Geritol, which had faded a bit from the national consciousness in the 1960s, bounded back in 1972, with a famous commercial in which a husband spoke to the camera while his wife draped herself over his shoulder, smiling like something between a model and the brainwashed resident of a creepy commune.
“My wife’s incredible,” the man boasted while violins played. “She took care of the baby all day, cooked a great dinner, and even went to a school meeting—and look at her.” The woman kept snuggling and smiling. “She looks better than any of her friends,” bragged her spouse. “She takes care of herself—gets her rest, does her sit-ups, watches her diet. And to make sure she gets enough iron and vitamins, she takes Geritol every morning. Makes me take it, too.” The violins continued as the announcer explained that Geritol has “more than twice the iron of ordinary supplements,” and then it went back to the happy couple.
“My wife,” the master of the house concluded as his grateful, silent helpmate beamed. “I think I’ll keep her.”
The 1970s were great for memorable-in-an-awful-way ad lines. It was, after all, the decade of “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.” That was Clairol, assuring women that they never needed to let “any guy put you down because of your age.” It may have been a comfort, although, as a New York Times essayist noted, the woman in the ads tossing her shining mass of hair did not really look old enough to worry about the problem: “[I]f she’s over 25, I’ll eat my bottle of bleach.”
But “My wife… I think I’ll keep her” had a special resonance. In Garry Trudeau’s popular Doonesbury comic strip, runaway housewife Joanie Caucus, married to Clinton, told the gang that her turning point came when one of his bowling buddies complimented her French fries: “Clinton leaned back in his chair, and said with a big, stupid grin, ‘My wife, I think I’ll keep her.’ I broke his nose.”
Doonesbury, which debuted in 1970, featured a large cast of characters who started at Yale, moved on to form a commune, and then marched through the rest of the twentieth century marrying, reproducing, and pursuing careers. Joanie Caucus—slightly battered by life but determined to move along—was the female star. She was 38, older than her pals, and eager for a new start. She wanted a career as a lawyer, and although she worried that no law school would take “a middle-aged woman,” she was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, where Doonesbury fans followed her fictional progress avidly. She got so many letters from enthusiastic supporters that Trudeau’s mailman assumed he and Joanie Caucus were living together. Three years later, when it would have been time for her to graduate as part of the class of 1974, Trudeau was invited to give the law school’s commencement address. “And they put a mortarboard on her chair in the front row,” he remembered later. Joanie began her career in her 40s, eventually becoming an aide to Rep. Lacey Davenport, the eccentric Republican who became a beloved part of the cast of Doonesbury characters.
The nation couldn’t help noticing how much Lacey resembled Rep. Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey. Both had been in their 60s when they were elected to the House. Both were fiscal conservatives who had a passion for truth, justice, and the underdog. And there was something about their age, honesty, and outspokenness that made them both compelling. The real-life Fenwick had spent the Depression trying to raise her two children on a limited income while swimming under the debts of the fashionable husband she’d divorced. She had worked as a feature writer for Vogue and, in 1948, had authored Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. Her grandson Joseph Reckford remembers that Fenwick would describe her Vogue days as “a waste of time” when she would have much rather been working on civil rights. But deep in her heart, he added, “I think she really loved that stuff.” While researching the etiquette book, his grandmother went to the Pentagon to find out whether civilians should wear military decorations they’d received during past service. “The chief of protocol didn’t have an answer. So the two of them sat down and wrote the rules.”
“It was not dull to be around her,” Reckford said. “Not warm and fuzzy, but really interesting.” Fenwick was nearly six feet tall, thin, with perfect posture and a speaking voice that reminded many people of Katharine Hepburn’s. A reformed cigarette chain-smoker, she decided to substitute a pipe after her seventh grandchild was born: “I thought I reached the age when my conduct would not scandalize society.”
Fenwick became involved in the civil rights movement well before it was a popular cause for white Northerners. “When she was with Vogue, she made sure black models were in the pictures,” said Reckford. She worked with the NAACP and, later, a fair housing group and the Legal Aid Society. It was an era when liberal Republicans could do that sort of thing, and Fenwick was also active in party politics. When she ran for the New Jersey state assembly in 1969, she became one of only two women in the 80-person body. And since she was the pipe-smoking grandmother of eight with the Katharine Hepburn voice, she was… noticeable.
