” hanging on her wall but that now “I have been obliged to start a new collection and that is one of stateswomen.”
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. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the former governor of Wyoming, became director of the U.S. Mint—a job she kept until 1952. Mary McLeod Bethune, an inexhaustible educator and civil rights leader, was head of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration. Bethune was with Eleanor at a legendary gathering of New Dealers in Birmingham, where the infamous sheriff Bull Connor had announced that the audience would have to be segregated. When blacks and whites were seated on their opposite sides, the First Lady came in with a folding chair and sat in the middle of the aisle. After the enthusiastic crowd finally finished applauding, one of the white organizers called on Bethune, referring to her as just “Mary.”
“My name is Mrs. Bethune,” she replied.
It seemed, in retrospect, to be a small thing, said Virginia Foster Durr, a white civil rights leader who was at the meeting, “but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, called Mrs. Bethune at a public meeting.”
Virtually all the new Washington women were old enough to have grown up in the Progressive Era, fighting for voting rights. “The friendships that were formed among women who were in that suffrage movement have been the most lasting and enduring friendships—solid, substantial, loyal—that I have ever seen anywhere,” wrote Frances Perkins, who joined the administration at 52. They had worked in settlement houses, led clubs that fought for urban sanitation, clean politics, and consumer rights. They had been mentored by people like Jane Addams and had supported each other through the unsympathetic 1920s. Now they were finally addressing many of the issues the suffragists had believed would be taken care of when women got the vote. 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 New Deal women tended to hang out together, and there were times when they really needed that sense of having one another’s backs. When Perkins arrived at her desk on the first day of work in the Labor Department, she discovered her resentful predecessor had filled it with roaches. (She was hardly a novice when it came to dealing with male resistance—she always wore black dresses, believing that men responded best to women who reminded them of their mothers.) Perkins was one of the central figures of the administration and one of the closest to the Roosevelts. She had graduated from Mount Holyoke, worked at Hull House and at the New York City Consumers’ League. She was having tea with friends in 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a sweatshop crowded with overworked, underpaid young immigrant girls, caught fire. Perkins was part of the horrified crowd who saw workers trapped in the upper floors of the building leap out of windows to escape the flames and fall to their deaths on the sidewalk. She became executive secretary of a citizens committee formed to investigate the disaster, and eventually one of the nation’s experts on worker safety issues. Governor Roosevelt named her industrial commissioner and offered her the Labor post when he became president. Perkins, whose husband suffered from psychiatric problems, was the support of her family, and she was reluctant to move to Washington to take the cabinet job. Molly Dewson, the Democratic Party official who was serving as the pipeline bringing women into the administration, refused to listen to her reservations. “Don’t be such a baby, Frances,” she told her friend. “You do the right thing. I’ll murder you if you don’t.”
Dewson, who had graduated from Wellesley, served in the Red Cross in France during World War I and had been head of the New York City Consumers’ League. Eleanor Roosevelt brought her into Democratic politics in 1928, and they worked hand in hand to move women into FDR’s administration. “How fine it is to play the game together all these years, isn’t it?” Perkins wrote after a particularly fruitful luncheon. Dewson recalled that whenever she wanted serious support on an important subject, “Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup.”
Besides the roaches, Frances Perkins found her new desk in the Labor Department was stuffed with more than 2,000 “‘plans’ for curing the Depression.” Most of them were clearly impossible, but she was taken by several suggestions that involved giving the elderly flat payments every month. At the time, there was virtually no such thing as a private pension. Some states had old-age assistance programs, but the highest gave the equivalent of about $550 a month in today’s money. In most states, they got little or nothing at all. When Perkins was commissioner of labor in New York State, her friends had told her about the British system for old-age and unemployment insurance. People who had been to England “thought it was such a nice idea that Lady Jones’ maid had a little book, and when Lady Jones paid her, she wrote in the maid’s little book and that was going to take care of the maid when she was old—when she was 70 years old or 65 years old, she could collect something. Now wasn’t that a good idea? Thousands of people thought it was a fine idea.” Perkins got Governor Roosevelt to send her to England to study the system, and although she was horrified by the amount of government paperwork it required, she became a convert to the concept we now know as Social Security.
