On April 12 of 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was attending one of the many events that filled her life when she got a call summoning her back to the White House. She intuited the crisis that was coming. Nevertheless, before leaving she returned to the charity musicale in progress, waited until the next break in the entertainment, and apologized for “leaving before this delightful concert is finished.” Then she sat in the car “with clenched hands all the way” until she arrived home and was informed that Franklin had died.
Widowhood is a common fate—at the time President Roosevelt died, most women were widows by the age of 70, as were more than a quarter of those 55 to 64. But that didn’t make it any less traumatic—both because of the personal loss and because a wife’s identity was generally wrapped up in her marriage. Even though she was one of the most famous people in the world, Eleanor was no exception. “I shall hope to do what I can to be useful, although without my husband’s advice and guidance I feel very inadequate,” she wrote to a diplomat who sent his condolences. Without Franklin she was no longer First Lady. She no longer had her role, or her White House staff, or even her White House home. She also, of course, no longer had her husband of 40 years, who, despite their sexual separation, had been a beloved partner. For a further heartbreak, Eleanor had to deal with the discovery that he had not been alone when he died. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, whose affair with Franklin had crushed Eleanor in 1918, had been there, too. And the visit, along with many others in recent years, had been arranged by their daughter, Anna, who believed that Lucy’s companionship relaxed and soothed her ailing, exhausted father.
Eleanor returned to Hyde Park, which was filled with the Roosevelts’ Washington possessions. Franklin’s dog Fala was there waiting, and he became her constant companion. But the house was—at least by Eleanor’s standards—short on people. For a while, she felt at sea. Then in December the new president, Harry Truman, asked her to go to London as a delegate to the United Nations, the new world body Franklin had struggled so hard to establish. At first, she was mainly there as The Widow. Eleanor herself volunteered that she had no particular qualifications for the job. 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 end of the war had brought changes for almost everyone. Soldiers came home; families were reunited. Prisoners of war were released. Maude Davison—the leader of the nurses known as the Angels of Bataan—was 59 when her internment camp was liberated in February of 1945, and her health was about what you would expect from a woman who had been working on a starvation diet. After receiving a medical discharge in 1946, she married an old friend, Charles Jackson, a widower. Their life together was quiet—and rather short. Davison passed away 10 years later, the first of the nurse-POWs to die. She had never gotten that Distinguished Service Medal.
Davison’s fellow POW Josie Nesbit retired from the service in 1946 as a major. She married another internee, William Davis, and sent birthday and Christmas cards to the women she had served with for almost 50 years, until she died just 9 months short of her 100th birthday.
Non-veterans were in transition, too. By January 1946, the number of working women was down four million from its peak in 1944. Some were laid off or fired to make room for returning soldiers. Many went happily home of their own volition. Among those who didn’t, older women were particularly prominent—more than 80 percent of those 45 and over said they wanted to remain in the workforce. It made sense. Their children were mostly grown and the demands of homemaking continued to dwindle. Thanks to the New Deal, more than 90 percent of American homes had electricity, and the ever-improving home appliance market kept simplifying chores like washing and cooking. Besides canned goods, consumers were beginning to have access to a raft of frozen foods, including the legendary “TV dinners,” which might not have been great cuisine but did offer the option of speedy meal preparation.
After some postwar churning, older women were once again encouraged to work outside their homes. The prejudice they’d faced in earlier times had abated—the country had gotten used to seeing them holding down jobs. But, as always, it was the economy that really dictated attitudes. Postwar America was booming, and while employers no longer needed women to run power drills, they desperately needed more clerks, office workers, teachers, and nurses. And a lot of them would have to be older, since young women were quitting work in droves to marry returning soldiers and start families.
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. “A girl who hasn’t a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married,” wrote an essayist in the New York Times. “Not so long ago, girls were expelled from college for marrying; now girls feel hopeless if they haven’t a marriage at least in sight by commencement time.” In 1940, just a little more than half the young women between 20 and 24 were or had been married. By 1955, it was more than 70 percent, and the prospects for the other 30 percent were portrayed as bleak in the extreme. In the postwar classic It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel shows George Bailey what the world would be like if he had never been in it, and George asks to see his wife, Mary. “You’re not going to like it, George,” the angel says somberly. “She’s an old maid. She never married.” Mary is a miserable, seemingly frigid librarian. The actress Donna Reed was in her mid-20s when she played the part.