In 1974, Fenwick decided to try for a newly available seat in the House of Representatives. Another Republican, Tom Kean, wanted it, too. Both were moderate-to-liberal members of their party, and there was a general assumption that Fenwick, who was 64, would defer to Kean, who was 39 and had been a leader in the state legislature. Fenwick said later that she might have complied but “there was something about that expectation that got under my skin.” She stuck it out and won the primary by 76 votes. During the race, her driver-assistant, a recent college graduate, was floored by Fenwick’s “enormous bundle of energy.… She worked me to death, I’ll tell you that.… It was fifteen-to eighteen-hour days normally, particularly as fall rolled around.” In the final election, voters couldn’t help noticing that during debates, she easily outlasted her much-younger opponent. “I’d be glad to stay and talk as late as you like,” she wickedly told the audience as the Democrat appeared ready to topple. She won and became a freshman in Congress at 64. Her election was described as a “geriatric triumph.”
We’ll refrain from revisiting the fact that a 64-year-old man elected to the House of Representatives would have been regarded as unremarkable. Fenwick became a famous figure in the 1970s—mainly because of her accomplishments but also in part because so many people believed she was Doonesbury’s Lacey Davenport. When both Lacey and Millicent were appointed to the House Committee on Ethics, Reckford said, “Grandma had to acknowledge there was a connection.” And she did proudly display one of the original cartoon panels in her bathroom. It featured a campaign ad for Lacey with the slogan “Davenport. As indispensable as sensible shoes.”
In the real world, Fenwick carried around a red bag full of constituent letters to which she’d respond—with her own handwritten missives—while sitting at her desk in the House during debates and speeches that almost no one else ever stayed around for. “She said she could learn a lot from just listening. She thought that was her job,” her grandson recalled. Early on, Fenwick found the idea of staff so intrusive that when constituents would call, she’d pick up the phone herself and say, “They are too busy. Talk to me.” She had an impressive attendance record—at one point in her House career it was estimated she was present for 99 percent of the votes. In 1975, she was on the cover of Parade, which called her “the Republican version of Eleanor Roosevelt,” though “the taut elegance of her looks and assertiveness of her manner are more reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn.”
While her language was elegant (“I think that’s something you will come to regret saying”), Fenwick was fearless when standing up to even the most powerful members of Congress. She had a long-running feud with Wayne Hays, the irascible chairman of the House Administration committee. Hays had power over all the day-to-day operations of Congress—like elevators. When one elevator operator offended him, he had the operators’ seats removed so they had to work standing all day. “That was the sort of petty thinking she hated,” Reckford said. “She’d confront him and get threatened. He said he’d take away all her staff.”
On her 65th birthday, Fenwick went on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam and Cambodia with a congressional delegation that included another nationally famous woman from the House: Bella Abzug, the outspoken New York Democrat who was 10 years her junior. “I always like style, and she has style,” Abzug once said of Fenwick. “We both have a sense of ourselves. We’re both women of the world.” At one point the two went on a long side trip to investigate allegations about wrongful imprisonment in Vietnam. Fenwick thought the claims were unfounded. Abzug disagreed. They got into an intense fight during which Fenwick said, “Listen here, Bella Abzug, I can scream just as loudly as you and I’ve got just as bad a temper.” When the encounter ended, Abzug nudged Fenwick and said, “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
Fenwick was one of just 19 women in the House when she came to Congress. It was a small but formidable crew. There was, for instance, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, of Brooklyn, who in 1972 had become the first black politician to run for president on a major party ticket. Her campaign was hopelessly underfunded, and resented by some of her male colleagues, who seemed to feel a black man deserved to be first. (Chisholm later said she felt “far more discrimination being a woman than being black.”) Despite it all, she did receive 152 first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention.
There was also, of course, Bella Abzug. And Barbara Jordan and Elizabeth Holtzman, both of Watergate investigation fame, and Margaret Heckler, of Massachusetts, who’d be a leader in organizing a congresswomen’s caucus to fight for equal rights legislation. Arriving two congresses after Fenwick was Geraldine Ferraro, who would go on to become the first woman nominated for vice president by a major U.S. party. Most of the women were in their 40s or early 50s, which was pretty youthful by congressional standards. “Old” was a relative adjective when it came to Congress. In 1975, reformist “Young Turks” overturned the seniority system and tossed out 81-year-old Wright Patman as a committee chair in favor of 62-year-old Henry Reuss, who was regarded as a veritable boy wonder.
