In 1960, after 27 years and 7,222 episodes, The Romance of Helen Trent went off the air. After a multitude of unsuccessful relationships, Helen was left with her final flame, John, who asked her to marry him—in six months, after he finished a run for the Senate. “Oh yes, I’ll wait six months, darling. I’ll wait,” said Helen.
She was, presumably, still 35.
If you were one of the women who actually had been getting older while listening to Helen all that time, the 1950s was a pretty decent decade to be not-young. You could work if you wanted—particularly if you craved a job as a teacher, nurse, clerk, or receptionist. You could shop in stores where Mamie fashions were on every rack, and watch people your own age occasionally play sexually attractive working women on TV.
But change was coming around the corner, looking about 20 and wearing a miniskirt. Everybody felt it in the air—some sooner than others. A convention on beauty and style for senior citizens, sponsored by New York City’s Golden Age Clubs in the late 1950s, promised to show the audience how to “cast off the black guard of defeatism and despair into which a youth-geared civilization has cast them.” Mamie Eisenhower was about to be replaced by 31-year-old Jacqueline Kennedy, the third-youngest First Lady in American history. (The other two, in case you’re interested, were 24-year-old Julia Tyler, who married widower John Tyler near the end of his term in office, and 21-year-old Frances Cleveland, who caused so much excitement when she appeared in public that her husband, Grover, had to hide her on a farm outside Washington.) Like Mamie, Jackie Kennedy was extremely fashion conscious, but nobody ever referred to her look as matronly.
Styles had already begun evolving—skirts were getting shorter and narrower, and the fad for the chemise, or “sack,” dress foreshadowed an era that would celebrate the small busted. “What would become of Gina if I showed myself thus?” demanded the buxom 1950s sex symbol Gina Lollobrigida.
Many less famous women were asking themselves the same question.
We look back on the 1960s as a time of youthful rebellion, sexual liberation, and overall social turmoil. But all that took a while to get started. The first wave of the baby-boom generation that was going to dominate the culture—for what would seem to their seniors and juniors like eternity—was still in high school in 1960. The suburban-housewife ideal was still… the ideal. A Ladies’ Home Journal poll in 1962 found almost all young women “expect to be married by 22. Most want 4 children.” And while many wanted to work until those children came, “afterward, a resounding no!”
Employers hoped that when the young women said they didn’t want to work “afterward” they were thinking short-term. The booming economy couldn’t afford to have them all stay home forever. Because of the low birth rate in the 1930s, there were fewer workers available in the 25 to 44 age group, so at the dawn of the 1960s, business leaders like the National Association of Manufacturers were broadcasting the news that there were greater job opportunities for older people. The number of women 45 and older who worked in 1962 was double that of 1947. The jobs tended to be along the low-paying clerical line, and as had happened during the war, the fanfare about employment opportunity was accompanied by complaints about age discrimination. An advice column urged women returning to the workforce to avoid the entire subject of birth dates: “If your interviewer persists, try to be casual and tell him that one of the signs of aging successfully in a woman is to be able to lie successfully about her age. After all, we all know that the best 20 years of a woman’s life are between the ages of 28 and 30!”
Hard to imagine that working out.
The ranks of older Americans continued to expand. The average life expectancy in 1964 was 70—up from 47 at the turn of the century. “The American Medical Assn. has estimated that if medical progress continues at its present rate, the life expectancy by the year 2000 will be 120 years,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 1961.
Okay, maybe not. But for the first time increases in life expectancy reflected medical victories over diseases that affected older people. In the earlier part of the century progress mainly had been in fighting ailments that tended to kill the young—which were often the result of poor sanitation, and other public health issues. Then antibiotics and other “miracle” drugs reduced fatalities from infectious diseases like influenza. For a while the medical community seemed to wonder if anything more could be done. But scientists have a hard-to-repress need to solve problems. Doctors got much better at handling heart attacks and performing surgeries that stopped them from happening in the first place. Researchers developed medicines to reduce blood pressure and cholesterol. Older Americans healed themselves, too. Smoking, which had been on the rise since the turn of the century, started to decline.
Thanks to Social Security—which had been expanded to include domestic and farm workers—the people who lasted through their 60s and beyond were better fed and more likely to be living relatively comfortable lives. The suicide rate among the elderly began to fall in the 1930s, and kept going down—with the most dramatic decline in the late 1960s, when the rise in Social Security payments was particularly high and Congress had added on Medicare.
Because 65 tended to be the point at which people qualified for age-related benefits, it became a common demarcation line between “middle-aged” and “elderly.” But that last category was getting pretty crowded, and society began seeing substrata. In the national imagination, at least, one’s 60s were a pleasure-seeking life of retirement. Americans in their 70s were “senior citizens” the media mainly tried to portray as not that old at all. One Chicago Tribune columnist, under the sort-of-encouraging headline “Old Age Isn’t That Bad!,” quoted an expert who claimed, “A national survey showed half the respondents believe you’re not old till 80!”
People in their 80s who made the news were usually treated as either miraculous exceptions or adorable, albeit wrinkled, babies. “A woman of 83 recently won first prize in the bridge tournament on a Pacific liner carrying 700 first-class passengers,” marveled the New York Times. Ebony celebrated a 79-year-old great-grandmother who “dances a mean mambo” and in another feature reported on a trip to Canada by a Cleveland Golden Age Club, where a good time was allegedly had by all even though one of the members tripped, fell, and was rushed off to the hospital. “The oldsters had a very young time,” the magazine decreed.
The habit of calling older people “oldsters,” alas, continued.
So did the freedom with which older women were denigrated in the media. Dr. Joseph Peck, a bestselling author, contemplated “what makes old folks tick” and theorized that while retirement left both men and women at loose ends, “[s]he, however, can survive her boredom tho it may be killing for everyone around her. One bored old lady can create more disturbance in a household than a Communist in a new-born republic.” Describing the way “an apparently healthy woman” ages, Dr. Paul Poinsard wrote in a medical journal that she “makes life miserable for all those around her by her irritability, criticism and anger, aroused at the slightest issue.” While a woman whose children are grown might have the time to do things she always wanted to do, the doctor wrote, that wouldn’t help because “she has not developed the capacity for enjoyment.”