One of the most significant social changes in postwar America was its spectacular building boom, fueled by GI loans, which helped young marrieds buy the homes of their dreams in developments that seemed to spring out of nowhere. Suddenly a quarter of all families were living in the suburbs, generally in brand-new neighborhoods composed almost entirely of younger couples. The physical distance between parents and their grown children expanded overnight. And the idea of multigenerational families, which already had been growing unpopular, fell even further out of favor.
“My recently widowed mother feels that I am obligated to take her into our home,” complained a writer to Eleanor Roosevelt’s question-and-answer column If You Ask Me. Roosevelt responded that older people were better off living alone: “We are usually not good for our children or for their children when we live with them.… Older people can help from experience, but sometimes they have had too many experiences to make it wise for them always to be around the young.” Perhaps some of Eleanor’s contemporaries who read her comments thought they might feel extremely independent, too, if they had a top job at the United Nations.
Those positive magazine stories about how mothers and their married daughters learned to share a home were replaced by articles that stressed the desirability of getting Mom to go somewhere else. An essay in Harper’s quoted a middle-aged woman expressing her dismay that “My Mother Lives with Us,” and it offered no happy ending—just an acknowledgment that “Susan’s catalogue of grievances was, unhappily, all too familiar.” The media didn’t neglect the dark side of the trend. “Right now there are thousands of old people, men and women isolated in the loneliness of a rooming house, with only the camaraderie of a park bench to give them social solace… in forgetting our elders, we have forgotten our own hearts,” opined Ladies’ Home Journal. But the suggestions for a solution usually involved setting the elders up in a… separate place. Another Ladies’ Home Journal article from the same period extolled clubs where “oldsters” could get together and learn to paint or play instruments.
That was exactly the kind of thing many in the target audience dreaded. “The social planners assume that we are lonely and offer us defenses, which will also keep us out from underfoot,” mused Hannah Trimble, a 60-something retired Indiana teacher. But, Trimble wrote in the New York Times, “I shall never be able to sit happily in a neighborhood club and roll clay worms in the palm of my hand, and I refuse to end a busy life making potholders on weaving frames which have been brought up by civic bureaus.”
If Trimble thought the tone of these discussions about the elderly was incredibly patronizing, she was incredibly right. A speaker at the American Home Economics Association in 1956 offered a list of suggestions for how to live the good life past 65, ranging from “Cultivate quiet interests” to “Limit your range of physical activities.” A physician writing in the journal California Medicine theorized that aging men tried “over-compensation” to prove they were as strong or as clever as ever. But the typical older woman, he said, went for hypochondria—fearing her loss of beauty and fertility, “she finds an easy rationalization for this threat in the development of physical complaints, since society’s attitude is much more indulgent to illness in the female.”
There was always that question of exactly when “old” started. In Ladies’ Home Journal, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Age is a matter of the mind as well as of the body.” But she went on to conclude, “Ordinarily, old age is supposed to begin at sixty. After that you are more or less living on borrowed time, and after seventy most people count each year as an unusual gift.” It was true that the life expectancy for an American woman at the time was about seventy. But one like Eleanor, who had made it to sixty-five, could reasonably hope to see eighty.
Still, by the standards of the time, Roosevelt was being generous. In 1950, the New York Times ran a story titled “Business Now Holds Women ‘Old’ at 35.”
Not everybody was happy that women were living longer. The Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research group, issued a warning in 1955 that the country could be taken over by elderly women since their numbers were increasing so much faster than those of men. “In terms of voting power, ownership of land, and corporate equities, the United States could be seen on the road toward a gerontomatriarchy—control by aging females,” it announced ominously. The acclaimed biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen had noticed the sentiment. “In short,” she wrote wryly, “we who used to be carried off decently in our forties and fifties by apoplexies, stomach ulcers, and general debility now remain on the scene until seventy or eighty-odd, presumably retired from work and cluttering up the continent from Biloxi to Alaska.” People were reading Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie’s perennially bestselling harangue about domineering mothers who turned their sons into emasculated conformists. Women had gone through American history being told they weren’t worth anything if they didn’t bear children, and now Wylie had turned “Momism” into Public Enemy Number One. She was “a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels.”