It was quite a battle. Americans always had been adamantly attached to the idea that people were responsible for their old age; if they failed to save enough to prepare on their own, relatives should shoulder the burden. And giving money to the elderly was tied up in the public mind with aid to the unemployed, which was even less popular. When the subject of unemployment insurance came up, Perkins recalled, businessmen would say, “Oh no; terrible, the dole!” Then she “would mention old-age insurance to them to make it easier, but they would say, ‘No, that’s the dole too. I don’t believe in the dole.’”
The country was still politically conservative in 1932, so the Democratic platform on which Franklin Roosevelt ran for president simply called for a study on the causes of unemployment—“as though anybody hadn’t studied them in years,” Perkins sniped. Once elected, FDR created a Committee on Economic Security, with Perkins at its head. The committee was supposed to study the possibility of a national program for the unemployed, the aged, and health care, but—in a moment that would presage the rest of twentieth-century politics—it quickly dropped the health care part as too complicated. And work on the unemployed and the aged was hardly treated as an administration centerpiece. Just to prepare its proposal, the committee had to borrow actuaries from the Lions Club and a friendly life insurance company.
Long term, the committee decided, the answer to the problems of the elderly should be a program that people paid into while they were working. That way, their benefits would “come to the worker as a right” and not be restricted to the very needy. Thus was born the Social Security system, which was approved by Congress in 1935. It was desperately underfunded. Even though it wasn’t established under the Department of Labor, Perkins said, her staff “had to carry it the way you carry a dependent child.” She loaned workers to the Social Security Administration, including the critical statisticians, and put them up in her Labor offices, giving the top official a “large, handsome, red-upholstered, high-back chair… so that he could look like a king.” While the chair came out of her own office, Perkins admitted it was also “somewhat uncomfortable.”
At the time Social Security was first passed into law, somewhere between a third and half of Americans 65 and over were dependent on their family or friends for their support. The new program was slow to start, and when it did, monthly benefits began at a princely $22.60—well under $400 in today’s money.
The world into which Social Security was born presumed men were the family breadwinners and that benefits would normally be based on a husband’s income. Married couples did get more than single people—the government acknowledged that the wife had to eat—but if the wife worked, chances were it wouldn’t be reflected in their check. And if a nonworking wife lost her husband before age 60, she got nothing. Ditto for many who were divorced. The country would spend the next decades wrestling with the program’s deficits. One of the biggest was everyone it left out, including domestics and agricultural workers. That was a lot of people, particularly minority women. Mary Anderson of the U.S. Women’s Bureau found herself seated next to Mrs. Roosevelt at a lunch and was delighted to hear the First Lady nagging her to do something about the nation’s retired cleaning women, nannies, cooks, and laundresses. But nothing happened. The argument was that it was too complicated to try to cover people outside the normal work-for-a-company system. “The task may well prove insuperable,” said Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. It was ironic, given Perkins’s initial introduction to the program through Lady Jones’s maid. Many people thought Congress wanted to exclude domestics simply because they tended to be non-white. Years later, Perkins would say that the administration gave up on universal coverage and gradually “let them take out one group after another; no objections, just so we got the basis of the bill.” The Social Security Act was a huge compromise, but it was still a start for what would become one of the largest and most popular parts of American government. And when it passed, Frances Perkins threw a party.
Ida May Fuller, a retired secretary for a Vermont law firm, was just passing by a government office when she decided to drop in and ask about that new Social Security business. Fuller, who was known as “Aunt Ida” in her neighborhood, was a Republican, and she had never been all that enthusiastic about government programs. But she had noticed, while she was working, that a deduction had started coming out of her paycheck.
“It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you,” she said later.
The people in the office urged her to fill out some forms. On January 31, 1940, she received a check for $22.54—the first Social Security benefit ever.