Fenwick never got a chance to work with Margaret Chase Smith, who had been among the most influential Republicans in a Senate dominated by Democrats and had continued to irritate Republican leaders with her independence. Smith opposed President Richard Nixon’s attempt to nominate Clement Haynsworth and then G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court—both men had abysmal records when it came to civil rights. But she was, and always had been, a fiscal conservative and a hawk on foreign affairs and the military. As the Vietnam War became less and less popular, Smith’s pro-war stance enamored fewer and fewer of her constituents. She was also suffering from very public ailments—arthritis forced her to use a cane and ride through the Capitol in an electric cart. Hip replacement surgery put her out of commission for four months, causing her to miss roll-call votes for the first time in thirteen years. Then Bill Lewis, her companion, suffered a heart attack. Smith’s concern overwhelmed any of the old demands for public discretion. “Bill needs me and I need him,” she told a reporter when she chose to miss more votes in order to stay with Lewis at the hospital. When the reporter asked her if she was speaking on the record, Smith said, “I don’t care. Nothing matters if Bill doesn’t live.” Lewis did recover, and her remark triggered a front-page story in the Sunday Maine Times on the senator and her aide’s “special relationship,” which the paper called “one of the greatest love stories on Capitol Hill.”
When Smith, 74, ran for reelection in 1972 against a 48-year-old Democrat, Rep. William Hathaway, she had to battle rumors about her health, questions about her reliance on Lewis, voters’ exhaustion with the war she still supported, and charges that she had, after all these years in Washington, lost touch with her constituents. “In polite society one does not publicly discuss a lady’s age,” wrote a congressional observer in the New York Times. “When the lady happens to be United States Senator, however, and her age is 74… the subject becomes a common topic of political discourse.” As so often happens in these sagas, the new guy won. While Smith remained in a sort of seclusion, Lewis read her brief concession speech, congratulating Hathaway and thanking her supporters. Then Smith sadly returned to finish her term in Washington. Even the women, she felt, had deserted her. The president of the Maine chapter of NOW decried Smith’s support of the war and said the senator “represents everything women in the liberation movement want to eliminate.” Smith, wounded, never forgot the attack. “Here I was,” she said in an interview nearly 20 years later, “a woman with this background and this record—I cosponsored ERA throughout my Senate tenure, stopped [Senate Republican leader] Everett Dirksen from knocking the word ‘sex’ out of the Civil Rights bill, got women full regular status in the Armed Services, and championed many women causes in Congress—and they said I didn’t do anything.”
In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment finally got its day in Congress. Alice Paul, lifelong soldier for the cause, was 87 and on the other side of the generation gap she’d help create in the suffrage era. During the Vietnam anti-war protests, a group of female college students decided that, since they lacked draft cards to burn, they’d burn their voter registration cards. They called Paul and asked her to join in. Paul, who had undergone arrest, hunger strikes, and force-feedings to get the right to vote, wasn’t enthusiastic. But the ERA—a simple constitutional assertion that both genders had the same rights—was something almost everyone could rally around. After last-minute obstacles thrown up by a few very determined leaders, it sailed through the House, 354–24. When it passed the Senate, 84–8, some of the male senators gave their seats to House colleagues who had been heroines in the struggle, so people like Martha Griffiths and Bella Abzug could be there on the floor for the big moment.
A moment like that seemed to call for a celebration. At least sort of. One of Paul’s colleagues recalled that “a few people came over and we had tea.” Then everyone went right back to the phones, calling to lobby the state legislatures. Thirty-eight states had to ratify the ERA to make it part of the Constitution, and eight legislatures instantly approved it by unanimous votes. Two dozen more followed quickly, and it seemed as if victory was just around the corner. But then ratification started slowing down. In 1978, as the deadline approached, the ERA was three states short of victory. Congress extended the deadline but to no avail.
There were all sorts of reasons for the backlash—most notably the newly muscular politics of the social right. But there was also a genuine fear and anger on the part of traditional housewives, whose role had been dismissed by many of the younger activists. For generations full-time homemakers had been celebrated—sometimes in the smarmiest terms possible—as the heart of the family and the molders of the future. Now they were the object of pity, women who had missed out on the chance to have careers. Nobody wanted to be thought of as “tired, preoccupied domestic servants beset by incomprehensible troubles.” But that was the sort of language young feminists used frequently—when they weren’t comparing housewives to slaves or prostitutes.
And there was something worse than the lack of respect. People were losing confidence in the idea of marriage for life. The 1970s was the decade when divorce started booming. More than a million couples split up every year, and the whole country became aware that statistically speaking, every new union had a one-in-two chance of not making it to the finish line. In 1983, the federal government would note that the number of divorces had set a record for the eighteenth straight year and was three times as high as it had been in 1962.