On the plus side, the growing numbers—and purchasing power—of older Americans encouraged scientists to tackle medical conditions that had hitherto been regarded as a natural and untreatable part of the aging process. In 1943, a writer in Harper’s had called arthritis “medicine’s neglected stepchild” because of the lack of research devoted to alleviating it. He quoted a venerable physician who said that whenever a patient with arthritis came into his office “I always want to jump out of the window” because he had so little to offer. But by the 1950s, people were beginning to demand more effort. “The dread disease arthritis is the most chronic malady in the United States,” said the New York Times, as it begged readers to donate to research seeking a cure. The next year, in a similar plea, the paper announced: “Today there is hope in the struggle against arthritis, though scarcely a decade ago there was no hope at all.” Much of that optimism was directed at cortisone, a new medication Americans were being told would be an “elixir of life” for people suffering from age-related diseases like arthritis and hardening of the arteries. Scientists were finally figuring out how to produce cortisone in quantities sufficient for mass use. “Today it is reassuring to know that the great majority of arthritis cases can be greatly helped,” said an ad from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. As usual, it was an oversell, featuring reports of crippled patients who could “walk, run and even dance” after a couple of days’ worth of treatment. Cortisone never became a miracle cure, but it was a breakthrough—those unhappy doctors finally had something to offer when an arthritis case walked in.
On a less elevated level, Geritol was introduced in 1950, as a new cure for what sounded like a new ailment: iron-deficiency anemia, which TV viewers were informed was really just “tired blood.” Ads for Geritol were omnipresent on early television. Directed at older people, particularly women, the promotions featured authoritative-sounding male announcers—or a young and concerned-looking Betty White, who told “you really busy gals” that if they dragged around the house or had a “weak, rundown condition,” Geritol was a surefire way to “feel stronger fast.”
Geritol was a postwar version of Lydia Pinkham’s nostrums. It was 12 percent alcohol, plus iron and some B vitamins. Consumers were only supposed to take a small dose, but if they kept sipping, the effect would be approximately the same as tippling champagne. As time went on, the FTC would require the Geritol makers to point out that “the great majority of tired people don’t feel that way because of iron-poor blood.” But nevertheless, the ads kept showing frustrated hubbies dragging their exhausted wives around the dance floor until Geritol transformed the missus into a red-hot mama.
The medical world had a more ambitious answer to older women who consulted their doctors about feeling tired and run-down: the sex hormone estrogen. It wasn’t a sudden development. You may remember the French scientist back in the 1920s who claimed he had an elderly patient racing up six flights of stairs and working 12 hours a day after she got an implant of chimpanzee glands. A quarter of a century later, scientists in Missouri were reporting that they’d injected female prison inmates, 64 to 89 years old, with a combination of testosterone and a female hormone to stupendous outcomes: “Women who formerly had shown no desire to help in making beds and serving meals now helped nurses, entertained themselves and found joy in life,” Waldemar Kaempffert reported in the New York Times. A Los Angeles doctor, E. Kost Shelton, extolled hormone therapy at a meeting of the American Geriatrics Society the following year. “Formerly, most women who survived until the fifth or sixth decades expected to be and actually were senile in both appearance and perspective,” he said cheerfully. “They had fulfilled their destiny as seed-pods and were willing to dry up and blow away.”
Chimpanzees aside, scientists had been isolating estrogen in their labs since the 1920s with an eye toward helping postmenopausal women. By the 1940s, “estrogen replacement therapy” had become fairly common. When doctors figured out how to administer it as a pill instead of an injection, the treatment really took off. Estrogen was also showing up in beauty products—Helena Rubinstein promised that her Estrogenic Hormone Cream would help prevent “tragic signs of age—dryness, wrinkles, crepey throat, old-skin hands” in women “over 35.” It wouldn’t take terribly long for the medical community to get skeptical about those creams, and in 1961, the American Medical Association would denounce them as dangerous and ineffective. It was the beginning of what would become a half-century roller-coaster ride with estrogen therapies.
The theory that menopause was the end of real life for women was still going strong, thanks in particular to Freudians who claimed that menstruation was the female equivalent of a penis and menopause naturally brought on castration anxiety. Helene Deutsch published an influential two-volume work called The Psychology of Women, which theorized that menopause sent women into out-of-control sex and other irresponsible adolescent behavior. The theory posited that a minority—including, presumably, people like Deutsch—could escape the worst effects through careers or working on public welfare. It may have been the first time Lydia Maria Child’s ideas about solving old age by working for others were expanded to include prevention of nymphomania.