Advice on how to avoid this kind of fate continued unabated. And if there was one particular theme, it was self-improvement. “You must be interested in your life. If you’re not, change it,” recommended Anita Colby, billed as “America’s foremost authority on beauty after 40.” She advised her readers to “[d]ecide what you want to do and work toward doing it, even if it means perhaps going back to school.” While it sounded as if Colby was less than enthusiastic, the idea of continuing education was getting popular. In a way, it was a successor to those women’s groups decades before, in which members gathered to present reports on subjects like the fashions of ancient Rome. But the idea of spending your later years helping others was still somewhat in abeyance. At a symposium on “The Emotional Basis of Illness” in San Francisco in 1968, one of the expert speakers suggested that menopause was hardest on women who were “dominated by what psychiatrists know as ‘narcissistic ego strivings.’” Those narcissists, he said, “are often club women, the PTA leaders, the volunteers for government reform, hospitals or war work. They are known as ‘pillars of strength’ in the community.” Mark that as a kind of milestone—the very women who had long been celebrated for overcoming the effects of age by directing their attention toward serving the community were being pointed to as the “narcissists” who were going to take menopause worst.
Yet there were still people who insisted on trying to save the world—or at least keep it from exploding. In 1961, Dagmar Wilson, a 45-year-old mother of three, was visiting with some friends in her backyard outside Washington, DC, trying to figure out a way to organize housewives against nuclear testing. Concern about the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was already widespread, but in a still-conservative era, speaking out against it was controversial. Wilson felt the message might be delivered best by mothers—particularly middle-class, middle-aged mothers. “We wanted to look nice to emphasize the fact that this was who we were.… We felt this in itself expressed the urgency of our concern,” she said. They started Women Strike for Peace and planned a demonstration, using a telephone tree in which friend called friend. The response went beyond their wildest dreams. Six weeks later, 50,000 women marched in demonstrations around the country, calling for an end to nuclear tests and pointing to the danger of radioactive fallout poisoning babies’ milk. Both Jacqueline Kennedy and Nina Khrushchev, the wife of the Soviet prime minister, responded. “As mothers, we cannot help but be concerned about the health and welfare of our husbands and children,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote supportively. Her husband added a deeply restrained compliment, calling the marchers “extremely earnest.”
It was a new version of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton tactic: delivering an otherwise radical message through the filter of gray-haired maternity. Or, this time, particularly well-dressed maternity. Cora Weiss, one of the youngest members of the WSP leadership, remembers trying to live up to her colleagues’ standards. “I arrived at one Fifth Avenue demonstration wearing a cherry-red suit,” she recalled. “Right away one of my elder sisters said: ‘Your lipstick clashes!’ That was the end of me that day.”
The women’s timing was right—Americans were very worried about nuclear war. They had practiced “duck and cover” routines in school, and those new suburbanites were building fallout shelters in their basements, where the whole family was supposed to huddle if a bomb fell. Wilson was the daughter of suffrage supporters, and like the suffragists, she understood that the country paid attention when prominent matrons appeared willing to get arrested for a cause. The WSP demonstrators wore white gloves, nice hats, and shirtwaist dresses. Some of them picketed the White House in mink coats. When Wilson and her associates were summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1962 to answer questions about possible Communist infiltration into their group, their supporters filled the hearing room with flowers and babies. It was pretty much the death knell of HUAC. “I had the opportunity not only to confront my accusers but also to make them look like idiots,” Wilson said happily. One newspaper headline read: “Peace March Gals Make Red Hunters Look Silly.”
Dagmar Wilson was not, of course, the first woman to take on congressional anti-Communist witch-hunters. Margaret Chase Smith had delivered that spectacular denunciation of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, a speech so brave and powerful it became legendary. The political consultant Bernard Baruch declared that if it had been made by a man, he would have been the next president of the United States. And even though Smith was burdened with the wrong gender, she did get mentioned as a possible vice-presidential candidate. In 1964, when the very conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Smith’s fans pointed out that since she came from the moderate-to-liberal end of the party, she could provide a potential balance.
As soon as the idea came up, commentators started obsessing about Smith’s age. George Dixon, a columnist at the Washington Post, joked about “The Barry-Maggie Ticket.” The pair had great experience in military matters, he wrote, and “not even their most scurrilous traducers could accuse them of being too youthful.” At the time, Goldwater was 54 and Smith was 65, which Dixon seemed to consider extremely elderly. “Senator Smith is one of the few Senators to omit her age from the Congressional Directory,” he jibed, “but I know how old she was previous to 1900!” (Smith was born in 1897.) He was writing at a time when the country was being led by the first president born in the twentieth century, and John Kennedy made Americans newly youth conscious when it came to their leaders in Washington. Never mind that Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, served from age 62 to 70. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Smith’s age. But you wouldn’t have known it from the campaign to come.
Smith said she was not interested in second place. “I am only thinking of the Presidency,” she told the Boston Globe. It was a long shot, but if there was going to be a serious woman candidate in the twentieth century, it seemed as if Smith might be the right one to make the move. Many Republicans found Goldwater too conservative and the other likely candidate, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, too liberal. Some of Smith’s allies hailed the idea of her running, but other Republicans who ought to have been enthusiastic were doubtful. Nellie Tayloe Ross, the woman who had once been governor of Wyoming, called Smith a “lovely person” but claimed she lacked the necessary “physical stamina.”
The media seemed incapable of discussing Smith’s campaign without describing her as “silver-haired.” She complained that “almost every news story starts off with ‘the 66-year-old Senator.’ I haven’t seen the age played up in the case of men candidates.” The Los Angeles Times reported on the interview with a story that was headlined: “66-Year-Old Sen. Smith Hits Age Talk.”
On January 27, 1964, at the Women’s National Press Club, Smith announced she was running for president, in a speech written by her companion-aide Bill Lewis, who would become her campaign manager. It would be a long-odds candidacy under any circumstances: she had no real organization or paid staff, and her insistence on being present for every Senate vote left her only two weeks to campaign in the crucial New Hampshire primary. Rather than give speeches at high-profile rallies, she did what she had always done in Maine and went from coffee shop to workplace to women’s club, shaking hands and chatting with the voters.
The focus on her age continued. Richard Wilson, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, called it “a disqualifying factor.” In other matters, he wrote, she was better suited for the presidency than many of the recent occupants of the White House. Her only problems were “a matter of age and sex.” And for Wilson, the two were intertwined. The best age for a politician to run for president, he opined, was in the 40s or early 50s—but that was the time when “the female of the species undergoes physical changes and emotional distress of varying severity and duration.” Ah, menopause.
The campaign didn’t really go anywhere—besides everything else, Smith attempted to relate to the average voter by sharing her muffin recipe, which the press glommed on to so intensely it virtually became the entire campaign. But she did make history, becoming the first woman ever to have her name placed in nomination at a major party convention. Silver hair and all.