Getting divorced was becoming much easier, to the relief of many people of both sexes. But men were still the major breadwinners in most families, and many older women were haunted by the image of the devoted wife being abandoned by a husband looking for a younger model. Phyllis Schlafly, the leading force behind the anti-ERA movement, frequently pointed out that the famous baby-care expert Dr. Benjamin Spock—who made headlines when he announced he was eliminating all sexist language from his child-rearing books—“walked out on his faithful wife, Jane, to whom he had been married for forty-eight years, and took up with a younger woman: Dr. Spock was truly ‘liberated’ from traditional restraints.” On the other side of the political divide, Millicent Fenwick’s archenemy Rep. Wayne Hays divorced his wife of twenty-five years to marry a secretary who worked in his Ohio home office. The Hays story became even more of a cautionary tale about unreliable men when Elizabeth Ray, a twenty-seven-year-old clerk on his House committee, got jealous and told reporters she was being paid a healthy salary simply to be Hays’s Washington mistress. (“I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone.”) The great power broker was finished. And on the day Hays fell, as her grandson recalled, Fenwick “acted immediately to get the seats back in for those elevator operators.”
The fear of losing a husband to a younger woman certainly wasn’t new—remember all those middle-aged wives in the 1920s fretting about predatory flappers. But the idea of the isolated, older woman left on her own after a lifetime of keeping house had a particular resonance now that a younger generation was being trained to expect that women would have careers and the ability to bring home some money of their own. The women who had gotten married under the old rules were facing divorce when the idea of alimony was becoming increasingly unpopular. It had never really existed for most people—only about 14 percent of wives whose marriages broke up were awarded any kind of spousal support, and less than half of those actually got the payments their husbands were supposed to provide. But at least society believed, in theory, that they deserved compensation for their years of family service. Now judges felt even freer to demand that ex-wives—especially ex-wives whose children were grown—be able to take care of themselves.
For most of the older generation, the idea of life without a husband and his financial support was terrifying. “We’re a minority you may not have thought much about,” 55-year-old Laurie Shields told the Chicago Tribune. “But our plight is very real, especially those of us recently divorced or widowed. People our age were raised to believe marriage meant security.… The assumption, unfortunately, is unwarranted.” Divorce, of course, wasn’t the only cause of displacement in the 1970s. More than half of women 65 and over were widows. Combined with the older women who were divorced or had always been single, that left two-thirds more or less on their own. And there weren’t many services available if they needed help. “If a town had a lunch program for the elderly, that was considered a big deal,” recalled Ron Wyden, who was then a young Oregon lawyer.
It was a problem waiting to be noticed—and in order for that to happen in America, it was necessary for someone to give the problem a media-friendly name. That happened in the early 1970s, when Tish Sommers, an organizer for NOW, was carrying a chicken casserole out to the porch where her housemates—a commune of older women activists—were ready for dinner. “How about ‘displaced homemaker’?” she asked her friends. And from there, a movement was born.
Sommers was a displaced homemaker herself, although with a more adventurous history than the norm. She’d been a dancer and community organizer, and during World War II, when she failed a test to become a defense factory worker due to poor hand-eye coordination, she started a day-care center for the mothers who had made the grade and joined the assembly line. She’d once had an affair with a married man 20 years older—it was, she’d later tell a biographer ruefully, “a typical example of an older man picking up a younger woman, going off trying to rejuvenate.” She married, divorced, and then married a man 10 years her junior. By the time she hit middle age, she was living a relatively traditional life—wife of a professor at the University of Washington, Cub Scout den mother. Then the 1960s kicked in, and Sommers’s husband began attending encounter groups and seeking the ever-elusive “inner self.” He eventually told Tish that while he “thought I was a very good person, he didn’t love me.” She was crushed. They divorced.
Sommers was in her 50s. She had money, thanks to a family inheritance, but she was experiencing all the disorienting feelings that come with being suddenly single at a later age. Always a NOW activist, Sommers started a special task force that eventually grew into the Older Women’s League. Besides being one of the great acronyms of the era, OWL had the advantage of Sommers’s financial support, which funded training-counseling centers for the first wave of newly single women who now knew they were displaced housewives.
Meanwhile, the issue caught on with the media. In 1976, Ladies’ Home Journal published “The Discarding of Mrs. Hill,” the story of a 53-year-old lifetime homemaker who lost her husband to stomach cancer. Since he had died before retirement, his wife got no pension, and she was stunned to discover that she was too young to be eligible for Social Security. The family savings had been depleted by Mr. Hill’s illness, and when his wife tried to find a job, employers were unenthusiastic about a middle-aged applicant with no prior experience. Her grown daughters sent her money—not enough to help much, yet enough to make her feel guilty. It was a story guaranteed to unnerve any reader who was counting on living out her life with a husband’s support. When the magazine left Mrs. Hill, she had a part-time job at a nursing home and was about to lose her house.