Hollywood reflected that postwar dried-seed-pod theory about older women. In 1950, Bette Davis starred in All About Eve as a Broadway legend who feels her career is ending because she is turning 40. It was quite a switch from the era of Sarah Bernhardt happily emoting in her 70s. That same year, the trauma of aging drove Sunset Boulevard’s former movie queen Norma Desmond so dotty that she shot her much younger lover when he dumped her. Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, is introduced at the beginning of the movie holding a burial service for her beloved chimpanzee—which is, it seems, the best she can do in terms of having a child. She is living in her old Hollywood mansion, served by a former director turned devoted servant and surrounded by old Hollywood friends who are as divorced from reality as she is. “There’s nothing tragic about being fifty—not unless you try to be twenty-five,” the much younger Holden character tells Norma as he heads for the door, setting the stage for a finale that will leave him facedown in the swimming pool. Then, as Joe floats away, Norma looks up at the sky and says, defiantly, “Stars are ageless!”
(Both Davis and Swanson were nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for their performances. Historian Lois Banner theorizes they divided the vote for fans of mature performances, giving the actual prize to 29-year-old Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday. Later, Swanson would complain about “the ghastly American worship of youth.”)
By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood was so enamored with the teenage audience it sometimes seemed producers were forgetting everybody else. The ultimate example was Gidget, a surfer flick in which the only female over the age of 18 is Gidget’s mom, whose big moment comes when she tells her daughter that “to be a real woman is to bring out the best in a man.” The older women who appeared in movies in the postwar era were pretty much like their immediate predecessors: recognizable faces who popped up regularly, usually playing worried mothers, wise grandmothers, and faithful maids. Marjorie Main, who specialized in sassy old dames, was in 34 movies in the 1940s and kept it up in the 1950s, eventually switching to television. In 1958, she made her final appearance in an episode of Wagon Train, a popular western. Main played her usual comic role as a crusty, outspoken old bat who nonetheless has a spark of sex appeal. The writers paired her off with an aging cowboy, but not before she conducted a flirtation with one of the co-stars, Ward Bond, a character actor who was more than a decade younger.
Getting a younger man in the 1950s—even for a minute—was a rare feat. Main was one of many examples of veteran actresses who found bigger and better roles on TV. The new medium was looking for brand names at a time when very few well-known performers wanted to be seen on what was frequently referred to as “the boob tube.” Spring Byington, who had been popping up forever in supporting roles in motion pictures, got her own series, December Bride, in which she played a widow living with her daughter and son-in-law, who were constantly trying to marry her off—a comedy tailor-made for a decade in which keeping Mom from moving in was a long-running obsession. Ann Sothern was 49 when she began playing Katy O’Connor, a glamorous assistant hotel manager, in The Ann Sothern Show. “Katy, all the fellows fall for Katy,” the theme song announced, “’cause Katy makes them whistle for more.” Lucille Ball was in her 40s when she starred in the smash TV hit I Love Lucy, which was succeeded by similar sitcoms that kept her onscreen for more than 20 years.
The postwar world was supposed to be all about young suburban couples, but the best-known fashion icon of the 1950s was First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, who was 56 when her husband, Dwight, was elected president. Mamie was eight years older than Eleanor Roosevelt had been when she arrived at the White House. But Eleanor was a reprise of those turn-of-the-century women who strode through life with their eye on social reform, not clothes or hairstyles. Mamie happily regarded herself as a fashionable dresser. Her style was far from haute, and it wouldn’t be all that long before commentators would shudder at the memory of her tightly curled bangs. But there was something about Mamie that appealed to the moment. When one of her halter-top sundresses was described as making her “look more like a girl than a mature woman,” she retorted, “I hate old-lady clothes. And I shall never wear them.” Her designer, Mollie Parnis, decreed that her client was “proving that a grandmother needn’t be an old lady. She’s made maturity glamorous.”
“Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower is expected to give a lift to the fashion industry,” the New York Times noted approvingly after the 1952 election. “The millions who cheered Mrs. Eisenhower during the campaign tour noted that she always was well groomed, in simple little suits or dresses of good lines and flattering cut, that her hats were right and her gloves were spotless.” Unlike Eleanor, Mamie did not work with her husband’s party in an organizational way, but she apparently had no objections to being marketed in his political campaign. Supporters were encouraged to sing songs like “I Want Mamie,” to wear “I Like Mamie” buttons, and even to use tape dispensers featuring Mamie’s picture. When Eisenhower made appearances, the crowd would regularly yell, “Where’s Mamie?” until she appeared from behind a curtain, crying, “Here I am!” In 1956, Eisenhower’s reelection campaign ran an ad praising housewives as the custodians of American values. “They like Ike,” the narrator continued. “And here’s someone else they like—Ike’s beloved Mamie.” Women were urged to go to the polls and “keep our first lady in the White House for four more years.”