Meanwhile, in the New York City suburbs, a housewife in her late 30s had been typing up a manuscript about all the ways middle-class, college-educated women were being walled off from the world, doing chores that were nothing more than busywork, slowly losing their identities—and maybe their minds. It was, of course, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which would be previewed in a Good Housekeeping article in 1960 titled “Women Are People, Too.” It wasn’t exactly a fire-breathing headline, but considering the social revolution it introduced, maybe it made sense that the magazine decided to be so desperately cautious.
Title notwithstanding, “Women Are People, Too” drew floods of letters from women who felt they knew exactly what Friedan was talking about. They had gone to college with men—often getting better grades—acquired the requisite engagement ring by senior year, moved off to a model house in the suburbs, and raised a small crop of well-bred children. They were often still in their 40s when the youngest child married, and they were separated from the network of relatives and family friends who had occupied previous generations. The new appliances guaranteed that their critical housekeeping duties were minimal. There was plenty of entertainment on TV but a bewildering sense of “Is that all there is?”
Friedan was terrific at describing their frustration, and she proposed remedies that from our current worldview seem extremely modest. She told her readers to find work they cared about in “art or science… politics or profession” and then to keep the commitment going through classes or volunteer work while they waited for the opportunity to return to their careers. It was not necessarily the Lydia Maria Child plan of doing good for others—unless your ultimate career goal was in, say, social work. And Friedan did cannily note that the meaning of volunteer activities had changed—the passions for civic improvement of the early part of the twentieth century had given way to short-term, uncontroversial suburban-housewife projects that one interviewee called “committees I don’t care about.” Back in the day, Friedan wrote, women’s community activities “almost always had the stamp of innovation and individuality, rather than the stamp of conformity, status-seeking, or escape.” No more.
The book was written for and about an important, but rather narrow, audience. Future critics would note that Friedan showed no interest in the problems of working-class women. Domestics could not have been anything but offended when she noted that in the past “certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls.” The Feminine Mystique was also basically a book for middle-aged women. Friedan’s view of younger housewives was strictly that of an observer. (“They seem to get younger all the time—in looks, and a childlike kind of dependence.”) Very few people over 55 show up at all. Anybody who hadn’t embarked on a committed, passionate career of some kind before then, Friedan seemed to feel, was pretty much beyond hope.
The book made Friedan a feminist star, and very soon she would help create a national movement. She began visiting Washington, where she hung out with what she called an “underground network of women”—middle-aged careerists who had taken it for granted they would have to work twice as hard as a man to achieve half as much, but couldn’t resist trying anyway. They included people like Marguerite Rawalt, a tax attorney who had always yearned to be a judge, or to move up to a government post where she could make a real impact. But she always seemed to wind up assisting a man. In 1961, when she was 65, Rawalt saw her last chance. She desperately wanted a slot on the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, which was charged with resolving claims made by Americans whose property had been seized by other countries. She was highly qualified, and for once, Rawalt had a crucial political connection—a longtime association with the new vice president, Lyndon Johnson. The official who did the screening was appropriately awed by all the agencies she’d served in, all the projects she’d shepherded through, all the people she had known and helped along the way. “And now for the $64,000 question. How old are you?” he asked. When she told the truth, Rawalt could see on his face that her chance was gone.
Another woman Friedan came to know was Pauli Murray, an African American lawyer who, after a life of immense struggle, had landed a job with a major law firm only to discover that as the sole woman, the sole minority, and a newcomer 20 years older than her peers, she was always going to be a triple outsider. She didn’t stay long, moving on to a pioneering career in the civil rights movement. She also armed herself with a pile of credentials, acquiring a doctorate from Yale, teaching in Ghana and then at Brandeis University, and finally becoming an Episcopalian minister.
And there was Esther Peterson, the highest-ranking woman in the Kennedy administration, with the inevitable title of director of the Women’s Bureau, an agency of the Department of Labor. In her mid-50s, she wore her graying hair the old-fashioned way, with a braid on top of her head. One adversary dubbed her “the woman with the tight hairdo.” Peterson helped convince the president to create the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt. The former First Lady’s relationship with Kennedy had begun rather badly. She disapproved of the money his father had lavished on his campaign and his failure to appoint any women to his cabinet. “Men have to be reminded that women exist,” she snorted. They eventually made a sort of peace, and Kennedy reappointed her to the United Nations and to the National Advisory Committee of his new creation, the Peace Corps. But his most important peace offering was that Commission on the Status of Women. While the administration higher-ups certainly never expected it to do anything important, it had the critical effect of bringing together hard-charging women from around the country, along with politically savvy Washingtonians like Marguerite Rawalt.
The commission members—a whole generation full of experience, talent, and frequently thwarted ambition—were gathered in Washington for a meeting when the women began to complain about the way the Lyndon Johnson administration was failing to enforce the part of the new Civil Rights Act that prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. One thing led to another, and by evening a crowd had gathered in Friedan’s hotel room to figure out what to do. There was a lot of talk about forming a women’s version of the NAACP, to organize protests and pursue court cases on behalf of equal rights. Sometime that night, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was born.
Eleanor Roosevelt was never able to take a very active role in the Commission on the Status of Women, although member Pauli Murray said her own work was a “memorial” to the First Lady, who had personally answered Murray’s 1938 letter criticizing FDR’s racial policies and become a lifelong friend. Eleanor spent her last years in New York, living with David and Edna Gurewitsch. At the beginning, the trio would go out for evening entertainments, all organized by Eleanor. “Typically we three would hurriedly gulp our dinner in Mrs. Roosevelt’s apartment downstairs, then dash out, David in the lead, to hail a taxi,” Edna wrote. “Anxiety was high and breath was short as we reached the theater or concert hall in the nick of time.” Finally, Edna suggested it might be easier if the three of them stayed home on occasion. Eleanor, she said, reacted with surprise: “Do you mean, dear, that you think you would not be bored?”
Apparently the most admired woman in America was shocked to discover that her housemates were willing to spend time together without some special diversions to keep their spirits up. But once convinced, Eleanor happily shared evenings with the Gurewitsches in their home unless there was a really interesting invitation to something in the outside world. It was undoubtedly helpful for her to have David, who was also her physician, close at hand. At 77 she was still appearing on television, writing her columns, and regularly entertaining her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But she wasn’t well. In 1960, her doctors discovered she had anemia, which they treated with steroids, which then activated a dormant case of bone-marrow tuberculosis, a rare condition that would eventually kill her.