Ideas about what to do were springing up everywhere. The Gray Panthers, like OWL, was sparked by the frustration of a political activist facing old age. Maggie Kuhn had worked for the Presbyterian Church, overseeing social welfare programs. But even the church had mandatory retirement, and when Kuhn turned 65, she was out of a job, and starting a new movement of her own. The fact that her new group’s name was a play on the Black Panthers was a pretty good hint that it was not going to be middle-of-the-road. The Panthers were intergenerational and all-purpose, fighting for nuclear disarmament as well as displaced-homemaker legislation; they opposed both federal cuts in student loans and compulsory retirement. They also pushed for smaller, more immediate issues—in New York, the Panthers successfully pressured the city’s Transit Authority to acquire buses that could “kneel” for the elderly and other riders who had trouble negotiating the first 16-inch step. Age, Kuhn argued, was “a great universalizing force”—everybody, whatever race or gender, was growing older every day.
“Right out of the box, she began to push this message of age and youth in action together,” said Ron Wyden, who had started a senior-citizen legal-aid program in Portland. “Listening to her, you’d get intoxicated with the sense of citizen power. I couldn’t stop smiling. I thought—this is really what community organizing is all about.” It was through the Panthers, Wyden said, that he decided health care was “far and away the most important issue” to tackle. And Wyden was a very useful person to influence since he’d eventually go into politics, be elected to the U.S. Senate, and become the top-ranking Democrat on the committee that handled issues like taxes, Medicare, and Medicaid. “I adored Maggie,” he recalled.
While older women were worrying about a lonely, impoverished old age, younger women were getting a pretty clear message that, for them, times had changed. The American economy, so strong since World War II, suddenly faltered. Good-paying union jobs in manufacturing began to disappear. American families were going to find it harder and harder to maintain a middle-class standard of living on one salary. Girls in high school and college understood that when they went out into the world and married, they’d probably still be expected to help bring in income. For the first time more than half of adult American women were working outside the home for pay. It was a new middle-class model. Girls went to college to find a career, and then maybe a husband. Boys dreamed of a future wife who would be attractive, sympathetic—and a good earner. Inevitably, the country lost all interest in groups that tried to make nonworking wives feel more connected to the outside world. In 1974, the Los Angeles Times reported a “poignant indication of the state of things: Norwalk Women’s Clubhouse was purchased by Weight Watchers Inc., that group apparently being larger, stronger, richer and with a more secure future than the once-dominant women’s clubs.”
In 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The patrons and their supporters protested, and the confrontation became known as the Stonewall riots—America’s introduction to the gay rights movement. Organization quickly followed. At an early meeting of the Gay Liberation Front, among the attendees were Kay Lahusen and her partner, Barbara Gittings. They were both in their late 30s, and they had been activists for more than a decade—Gittings had been one of the founders of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a national organization for lesbians, in the 1950s. But they were made to feel decidedly unwelcome by the younger people, who called them “dinosaurs.”
It shouldn’t have been surprising that an idealistic movement for social change was ridden by ageism. After all, the student left had been born only a few years earlier, vowing to never trust anyone over 30. “I came out in 1976, at the age of forty-five, in Venice, California,” recalled Tita Caldwell. “It was a wonderful, exciting time to be a lesbian feminist. But for me there was a problem. Almost every woman was at least 10 years younger than I was.” Caldwell wound up feeling “discouraged and invisible.” But she turned things around, joining Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC), a support and social activism group that is still going strong in the twenty-first century. Lahusen, equally undeterred, bought two stuffed dinosaurs, which she carried around to gay rights meetings. “We were dinosaurs in a way,” she said, “but we were good dinosaurs.”
Older gay women hit a trifecta on the discrimination front. They had to battle all the normal problems of trying to find good-paying jobs because they were women, but they had been frozen out of the early women’s liberation movement by people like Betty Friedan because they were gay. Then their time seemed to have come—the gay community was coming out and standing proud. But most of the early rebels were young and irritated at having to deal with anyone who reminded them of their parents.
A great many older lesbians had spent their lives concealing their sexual identity, and the new gay movement was too youth-centric to offer them much support. Some found a home in groups like OLOC or SAGE, which was started to provide services to gays and lesbians who had been isolated by age. Chris Almvig, one of the co-founders, recalled her first client, Audrey, who was homebound and alone. She had been getting a lot of help from her neighbors, who had no idea she was gay. And Audrey was afraid to tell them. Almvig discovered that when Audrey’s neighbors came over to bring her groceries, “she turned the portrait of her lifelong partner who had passed away face down on the piano so that they couldn’t see it. When we came to visit she was able to talk with us about her. This was of monumental importance to the heart of the work that we were learning how to do—to cater to the needs of our LGBT elders that we were only just recognizing.”