As First Lady, Mamie did not hold press conferences, but she was happy to be photographed modeling her latest fashions. The nation became fascinated with “the Mamie look” and read obsessively about her inaugural ball gown, with massive petticoats that gossips said took three hours to properly arrange, covered by a gown festooned with 2,000 hand-sewn rhinestones. The dress would reappear on knickknack shelves across the country in the form of Mamie figurines. Life extolled the First Lady’s “pretty neck and shoulders,” and she repeatedly showed up on the lists of the world’s best-dressed women. Her passion for pink spurred a national craze for the color, and when America learned that Mamie had pink bathrooms, millions of homes adopted the same scheme.
She also broke new ground with her public displays of affection with Ike, whom she frequently kissed and hugged in front of the cameras. In 1955, when the president suffered a heart attack, Mamie stayed in a hospital room next to his, demanding little in the way of special treatment—except for a pink toilet seat. Her public image was a mixture of traditional housewife and mink-wearing lady of luxury. She caused a political mini scandal in 1958 when she took a government plane home from Phoenix, where she had been staying at a spa that specialized in helping middle-aged women lose weight. She made no secret of how much she loved breakfast in bed. (“Every woman over fifty should stay in bed until noon.”) During their evenings alone, she and Ike liked to eat dinner off trays in front of the TV—or two separate TVs since they preferred different programs, which they managed to hear while they dined in the same room. The cuisine, reportedly, was sometimes just one of those new frozen TV dinners. Everyone knew that Mamie liked to play canasta, loved charm bracelets, watched the soap opera As the World Turns, and wore a pink housecoat with a pink bow in her hair during her mornings at home.
Mamie was a genuine trendsetter, which spoke to the fact that older women had significant clout in matters like style in the postwar era. The fashion industry was constantly announcing a youth takeover, but the moment was slower to arrive on Main Street than the experts predicted. Meanwhile, it was an era of pearl chokers, mink coats, and shirtwaist dresses. The “New Look” unveiled by Christian Dior in 1947 featured a long, full skirt, but it required an extremely narrow waist, which once again would have to be achieved through serious corsetry. Foundation garments—happily with newer, more comfortable synthetic fabrics—were omnipresent. There were girdles for teenagers, girdles for stout women, girdles for thin women, girdles to be worn while washing the kitchen floor. Everybody was expected to suffer for their looks, one way or the other.
The Mamie bangs may look dreadful to a modern 56-year-old, but they were designed by Elizabeth Arden, the fashion titan who became one of the first women to appear on the cover of Time. Some financial experts of her era believed she had earned more money than any woman in American history. The looks she designed weren’t so much for young women as for older women who wanted to appear younger—another client of Arden’s was Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Arden stressed heavy makeup, firming facial exercises, and—pink. Pink was definitely the color. It was while returning from an Elizabeth Arden spa that Mamie got in trouble for taking that government plane.
At 86, Mary Church Terrell was still picketing, protesting the segregation of restaurants and theaters, and filing civil rights suits. She lived long enough to see the Supreme Court’s decision banning segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education; she died two months later, on July 24, 1954, at age 90. Mary McLeod Bethune, who had been the central African American figure in the Roosevelt administration, was still in action in Washington, where President Harry Truman appointed her to a committee on national defense. “I am now 78 years old and my activities are no longer so strenuous as they once were,” she wrote. “I feel that I must conserve my strength to finish the work at hand.” She was completing her autobiography and trying to organize a foundation to continue her fight for wider educational opportunities for African Americans. “Sometimes I ask myself if I have any other legacy to leave,” she wrote. “Truly, my worldly possessions are few. Yet, my experiences have been rich.… So, as my life draws to a close, I will pass them on to Negroes everywhere in the hope that an old woman’s philosophy may give them inspiration.”