She continued her life as close to normal as possible and pressed on with her work, writing another book, working with the Commission on the Status of Women, and chairing a committee to investigate the lack of government protection for the Freedom Riders who were fighting to integrate mass transportation in the South. She prided herself, Edna Gurewitsch recalled, on her self-sufficiency—even in the still-foreign world of domesticity. Once, on a plane returning to New York, she told Edna she would make breakfast for herself when she returned home. “Marie has left bread in the toaster and put water in the teakettle and taken the teacup out. I will do the rest,” she said proudly. It was, by the standards of her life, a high mark in culinary achievement.
But her niece remembered that her aunt “didn’t seem her old self.” Eleanor began retracing the stops of her life—visiting Campobello Island, where she and Franklin had summered with their children, and receiving guests at her old cottage in Hyde Park. Finally, she began planning her funeral (plain wooden coffin). She died on November 7, 1962. President Kennedy ordered all United States flags around the world lowered to half-staff in tribute.
The focus of NOW’s new “NAACP for women” was equal employment opportunity. Marguerite Rawalt organized a little band of volunteer lawyers to take the cases to court. She was retired and newly widowed. The death of her husband, Harry, weighed heavily on her, and she welcomed the ungodly schedule of travel and meetings: “I seem to lose myself that way, and make up for the lack of Harry at home to care.”
One of the landmark cases involved flight attendants, who were at the time all women—and women who were required to retire if they got married or when they reached 35. It was, airline executives insisted, a crucial perk for business travelers to be greeted by a young, attractive, single woman when they got on a plane. “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?” demanded Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan, when the House held a hearing on the matter.
It was because of Griffiths that the flight attendants got their hearing in the first place. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was wending its way through Congress, a few Southern conservatives proposed adding an amendment that would protect women as well as minorities from discrimination in hiring and promotion. Most members took it as a joke, or an attempt at distraction, but Griffiths grabbed on to the amendment and—with the help of Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate—pushed it into law.
After it passed, flight attendants were the first people in line to press their complaint. They had double ammunition, since the Civil Rights Act had been followed by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. But passing a law and changing the world are always two different things. Even the government could be oblivious. Two years after that law against age discrimination had passed, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare contacted the American Association of University Women, looking for the names of women “between 25 and 35” who might be good fits for federal job openings. After howls of protest, the department revised the request to women under 50.
Critics complained that the legal system still didn’t know what to do with companies that only discriminated against older women. When age came up, employers could point to all the gray-haired men who were on the payroll, and when sex came up, they might be able to trot out a raft of female 27-year-olds. Decades later, women would still be going to court claiming they’d been tossed out of work after being referred to as a “prune” or an “old hag.”
On the plus side, in 1973, flight attendants won the right to turn 36.
While Friedan and her contemporaries were organizing NOW and taking age discrimination cases to court, on the nation’s college campuses all hell was breaking loose. Those postwar baby boomers had finally arrived, and they were determined not to be silent like their parents’ generation. The nation first noticed something was going on in September of 1964 when Katherine Towle, the dean of students at the University of California at Berkeley, announced that student groups could no longer use a popular plaza to solicit support for “off campus political and social action.” Towle, who was then 66, was the first woman ever to be named dean of students at Berkeley. Earlier she had been the first director of the women’s marines and was one of the first officers in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve to serve in World War II. She would say later that she sympathized with the students’ position but had no authority to do anything except enforce the administration’s policies.
Anyway, the deed was done and the free speech movement was born, along with the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” (Jack Weinberg, an environmental activist at Berkeley who originated the line, said many years later that he hated being attached to it for life but added wryly, “I’ve become more accepting of my fate as I get older.”)
While the student movement was definitely anti-authority, the young protesters actually trusted quite a few people over 30. Bettina Aptheker, who was one of the Berkeley leaders, remembers one critical moment when the students tried to stop a police car from hauling away one of their group. (It was, yes, Jack Weinberg.) The standoff lasted for two days—the car surrounded by hundreds of students surrounded by hundreds of police officers, and everyone very nervous. Aptheker has a vivid memory of Ann Fagan Ginger, a 39-year-old local lawyer, “getting up on top of the police car and giving us instructions on what was legally required if we got arrested. She was great—very calming.”
Aptheker also has fond memories of Dean of Students Towle, who was hauled in to testify for the prosecution at a trial for the arrested protesters. Student sit-ins had blocked her office for days, but Towle praised the young people for creating paths so visitors could make their way through. “She might as well have been a defense witness. She was that great. She was very sympathetic to us.” Twenty years later, when Towle was in her 80s and in a nursing home, Aptheker visited and brought her a bouquet of roses.
As campuses erupted, there were almost always supportive over-30 figures in the background—Emily Taylor, the 49-year-old dean of women at the University of Kansas, stood up for a group of feminists protesting in the administration building, warning the chancellor that if he arrested them, he’d have to arrest her, too. And outside school, there were plenty of young women who wanted to hang out with people like Pauli Murray—who mentored, among others, future congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, spent her 60s and 70s counseling an entire generation of draft resisters, runaways, and other assorted rebels, and was a hero to young radicals. Still, getting older did not appear to be something the youth were planning to do themselves. “Hippie women over thirty have that lean and desperate look,” reported Vivian Estellachild, a chronicler of the counterculture movement.
As the decade went on, young Americans declared their moral superiority from sea to shining sea. “A world like this deserves contempt,” said Deborah Smullyan in her commencement speech at a high school in suburban New York. “Only goodness in our generation can counter the decadence of the society we are inheriting. And our generation is good.” It was one of many, many graduations of the era in which a spokesperson for the students announced that the adults had built a world that was, in the words of Hillary Rodham of Wellesley, “not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
In 1963, Women Strike for Peace won their goal: the United States signed a limited nuclear weapons test ban treaty. But they were hardly through. They were among the first Americans to oppose the Vietnam War—still wearing dresses, nice hats, and frequently picketing in high heels. And the members were out in full force in 1968 when Jeannette Rankin—the former congresswoman who had voted against both world wars—led a big women’s anti-war rally in Washington. Rankin, 87, was at the head of 5,000 demonstrators, the largest gathering of women for a political protest since the suffrage era. It took place on the opening day of Congress, and the police barred access to the Capitol grounds. All the protesters could do was deliver a petition to House and Senate leaders, and then gather for the rest of their program at a nearby hotel.