In March of 1974, Ms. magazine threw Gloria Steinem what she recalled as “an omelet party at some restaurant in the neighborhood” for her 40th birthday. It produced what the endlessly quoted Steinem later called “my most quoted line.” Another guest, a reporter, politely told her that she didn’t look 40. “And I said, just off the top of my head, ‘This is what 40 looks like—we’ve been lying for so long, who would know?’”
While almost nobody else really looked like Gloria Steinem did at 40, she was making some serious points. Women’s lives had changed in so many ways. They certainly didn’t think their chances of marriage and a family had evaporated at 30, and many expected to be hard at work on careers that lasted into their 50s or 60s. But hitting your 40s was still frequently a disquieting marker. “We’ve been ignored so long that I got the impression that many women stopped being women at 45,” said Faire Edwards, a participant in the White House Mini-Conference on Older Women. (If older women were going to get a government conference, it was still going to be a mini.) “What do we do, turn into pumpkins maybe?” Gail Sheehy, who in 1976 published her mega bestseller Passages, about the stages of adult life, described 35 to 45 as the passage to—well, middle age. Sheehy told her readers it could be a great period for a woman, when the kids were grown and “she is released to soar into realms undared on wings untested.” Yet Sheehy, who was still in her 30s at the time, wasn’t ready to imagine what the entire trip would look like. The book stopped exploring the stages of life at 50.
Less cheery essayists were more explicit about the downside of moving past 40. Susan Sontag wrote a diatribe against “The Double Standard of Aging” that echoed—in a more political and intellectual way—all the complaints the previous generation had made about the different way society regarded older men and older women. “Women become sexually ineligible much earlier than men do,” she declared. “A man, even an ugly man, can remain eligible well into old age. He is an acceptable mate for a young, attractive woman. Women, even good-looking women, become ineligible (except as partners of very old men) at a much younger age.” She blamed capitalism for the Western world’s youth worship. People with less elevated outlooks made the same complaint. Participants in the mini-conference opined that while gray hair on a man seemed to connote sexiness and power, “a woman with gray hair is perceived as sitting by the fireplace rocking, with a white cap on her head.” Things weren’t quite that bad. If gray hair made women look like candidates for a rocking chair, the obvious solution was not to have any. There was certainly no longer shame in washing it away—about 33 million women were using hair color in the 1970s.
Despite the long-held biases against such unions, more women were beginning to take younger husbands. Conventional wisdom still held that the man was supposed to be the senior partner, but 16 percent of the marriages in 1970 involved older women with younger men, and the proportion went up to 22 percent by the end of the decade. “They’re finding, like men, that they can be more attractive in maturity than they were in the awkwardness of youth, more adept at romance, more skillful sexually, more stimulating socially,” announced an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled “Older Women, Younger Men—Why Not?” The article also pointed out that there were 2,000 American women over 55 married to men under 25 and theorized that there were probably more “if women admitted their real age to the census taker.” If the Saturday Evening Post—the magazine that made Norman Rockwell a household name—felt the idea was sensible, that did suggest a rather expansive consensus. “The only time the mature woman is ‘over the hill’ is when she’s heading for the next tee on the golf course,” the Post essayist announced stoutly. Singer Dinah Shore, who was in her mid-50s, embarked on a long-running relationship with actor Burt Reynolds, who was 20 years younger. The affair gave a huge boost to Shore’s career, and didn’t seem to hurt Reynolds’s, either.
If the world was taking a somewhat more welcoming view of older women, there were good reasons. The nation had been obsessed with youth in the 1960s, in part because the first wave of the humongous baby-boom generation was hitting its 20s. By the mid-1970s, the first boomers were pushing 30 and perhaps beginning to take a whole new look at what it meant to be… non-young.
The world’s vision of aging women had always been based, in large part, on maternity. You reproduced until menopause; then when the last child was grown you were probably in your 60s and elderly. Middle age became a semiofficial stage of life when families got smaller, and mothers discovered that their child-rearing was over when they were in their early 40s. But by the 1970s, the timetable was more or less retired: women were delaying pregnancy to work on their careers, then beginning motherhood at a point when earlier they might have been deemed to be on the cusp of old age. Everything was shifting in the direction of more choices and fewer restrictions based on your date of birth.