Faith in community work as a way to combat the effects of age was alive and well. The generation of black women carrying the banner in the 1950s were middle-aged, and they had been in the civil rights movement before most white Americans were even aware there was such a thing. When whites learned better, it was through Rosa Parks. She was 42—long past her youth by the standards of 1955—when she refused a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver’s demand that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She was equally unmoved when he threatened to have her arrested. “You may do that,” she said calmly. He did, and the rest, as we say, is history. Parks had worked for 12 years with the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). To the world, she was a stupendously respectable, unthreatening-looking woman who appeared in court wearing a demure black dress with white cuffs and a small velvet hat. “They’ve messed with the wrong one now,” cried a teenager in the crowd around the courthouse. While the nation watched, Montgomery blacks staged a yearlong bus boycott protesting segregation, organized largely by African American teachers and social workers.
We tend to look back at the civil rights movement and see young people sitting in at lunch counters, organizing Freedom Rides, and risking death to register black citizens to vote. But older women were at the center of the early movement, because they had always been leading behind the scenes. First and foremost was Ella Baker, who had gone to college in Raleigh in the 1920s and then shocked her family when she rejected the normal black-middle-class career of teaching to become a community organizer. She was a perpetual mover, in the tradition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Eleanor Roosevelt, happiest when she was on a train, working through her papers and traveling toward another mobilization.
The civil rights movement, when it came onto the national stage, was perceived as something led almost exclusively by men. In part, that was because the men preferred it that way. Andrew Young, who would later become mayor of Atlanta, remembered feeling that people like Ella Baker “were too much like my mother. Strong women were the backbone of the movement, but to young black men seeking their own freedom, dignity and leadership perspective, they were quite a challenge.” Baker was one of the first organizers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but she and its charismatic leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., didn’t get along. She was an SCLC acting director, but when the position was made permanent, the job went to a younger man. “After all, who was I?” she asked bitterly. “I was female, I was old.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, Rep. Mary Norton, who had passed the historic legislation outlawing child labor and winning workers a minimum wage, was bemoaning the fact that “women do not organize as they could to help elect women! They could, because of their numerical strength, control elections, but it is my opinion they never will.” She had reason to be discouraged—when she announced her retirement in 1950, there were only 10 women in Congress, and over the next decade, the number never managed to inch up to 20. “Congresswoman Norton is perfectly remarkable,” Eleanor Roosevelt would note in 1954. “She insists that she is 79 years old, but nobody would know it by watching her!… Old age which comes as gracefully as it has come to her is certainly nothing to be feared for she is more interesting and a more entertaining companion today than she was 40 years ago.”
The women who were elected to Congress were still frequently widows but with vastly different ideas about what to do with their inherited political careers. On the one hand, there was Vera Bushfield, who served as her husband’s successor as senator from South Dakota in 1948 but wasn’t in office long enough to get sworn in. On the other, there was Margaret Chase Smith, who succeeded her husband in the House, then ran for the Senate, becoming the first woman to serve in both chambers. At the time she moved up, she was in her 50s—a veritable juvenile by Washington standards. It gave her the opportunity to craft a quarter-century career of breaking barriers and standing up to some of the most vicious forces in postwar America.
Margaret Chase had grown up in the Maine mill town of Skowhegan, the oldest of six children. Her father, a barber, was a mean drunk. Her mother worked in factories, stores, restaurants, and laundries to help support the family. By the time she was in high school, Margaret was working, too. She particularly liked being a telephone operator, and it was through that job that she met Clyde Smith, who called one day to ask the time. Smith, a successful businessman more than 20 years her senior, was interested in politics and women. He “had a reputation for liking the girls, especially younger girls,” Margaret told her biographer. Divorced, he pursued her and enough other flames to keep her perpetually insecure about his intentions. She graduated from high school and eventually became circulation manager at a local paper—of which Smith was co-owner.
She also started joining women’s clubs, the versions that stressed business and professional networking as well as culture and civic improvement. While she was still in her 20s, she became head of two of the biggest and most impressive clubs in Skowhegan, forging friendships with other hardworking, self-starting women—relationships that would come in handy when she moved into politics.