They were, as we’ve seen, careful to be decorous. They had been picketing the government for what felt like forever, and they had always tried to make it clear that while their aims were radical, their deportment was… not. But as the gathering convened in the hotel auditorium, a much younger group took the stage, carrying a papier-mâché coffin decorated with hair-spray cans and garters, and a blond-haired dummy that was supposed to represent Traditional Womanhood. They were from New York Radical Women, heralding a new generation gap within the women’s movement. When they finished their performance, they stalked away to another part of the hotel. Amy Swerdlow, one of the organizers of the march, followed along with many of her friends—all in their 40s—expecting to hear the younger generation argue for more aggressive tactics to press for an end to the war. “What we found, however, were young women rushing to the mike to speak passionately, but often incoherently, about the way in which the traditional women’s peace movement condoned and even enforced the gender hierarchy in which men made war and women wept,” Swerdlow recalled later.
Swerdlow felt the young people regarded her and her comrades as part of the problem—the older generation who had graduated from Radcliffe or Smith, then retired into domesticity. She had tried to negotiate with New York Radical Women before the march, when they demanded that Women Strike for Peace pay for an extra hotel room for them to hold their counter-gathering. In the end, the organizers had agreed—even though they realized they were putting up money so the younger women could have a venue to produce an attack on them. It was, Swerdlow observed, “a classic example of liberal mother-daughter conflict.”
There were no set age lines between the feminist old guard and the new radicals. But in general, the women who had been working for equal rights for a long time were fighting for a place at the table when it came to everything from jobs to national defense policy. The most radical wing of the new guard wanted to burn down the table entirely, wiping out patriarchy, marriage, and maybe even traditional parenthood. Some of the most vocal—and most publicized—new arrivals also wanted to get rid of cosmetics, sexy dresses, and anything else women wore with an eye toward pleasing men. The old guard was at a loss. “I don’t want people to think Women’s Lib girls don’t care about how they look,” Betty Friedan told the New York Times as she had a quick hair curl that made her 20 minutes late for a huge march for equality that she organized in the summer of 1970. When Friedan wound up appearing on TV with Roxanne Dunbar, one of the followers of the new dress creed, she accused Dunbar of being “scruffy.” The wounded younger woman noted that she had appeared in “my very best army surplus white cotton sailor trousers.”
By then, Friedan had become a kind of metaphor for the gap. “She misrepresents the case for feminism by making people believe that reform is the answer,” said Sally Kempton, a member of the new wave. “The problem is more fundamental. The entire society has to be upended. And on top of that, she projects the star image, the elitist, which is totally out of whack with what we believe. And there she goes, in sexually suggestive clothing, saying she is the spokesman for the movement. She is not the movement mother; that is Simone de Beauvoir.” Beauvoir, the French philosopher and feminist, was certainly less attached to the economic and cultural status quo than Friedan was, but she also had the great advantage of being an ocean away, writing in a different language and staying out of the young American feminists’ faces.
Friedan, on the other hand, was everywhere, and sticking to her guns. At a college speech in 1970, she urged the students not to be seduced by “the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm” school of thought. She was suspicious of lesbians in the movement—in 1969, she warned feminists against the “lavender menace.” (Later she would recant, saying that at the time, her attitude toward homosexuality had been “very square.”) And she was proud of her clothes and figure. “Feminists all over the country have admitted to me that they enjoy looking pretty and dressing up,” Friedan told a meeting of the Colorado NOW in the 1970s. By then, she argued, American women had become “more secure as people and this enables them to enjoy the traditional things about being women—like nail polish and eye shadow.”
Some of the most outspoken young women disagreed totally. And since NOW was still the center of feminist action, many of them joined up and tried to transform it. Their numbers weren’t really all that large, but they attracted massive media attention. NOW co-founder Muriel Fox remembers picking up a Sunday Times Magazine and reading a story about the “Second Feminist Wave” that quoted the 29-year-old president of NOW’s New York chapter, Ti-Grace Atkinson, comparing marriage to slavery and looking forward to the day when those “legal contraptions” were gone and children were raised communally. “We felt she was going to disgrace the entire feminist movement,” Fox recalled. And the next NOW meeting, Fox said, “produced an unfamiliar outpouring of hippies.… We old-time NOW members asked each other, ‘Who are those people?’”
One of the reasons for the vast difference in perception was the attitude toward men. While the original NOW founders confronted male politicians and sued male employers on a daily basis, many of them lived with liberal-to-left male partners who were sympathetic and sometimes extremely supportive—Fox’s husband, Dr. Shepard Aronson, was chairman of the New York chapter of the NOW board. Many of the younger women had come up through the anti-war movement and the student left, where the male radicals could sometimes be thuggishly macho and where women’s issues were generally regarded as an unwelcome distraction.
The generational battle seemed to be everywhere, although some communities hoped they were at least somewhat exempt. Ebony contended that “elder people of the Negro race have higher status among their people than elderly whites enjoy.” But the age gap was there, and growing. The Chicago Daily Defender, one of the nation’s most prestigious black newspapers, ran a short piece in 1960 called “This Is Life: Old Woman,” which used the metaphor of a decrepit house: “The basement door gaped open, its door, wide, loose, sagging, as though many children had gone through it. No one came to see her anymore. No one wanted to go inside her and take her warmth, or look through her eyes, or smell her or touch her.… And so she stood among the weeds of her isolation, and not even a rat would go inside her.”
One major generational point of contention centered on hair. Younger women had begun to wear Afros—the natural style that violated the beauty standards of some older women, who had been raised to believe that straight, well-controlled tresses were the ideal. “Lord have mercy!” laughed Elizabeth Hayes Patterson, recalling the reaction. Patterson, a former associate dean at Georgetown University Law School, was particularly afraid that her new Afro would offend her grandmother, who was a hairdresser: “I did worry about her feeling a kind of rejection of what she had done all her life.” But while her grandmother would definitely have preferred to see Elizabeth keep straightening her hair, there was no drama. Other families didn’t necessarily adapt as smoothly. Septuagenarian Florence Price told interviewers about a friend who went to pick up her daughter at the airport and discovered the girl had grown an Afro: “My friend just stood there in that airport, looking at her daughter, and screamed.” Price, whose daughter had an Afro, too, sympathized: she called the style “just a disgrace.”
In the civil rights movement, the middle-aged female organizers who spent their lives fighting racism had too much to think about to worry about ageism. If they had a second “ism” to battle, it would have been sexism. “Around 1965 there began to develop a great deal of questioning about what is the role of women in the struggle,” Ella Baker said later. “Out of it came a concept that black women had to bolster the ego of the male.… I personally have never thought of this as being valid.”