That was good news. So was the fact that women whose children were grown frequently had careers of their own to keep them busy. So was the fact that older Americans were living longer. You know there’s a catch coming, right? The media discovered a “sandwich generation” of women who had to care for both their own youngsters and elderly parents. And while almost nobody specifically blamed either the babies or the older people for creating the problem, the results could seem pretty grim. “Never before has any group had to carry the burden of both their parents and their children at the same time for so long a time,” wrote an essayist in a 1977 Los Angeles Times piece called “New Middle-Age Crisis: Being a Mother to Your Parents.” A couple with the pseudonyms of Carolyn and Walter Johnson had finished raising two children and Walter was at the peak of his law career when Carolyn’s 87-year-old mother got sick and moved in with them. A few months later, their elder daughter got divorced and came home with her 3-year-old. “Soon Carolyn’s mother and daughter were arguing about how to discipline the 3-year-old,” the paper reported. “Walter Johnson worked longer and longer hours to avoid the nasty scenes at home. Carolyn found herself caught in the middle—a phrase repeated often by those in similar situations.” It was, University of California professor James Peterson commented, a new phenomenon—at least in terms of size and scope. And “the middle generation is carrying the load.”
The children who preferred to avoid the load were looking more and more to nursing and retirement homes when their parents needed new living accommodations. There were many types, from housing developments with extra services for health care and entertainment to what were basically hospitals for old people. Even the more approachable models gave many women nightmares. “If we don’t do something now, when we are older they will have us playing bingo,” warned an OWL member at a 1977 meeting in West Los Angeles. “They are patronizing with seniors. They treat them like children. They sit them down and give them coffee and cake.” Another member nodded. “What’s worse are the arts and crafts.”
One of the early OWL solutions was communes—the idea of older single women getting together, pooling their money, and establishing group housing just the way the 20-somethings did. Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, didn’t like the idea of segregating seniors, and she was living at 75 with a “family of choice” in Philadelphia that included seven younger men and women, ages 21 to 39, along with six cats, a poodle mix, and a tank of tropical fish. One of the younger residents admitted, “At first I was a little bit hesitant about moving in with an older woman. I have gentlemen friends, and I worried what Maggie might think about my having them over. When I mentioned it to her, she said, ‘It’s all right with me. Do you mind if I have them over, too?’”
In her autobiography, Kuhn wrote that denying sexuality in old age “is to deny life itself,” and described some of her own affairs, including one with a university student 50 years younger. Ron Wyden had friends who lived in Panther communes—which Kuhn liked to refer to as “shared housing”—and remembers their enthusiastic descriptions of life with housemates ranging from 70 years to 15 months. And the fact that Kuhn was sleeping with some of the younger residents, Wyden said, “was certainly a topic of discussion.”
But in most of America, the idea of communes never took off. Nursing homes started booming. Almost nobody went to them enthusiastically, but older women, schooled in the dark feature stories about grandmother-in-the-bedroom, had stopped expecting they would wind up living with their offspring. In middle age, they were already telling each other they didn’t want to be “a burden.” And there was more money to pay for their keep—along with Medicare in 1965, Congress had authorized Medicaid to pay for the health care of low-income Americans, and a large chunk of that spending went to nursing homes. The vast majority of nursing home residents were elderly women, almost all widows.
By the 1970s there were 23,000 nursing homes in the country, and there was also, for the first time, a sense of alarm about what happened to the people who wound up living in them. It spawned at least 50 major newspaper investigations and multiple probes by congressional committees. They discovered horror stories, like a Senate report of “a woman suffering from a fever of 106… found by a member of her family lashed to a chair.” A Chicago Tribune investigation uncovered “[a] woman left so little tended that maggots, apparently anticipating another death, already had infested her body.”
Far more common than those spectacular stories of neglect and abuse were patterns in which nursing home residents were drugged into compliance. One Senate subcommittee was particularly disturbed about the way patients were given tranquilizers “to keep them quiet and to make them easier to take care of.” Another subcommittee reported that tranquilizers represented nearly 40 percent of medication administered in nursing homes.
Drugs were not just an issue for nursing homes. While national attention was directed at drug use by rebellious youth, older, better-off, play-by-the-rules Americans were engaged in a serious romance with psychotropic drugs—particularly tranquilizers. An extensive four-year national study conducted in the 1960s found that tranquilizer use had gone from about 7 percent of the population in the mid-1950s to 26 percent a decade later. Except for among very young adults, tranquilizers were much more popular than stimulants. (“The younger respondents apparently want to wake up rather than go to sleep,” mused the study’s author.) And women were far more likely to use them than men. By the ’70s, one in five American women were taking tranquilizers, and an estimated one to two million women were addicted to them.