She was still attached to Clyde, who was in the state legislature and looking for the next step up. They finally got married in 1930, when Margaret was 32 years old. Her new husband was 55, in bad health, but eagerly promoting himself as the next Maine member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also continued his outside love life—a few months before he married Margaret, Smith fathered a baby girl with a local factory worker. Near the end of her life, Margaret looked back and remembered her marriage: “[A]s great a man as Clyde was, he was not as devoted to me as you seem to think,” she told an interviewer. “Let me limit my observations to saying that he gave me many heartaches.” But whatever the failings of their union, Clyde and Margaret forged a very successful political partnership. She joined the staff of his Washington office, her duties expanding as her husband became more and more disabled from what was apparently advanced syphilis. She appeared as his surrogate in his reelection campaign in 1938, racing back and forth between Maine and Washington, and growing so confident in her role that she promoted her own foreign policy, which differed sharply from her husband’s. (While Clyde was an isolationist, Margaret believed both in military preparedness and Maine’s share of the defense industry.) Clyde won reelection, but he was failing physically. In early 1940, he issued a plea to his constituents to give Margaret his seat in the case of his death: “I know of no one who has the full knowledge of my ideas and plans or is as well qualified as she is to carry on these ideas and my unfinished work for the district.” It was a serious underestimation of Margaret’s capacities, but it held the day. After Clyde died, Margaret replaced him in a special election with only token opposition.
She had more trouble with the regular general election in the fall of 1940, when four other Republicans felt a man deserved the seat. Given the rhetoric from her opponents, a Portland newspaper columnist noted that the campaign was being waged less on ability than on a “question of sex.” She whomped them all, along with her Democratic opponent in November. Much later she referred to 1940 as “a pretty heavy year.” She had watched her husband die while managing his Washington office, and run in three elections in five months. She had also signed an agreement providing monthly payments to the illegitimate daughter Clyde had fathered.
In Congress, Margaret Chase Smith refused campaign contributions, set records for roll-call attendance, and personally responded to every constituent’s letter on the day it arrived. But she also sought serious policy-making power—some of her major issues were civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a strong military. In 1948, she ran for senator. It was an unheard-of goal. Only a few women in American history had gotten to the Senate, and all of them had initially made it through appointment—except, carping historians might point out, Gladys Pyle of South Dakota, who won a peculiar contest for a two-month term when the Senate was out of session in 1938.
By then, Smith had developed a close relationship with the House Naval Affairs Committee’s chief counsel, William Lewis Jr., 31. Smith was the only woman on the committee, and some of the male members had trouble dealing with her presence through lengthy meetings. Lewis was tasked with giving them a break by taking Smith for an after-dinner walk. He later became her executive assistant, and the two were both politically and personally inseparable. Speaking about the relationship in her old age, Smith said she could not marry—particularly marry a younger man—“and keep my job.” She added: “I wish that I had made more time for love.” Lewis urged her to run for the Senate, then organized her campaign, which was regarded as a long-shot gamble at first. The national party wasn’t enthusiastic, given that in the House she was not a reliable Republican vote; her preference for bipartisanship had started early. And no woman had ever won an election to the Senate in her own right. Smith wanted the job so much she gave up her long-standing opposition to campaign contributions.
She needed all the help she could get. There were whispers about her morals and much louder claims from the Right that she was a Communist sympathizer who had supported suspect institutions like the United Nations. At this point, her detractors didn’t focus on her age. Most of the talk was about her gender—sympathetic stories often stressed attributes like her cooking skills. It sometimes seemed as if every story about Smith’s achievements included some reference to her muffin recipe.
She had more notable strong suits. For instance, in the run-up to the election, Smith 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.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith was a military hawk and a vigorous anti-Communist, qualities that would get her into trouble later in her career. But she was appalled by Joe McCarthy, a new Republican colleague who had just arrived from Wisconsin and was soon making headlines with his claims that the government was “infested with Communists” plotting to help the Russians win the Cold War. His accusations became national news, and other senators joined in the witch hunt. Most of the rest stayed quiet out of fear of being branded Communists themselves if they objected. Careers were being ruined, and government employees were terrified. Smith, who served on two committees with McCarthy, didn’t like the situation.
In June of 1950, Smith rose in the Senate and offered her “Declaration of Conscience.” The American people, she told her colleagues, “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘communists’ or ‘fascists’ by their opponents.” As a loyal Republican, Smith said, she did “not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
Her speech did not stop McCarthy, who temporarily got revenge when he succeeded in getting Smith thrown off his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (He replaced her with newcomer Richard Nixon.) He encouraged speculation that she herself was a Communist—or at least a “fellow traveler”—and promoted a primary challenge when she ran for reelection. But Smith won with no trouble, and in December 1954, she was also the winner when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. She was even mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. (The job, like the committee slot, went to Nixon.) She entered the 1960s as a national figure. In Illinois, a teenager named Hillary Rodham opened up a copy of Life magazine that featured a story on Smith and was amazed. “I had no idea there was such a woman,” she recalled.