Baker had already turned her attention to the younger generation, becoming the guiding hand in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was, in the beginning, a reflection of Baker’s own vision of blacks and whites, men and women, young and old, working together to empower the grass-roots communities. The students called Baker “our Gandhi” or “fundi,” a Swahili word for a person who teaches the next generation necessary skills and wisdom. She worked with no salary or even official title, moving from town to town, listening all night to the students’ smoke-filled debates, demanding no concessions to either her age or her asthma. One former SNCC member recalled her “sitting in on these SNCC meetings that ran for days—you didn’t measure them in hours, they ran days—with a smoke mask over her nose, listening patiently to words and discussions she must have heard a thousand times.” Diane Nash, who became one of the leaders of the black college students who staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, met Baker when she was 18. Baker was, Nash recalled, “the first older person I had known who was so progressive. And I needed that reinforcement. It was important that someone like her thought we were right. It was really important when things got hot and heavy.”
Baker’s vision of community organizing left little room for ego. Even if white resistance to the idea of black people voting in the South had not been so vicious, it’s likely that younger civil rights workers would have gotten restless with her patient, low-profile approach. But the violence was terrible, and the national media was paying attention to new voices like Stokely Carmichael of the black power movement. (Word went around the movement that Carmichael had once joked the proper place of women in the movement was “prone.” Much later, he denied the quote, saying, “A woman like Ella Baker would not have tolerated it.”) Eventually all white members were expelled from SNCC. It was no longer an Ella Baker organization, and while Baker refused to separate herself from the young people she had nurtured for so long, she did gradually drift away, focusing most of her attention on international issues.
Young people, white and black, were tired of compromise and of taking cues from their elders. When NOW was a young and pioneering organization, members predicted it could someday become an “NAACP for women.” But both NOW and the NAACP were suddenly being dismissed as old-fashioned and way too timid. To make the chasm clear, some of the radical feminists referred to the older NOW membership as “Aunt Thomasinas.”
Of all the social revolutions that broke out in the 1960s, none was more popular than the sexual revolution. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, then 40, published Sex and the Single Girl, her clarion call on behalf of unmarried women—“the newest glamour girl of our times.” It was not really an assault on matrimony. Brown’s argument was that if women had fun—including a lot of sex—and worked on their careers when they were in their 20s and 30s, they’d make a much better match later on. Marriage, she decreed, “is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband.” Brown herself had married a wealthy, successful, and extremely supportive movie producer, David Brown, when she was 37 and “just worldly enough, relaxed enough, financially secure enough… and adorned with enough glitter to attract him.”
Her book was, in many ways, a successor to Live Alone and Like It, the 1936 bestseller by Marjorie Hillis that instructed single women on how to live a fabulous life, give great parties in tiny apartments, and turn their itty-bitty bedrooms into glamorous retreats. Hillis, however, had not really encouraged extramarital sex; Brown couldn’t get enough of it. She told one associate that during her single days she’d made love to 178 men. A lot of women were interested in following her example, although perhaps at a less ambitious level.
If Brown had a liberated vision of how old a woman should be when she got married, she still couldn’t escape the age obsession. In her early 40s, she was looking for work and had an interview with the brilliant Mary Wells Lawrence, who was about to become one of the most successful advertising executives in the country. Lawrence offered her a job, Brown accepted, and they were chatting away when suddenly Brown stopped and abruptly said she didn’t want the job after all. “She looked at me very strangely,” Lawrence recounted years later, “and said, ‘You know, I take that back. I’m not going to work for you. I won’t work for you. You are younger than me.’”
In 1965, Brown got to be in charge herself. She became the editor of Cosmopolitan, a famous literary magazine that had fallen on very hard times and was in grave need of a makeover. And make over she did. The newly nicknamed Cosmo brought into the mainstream the idea of sex as a normal and extremely important part of every woman’s life. It was revolutionary, even if its content was a far cry from the intellectual fare the magazine had originally been known for. Brown referred to her readers as “my girls” and warned her film critic that his strong reviews were upsetting to young women who “only want to know about a movie they can go to on a Saturday night date at the drive in.” Then she added abruptly: “They write to me about their menstrual problems.”
Brown’s “girls” weren’t the only ones worrying about menstruation. Menopause—which was frequently referred to as “the menopause”—was a big topic. And the discussion was moving in two entirely opposite directions. Many experts maintained that it was a natural part of life, and it was time to stop making it a big deal. “In the higher educational level, the enlightened woman doesn’t fear or complain about the menopause,” Professor Bernice Neugarten, of the University of Chicago, told an audience. Neugarten, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the psychology of aging, had a PhD, but the Chicago Tribune, in reporting her speech, followed tradition and referred to her as “Mrs. Neugarten.”
Other experts were making “change of life” sound less like a change than a deep plunge downward. After Sex and the Single Girl, one of the books that helped define the sexual revolution was Dr. David Reuben’s wildly popular bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). Reuben’s readers got the equivalent of a course in sex education, including, critics pointed out, some information that was bigoted (homosexuals were trying to “solve the problem with only half the pieces”), weird, or just plain wrong—Playboy helpfully ran a list of 100 errors. Toward the end, Reuben turned to menopause: “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” he decreed. He went on at some length about how the absence of estrogen leaves the unhappy woman “as close as she can to being a man.… Not really a man but no longer a functional woman, these individuals live in the world of inter-sex.” If women saw menopause as the beginning of the end, Reuben concluded, they “may be right. Having outlived their ovaries, they may have outlived their usefulness as human beings.”
You are not going to be surprised to hear that Reuben was a cheerleader for hormone replacement. The idea that there was a perpetual fountain of youth tucked away in hormones had been around for decades, but in the 1960s, it boomed. Robert Wilson, a New York gynecologist, made a huge splash with his book Feminine Forever, which told female readers how to avoid becoming a “prematurely aging castrate” by using hormones to avoid menopause completely.
“It shows how women who already have gone through the anguish of menopause can experience the phenomenon of Menopausal Reversal,” promised an ad for the book, “and grow visibly younger day by day until they are transformed into the exciting, vibrant females they were before the ‘change’!” It’s not hard to see how that grabbed attention. “One gynecologist on the staff of George Washington University in Washington, DC, says she has been besieged by women patients who bring Dr. Wilson’s book into her office with paper clips attached to various pages,” reported Science News.
The pharmaceutical industry was thrilled at the idea of a new market made up of virtually all the older women in the country, and it enthusiastically pressed the case for hormone replacement with ads that made menopausal women sound pathetic in the extreme. “There we were—my husband at the peak of his career—busy, successful… but no time for me,” said a woman in one ad for Premarin, an estrogen tablet. “I’d lie awake night after night, more depressed every day. This wasn’t a ‘change,’ it was a catastrophe.” Ayerst Laboratories produced a film that showed a woman in a nightgown, sitting before a fireplace, talking about how her children were grown and her husband was “away a great deal,” leaving her alone in the evening to wonder whether he was stepping out with a younger woman. The idea that estrogen could keep a husband from straying was central to Wilson’s theories. While postmenopausal women would still be “castrates,” he wrote, with estrogen her “breasts and genital organs will not shrivel. She will be much more pleasant to live with and will not become dull and unattractive.” He compared menopause to diabetes and estrogen replacement to insulin.
Wilson, who had been a gynecologist in Brooklyn before his fame sent him rocketing to a Park Avenue office in Manhattan, was a great spinner of tales. He claimed he had once been visited by a mobster who displayed his pistol and announced that unless his menopausal wife’s behavior could be improved, he was planning to kill her. His theories about estrogen were based mainly on one rather sloppy study of about 300 middle-aged women. “Since recent medical progress made menopause and its consequences fully preventable, I believe it becomes the obligation of doctors to tell every woman that she can now remain feminine for life,” Wilson wrote in 1966, when he was taking his victory lap after the book’s publication. He provided charts to illustrate when women would need hormone therapy, which began with 5 percent of those from 17 to 29, ratcheted up to “about 40%” of women in their 30s, and then covered pretty much everybody on up to 85.
Feminine Forever had hardly hit the shelves before there were reports the FDA was investigating Wilson’s relationship with G. D. Searle and Co., the manufacturer of Enovid, which happened to be just the kind of drug Wilson was extolling. Later, the New Republic would obtain the tax-exempt filings of the Wilson Research Foundation—a nonprofit headed by Wilson’s son—and determine that manufacturers of estrogen made up a huge portion of the contributors. Wilson’s son eventually said that estrogen manufacturers had also paid the expenses of writing Feminine Forever.
By the beginning of the 1960s, Helena Rubinstein was fading—perhaps it was just as well, considering the direction the styles of the times were headed. Her long-suffering personal secretary wrote to a friend in 1964 that his boss “has had double pneumonia, a heart attack, inflamed arteries.… She was ninety-two on Christmas day and yet she has now completely recovered and dictates, on average, sixty-four letters a day. Two secretaries have already had nervous breakdowns and a third has developed a strange rash!” She had also weathered a break-in—three men posing as florists forced themselves into her bedroom at gunpoint. The nonagenarian saw them and was said to have declared, “I’m an old woman. Death doesn’t frighten me. You can kill me, but you can’t rob me… now get out.” She slipped the keys to her safe down her nightgown and began shrieking—sending the robbers fleeing with only about $100 from her purse.
When Rubinstein died, in 1965, Elizabeth Arden was unmoved by her longtime competitor’s demise, but she was deeply disturbed that the newspapers mentioned Rubinstein’s age in her obituaries. Arden, who was eight years younger, was definitely not preparing for her own passing. “Death… was a subject Miss Arden refused to contemplate and any reference to it met with icy silence,” said a friend. Just four years before she died, at 85, Arden went real estate shopping in Ireland and bought herself a castle.
The passing of the two fashion icons coincided with the end of an era of sophisticated, rather mature glamour. “There’s no middle age anymore,” a Chicago Tribune essayist mourned in 1967. “There are the young young, the middle young, and the old young.” It was a new version of the 1920s many-variations-on-19. The Tribune writer quoted a psychiatrist who announced that Americans no longer saw any positives in aging: “We used to look forward to being grandparents. Now grandma isn’t home baking cookies; she’s frugging at the hot spots.” Grandma might have replied that it’s possible to both cook and dance, but there was no denying that the 1960s were in many ways an echo of the 1920s—if you weren’t young, you at least had the responsibility to try to disguise the fact. Otherwise there was… wrinkling. According to an ad in Vogue for something called Youth Cosmetics cream, the arrival of the first wrinkle was a warning about “careers and happiness ruined by the ravages that time can cause the unprotected face.”
For decades women had been turning to plastic surgery to remove the signs of age, but it had always been a rather hush-hush matter. Now people were reading about it everywhere. “Plastic surgery is admittedly expensive, not covered by Blue Cross, horribly uncomfortable for a few days—but oh my foes and oh my friends—the results!” wrote Helen Gurley Brown in 1964. “The lovely cataclysmic results are the kind you can’t get any other way.” She began her long romance with facial reconstruction with a nose job, and then went on to endure many, many more procedures over the course of her long life. Her husband declared himself shocked by “the self-inflicted pain,” but it was pretty clear she wasn’t doing this for a man.
They had seen the future, and it was lifted. “[S]omeday women and men will enter the hospital for the removal of wrinkles and jowls in much the same way as they keep their weekly appointment at the beauty salon or barber shop,” promised the Chicago Tribune. And it couldn’t start soon enough. “Twenty years ago women started having their faces lifted at age 60 and they probably had ‘time’ for only one lift. Today, most start in their late 40s,” plastic surgeon Dr. Wilmer Hansen told the Los Angeles Times. He was, at the time, one of only eight physicians who specialized in plastic surgery in Los Angeles—obviously there was still a long way to go. Hansen also enjoyed the old-school tendency of male experts to make fun of their female patients. (“If exercise did much good, a woman’s face—particularly around the mouth—should be wrinkle-free, because there is no place on a woman’s body that gets more exercise.”) Helen Gurley Brown, not surprisingly and not secretly, was an ardent fan and often bragged that she had never taken a day off work in her life “except for cosmetic surgery.”
For all the emphasis on youth, there was also a celebration of gray hair—or at least beautiful, lush, charming gray hair. “My hair’s gray—Now, I love it that way!” announced a happy woman on what appeared to be a romantic cruise with her husband in an ad for Come Alive Gray rinse. The ads tended to feature women who looked rather young to have gone gray on their own. And there were still some doubts about whether letting nature take its course was a good idea. “The crucial question,” a New York Times article announced, was “whether men will whistle at (or otherwise pursue) a gray-haired woman.” To find out, the writer took a survey—it was a sign of the times that being whistled at on the street was regarded as desirable, and that mature men were pleased to discuss their preferences. The Times quoted a vice president of American Airlines generously announcing, “A woman’s hair is the last thing I look at when deciding whether to whistle.”