While Smith’s star was rising, Eleanor Roosevelt was ending her official relationship with Washington. In 1952, the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, had opted not to renew her appointment to the United Nations. She certainly didn’t retire from the public stage—she continued writing her newspaper column and averaged 150 speeches a year. “Is our guest famous for travel?” one of the panelists on the popular game show What’s My Line? asked when Roosevelt appeared as the mystery celebrity of the week. In 1959, she starred, improbably, in a television ad for Good Luck margarine. Butter substitutes were still regarded with some dismay, but Eleanor announced, in her unmistakable voice, that “[n]owadays you can get margarine like Good Luck, which really tastes delicious. That’s what I’ve spread on my toast.” While extremely generous to charities, Eleanor also managed to make a healthy annual income—the equivalent of about $800,000 in today’s dollars. Once, when she was at a dinner at Brandeis University, the emcee suffered a sudden stroke, and Eleanor quickly stepped up and took over. “No, I have not slackened my pace,” she wrote to a friend in 1954. “At least, not yet. I probably shall. Everybody does.” Note the “probably.”
Time, commenting on how “Mrs. Roosevelt had changed during her years alone,” decided that “although she has aged visibly,” she was looking better than ever—quoting “one fascinated Frenchman” as saying “Madame Roosevelt is becoming beautiful.” The magazine credited the transformation to a car accident in which several people were injured and her “face was smashed against the steering wheel.” Bizarrely, Time told its readers that “the aftermath was a happy one” since “Mrs. Roosevelt’s protruding front teeth were broken in the accident; the porcelain caps which replace them subtly changed her whole face and gave her a sweet, warm and gentle smile.” The magazine also appreciated a weight gain that, the anonymous authors said, had given her “a comfortable and matronly air.”
She did seem to have come to a good place. “At 70, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that this, too, shall pass!” she wrote. Asked about her accomplishments on her birthday, she told reporters that she had gotten the most satisfaction from the United Nations work. But basically, she said, “I just did what I had to do as things came along.” Whatever spare time she had was often devoted to answering letters—the ones that involved impossible requests for appearances often got an apology of “Ack—regret no time.” There were signs of aging. She became deaf in her right ear, and her gift of falling asleep at will, anywhere, became less controlled. “It can be awkward if she’s in company,” said Nina, one of her grandchildren. “I keep a very close watch. If I catch her just as her head is nodding, one tap of the ankle is enough. But once her head reaches her chest, it takes a good old-fashioned shake.”
She devoted endless hours to campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. Her relationship with the former Illinois governor was personal as well as political. Joseph Lash felt that while “Adlai did not interest her as a man,” she loved his keen mind. If Stevenson at times seemed to rely on her too much, Lash added, “that too was not unflattering. The worst thing was not to be needed.” She continued to develop intense friendships similar to the one she had with Lash himself.
Eleanor met Dr. David Gurewitsch through Lash’s wife, Trude. He treated her in 1946 after the car accident that broke her teeth and then became an intimate friend, traveling all over the world with the former First Lady, keeping in constant correspondence during their separations, and escorting her to dinners and other evening events. (The most modern person of her day on many matters, Eleanor did not believe a proper woman went out alone after dark.) She kept a picture of him on her night table and took another with her in a leather frame on her trips. His future wife, Edna, who later wrote a book on the relationship, called it “an intimate but platonic union.”
“You know without my telling you that I love you as I love and have never loved anyone else, and I am grateful for the privilege of loving you and thankful for every chance to be of help,” she wrote to him on his birthday in 1955.
Gurewitsch, who always referred to her as “Mrs. Roosevelt,” carefully kept his independence. He dated women and eventually got married. If Eleanor suffered, she never did anything to alienate him. She and Edna Gurewitsch eventually became close friends. When Eleanor was 75, she and the Gurewitsches bought a house together in Manhattan. While Eleanor was never going to find the kind of passionate intimacy she had been searching for in her marriage and later life, she was spectacularly successful in surrounding herself with people who loved her.
She had also started a friendship with another young activist, Allard Lowenstein, who irritated her staff by showing up at her Hyde Park home with a pack of friends without any advance notice. Her social secretary pointed out to Eleanor that she would have been angry if her children behaved like that. “By now,” she replied, “you ought to know me well enough to know that I like young men.”