It was becoming a lot easier to conceal gray with home hair coloring sets, but it was not necessarily more socially accepted. Certainly nobody broadcasted the news. “A feeling of smugness, like that of a World War II suburban volunteer who recognized a Messerschmitt, always accompanies the spotting of a dye job,” the Times reported. Clairol ran a mammoth ad campaign promising customers that they could keep it a secret: “Does she or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.” The ads, which quickly became classics, often featured a woman with a child—to make it clear Clairol was for moms, not “fast” women. Shirley Polykoff, an ad copywriter who became an industry legend with the Clairol campaign, would not allow her employers to raise her salary above $25,000 because she did not believe her pay should be higher than her husband’s.
When the ’60s began, only about 7 percent of American women dyed their hair. Within a decade, the practice was so common the government stopped putting hair color on passports.
As the ’60s went on, and those twenty-something baby boomers became the center of everything from fashion to civil disobedience, older women began dressing more and more like their juniors. “This historian observed a Boston matron on the far side of fifty, who might have worn a graceful palla [mantle] in ancient Rome, dressed in a miniskirt and leather boots,” complained Brandeis professor David Hackett Fischer. To be fair, Fischer also noted that he’d seen a man in his sixties “who might have draped himself in the dignity of a toga” wearing hip-hugger jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt.
Twiggy, the famous 91-pound British model, epitomized an era when the Duchess of Windsor’s slogan about never being too thin became a national mantra. Twiggy, whose real name was Lesley Hornby, measured 31-22-32. “It’s not really what you’d call a figure, is it?” she asked. But it was the look of the moment, and mature women like Helen Gurley Brown tortured themselves to keep their bodies as reedy as possible. “Skinny is sacred,” Brown decreed.
In a win for everyone of every shape, underwear was getting more comfortable—tights and pantyhose replaced girdles and nylons. And slacks, which would transform the way older women dressed in the near future, were beginning to make an appearance. In 1961, The Dick Van Dyke Show made history of sorts when it introduced a happy homemaker, in the form of Mary Tyler Moore, who wore pants while she did the housework. Many women were already doing that in the comfort of their homes, but it would be a while before the idea of wearing slacks in public would become popular for women of all ages. “Back then… women got dressed up to go to the store,” a beauty care executive recalled.
We live in an era when it’s perfectly okay for a woman to wear pants to church or to work, or to be nominated for president. It’s sometimes hard to remember how daring that seemed back in the wild 1960s. “To sum up, wherever women wear men’s dress, it is to be considered a factor in the long run tearing apart human order,” a prominent Vatican cardinal declaimed in 1960. Slacks wearers who weren’t afraid of tearing human order apart still had to worry about where they could get pants when they wanted them—they often had to buy men’s versions and adapt them. Levi’s discovered that about 15 percent of its jeans were being purchased by women.
The tide was turning, with the help of women like Mary Tyler Moore and Rep. Charlotte Reid, a 56-year-old Illinois Republican. In 1969, she became the first woman ever to wear pants on the floor of the House of Representatives. “I was told there was a lady here in trousers, so I had to come over and see for myself,” one of Reid’s male colleagues told the Washington Post.
Walt Disney spent the 1960s sticking to the values he’d long espoused, producing big, animated features that taught children the villain was almost always an ugly old woman—this was the decade of Cruella de Vil. His Mary Poppins began with a line of very old and very cranky-looking applicants for the nanny job, being blown away by a miraculous gust of wind that brings a youthful Julie Andrews floating down under her umbrella to save the day.
Nevertheless, older women did appear in top-grossing films of the ’60s, occasionally in lead roles. Rosalind Russell, 54, starred in A Majority of One as a widow who moves to Japan to be with her daughter and son-in-law, and falls for a Japanese businessman. (Love triumphs over familiar objections to an interracial romance.) Accepting Russell as the romantic heroine was probably much easier for audiences than accepting Alec Guinness as the Japanese suitor. Russell was a leading woman throughout the early part of the decade, starring in Gypsy as the fabulous Mama Rose in 1962 and returning a few years later as a nun in The Trouble with Angels, a comedy in which a Who’s Who of older actresses played teachers attempting to educate schoolgirls, played by women in their early to mid-20s.
Bette Davis, in her 50s, ran into a rough patch in her career but made it perfectly clear she intended to keep on keeping on. In 1962, she placed an ad in the help-wanted section of the Hollywood Reporter, reading: “Mother of three—10, 11 & 15—divorcée. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway).” It was, she claimed later, a joke. She’d had a string of hits, although the biggest were roles as a washed-up actress who serves her sister the pet parakeet for lunch in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and as a dotty plantation owner whom everyone believes decapitated her youthful lover in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
One of the defining movies of the ’60s was The Graduate, a coming-of-age comedy about an alienated 21-year-old who’s seduced by one of his parents’ friends, the nefarious Mrs. Robinson. By now it’s hardly necessary to mention that Dustin Hoffman, who played the hero, was only six years younger than Anne Bancroft, who played Mrs. R. The role made Bancroft a star, and it’s interesting to think of what might have happened if Doris Day had accepted an offer to play the part. Day, who turned down the role because it involved nudity, had become famous in the ’50s, playing what some critics called “a perpetual virgin” who held off male suitors wanting to Go All the Way. In the ’60s, she went from chaste date to virtuous housewife, whose fidelity was tested in a row of films with silly plots and huge box office returns. She was the most popular star of the era, but she wasn’t immune to the forces that had sent a previous generation of older female movie stars to TV. By the time Day hit 46 she was playing a widow on The Doris Day Show.
Middle-aged actresses continued to emigrate to TV, but there weren’t many roles along the lines of the sexy working girl Ann Sothern had portrayed earlier. Bette Davis, during her low-employment period, showed up on episodes of Wagon Train and Perry Mason. Agnes Moorehead, who had starred in films like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, enjoyed a whole new career at 64 in the TV comedy Bewitched, playing every man’s nightmare of a cranky mother-in-law who could also cast spells. Barbara Stanwyck, whose movie career during the 1940s made her the highest-paid woman in America, switched to TV and scored a hit with The Big Valley, starring as the matriarch of a powerful California ranching family in the Old West.
Among the film stars who wound up playing someone’s mother on television, Stanwyck may have gotten the most active parts—her character was taken prisoner, trapped underground after a cave-in, and locked in a mental asylum by her enemies. It was a sterling accomplishment for an era when TV had entered into a love affair with Men Who Rode Alone. Viewers could watch cowboys on the move in shows like Have Gun—Will Travel, and modern all-male variations like My Three Sons (a widower and his boys), Route 66 (two young men on the highway), and above all Bonanza (the saga of an Old West patriarch who had been married and widowed three times, producing three sons who shared their father’s talent for falling in love with women with short life spans).