America had been enamored of tranquilizers since the 1950s, when a scientist named Frank Berger was testing a new muscle relaxant on monkeys and noticed that the animals—which had been so vicious lab workers had to wear face guards and thick gloves when dealing with them—suddenly became downright mellow. (“Where they wouldn’t previously eat in the presence of human beings, they now gently took grapes from your bare hand.”) The drug was repurposed as a sedative for humans. Its popularity was partly thanks to a rebranding: a colleague told Berger that the world didn’t really need new sedatives—“What the world really needs is a tranquilizer. The world needs tranquility. Why don’t you call it a tranquilizer? You will sell ten times more.” The newly named tranquilizer, called Miltown, came on the market the day after Mother’s Day in 1955 and quickly became a favorite in Hollywood, where entertainers spread the word to the public. The popular television comedian Milton Berle told his fans he was “thinking of changing my name to Miltown Berle.” By the end of the decade, Miltown was popular across the country, and although the presumption had been that hardworking men would be the natural market, women picked up on the idea fast. A 1957 time capsule buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was supposed to show the future what life was like for typical Americans included a woman’s purse, containing bobby pins, gum, cigarettes, a compact—and a bottle of tranquilizers.
By the end of the ’60s roughly two-thirds of tranquilizer users were women. Betty Friedan thought they were a symptom of the “problem that has no name” and the horrors of full-time homemaking: “You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there’s no point in going on another day like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it’s pointless.” Feminists weren’t the only people focusing on the problem. The Rolling Stones had sung snidely about “Mother’s Little Helper.” (“What a drag it is getting old.”) The nation was certainly being urged to worry—newspapers and magazines in the early 1970s were full of headlines like “Housewife Is a Junkie.” Physicians complained at a Senate hearing that drug marketers were recycling the rhetoric of the women’s liberation movement—one such ad recommended Ritalin “for environmental depression… engendered by such problems as the constant assault of noise… ecologic pollution and social unrest.” An ad for a tranquilizer-antidepressant showed a housewife in an apron, staring unhappily at a huge male foot. “FAILURE… She had a hypercritical father in her formative years. Her husband follows in the same pattern,” said the copy. “[T]hey have whittled away at her self-confidence considerably—which causes anxiety and depression.”
By the 1970s, the Miltown generation of wives and mothers was moving on past child-rearing and perhaps wondering whether middle age would involve more or less need for tranquilizing. One of them was Betty Ford, a congressman’s wife the country would come to know very well.
Before we get to Ford’s troubles with drugs and alcohol, let’s start this story at the beginning. Richard Nixon had barely cruised to reelection in 1972 before his administration was engulfed in what we would come to call the Watergate crisis. It was an action-packed couple of years. First, Vice President Spiro Agnew had to step down after he was implicated in a tax-evasion, money-laundering scandal. Congress picked Gerald Ford, the Republican minority leader of the House, to succeed Agnew. Then Nixon was forced to resign and Ford became the only American president to reach office without ever having run in a national election.
Ford had been president just a few weeks when his wife, Betty, underwent a mastectomy. It had started out as a fairly simple case—she’d been having a routine exam when the doctor discovered a lump. “When they told me I had to be operated on,” Betty recalled later, “I protested and said I had a schedule to keep and couldn’t possibly take time out.” She went back to her schedule, hosted a tea for Lady Bird Johnson, and then entered the hospital the next day. Surgeons removed the nodule, discovered it was malignant, and then brought her back into the operating room for removal of her breast. Tests showed the malignancy didn’t seem to have spread, and the First Lady returned to her social obligations. There was no recurrence.
Her openness about what had happened was, by the standards of the day, stunning. The public knew about the mastectomy before she went home. And this was a time when almost nobody talked about having cancer, and certainly not breast cancer. The general presumption was that cancer was a death sentence, and one so grisly it should not be shared, period. “Some people didn’t even tell their own children,” said Betty Rollin, the author of a breakthrough memoir, First, You Cry, about her experience with breast cancer. Ford’s story, with its good-news ending, changed the conversation entirely. Women flooded into clinics for mammograms and began self-examining. One of them was Happy Rockefeller, the wife of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller—Ford, having moved up from vice president, appointed Rockefeller to take his old job. Happy found a small lump, and a biopsy showed the Second Lady, too, had a malignant growth. What followed was a story similar to Betty’s—mastectomy and a determination that the cancer had not begun to spread. “We’re very grateful to Betty Ford for her example to all of us,” the vice president told reporters.
The double White House saga stunned the nation. Breast cancer was a major cause of fatality in middle-aged women—deadliest for women in their early 40s. Mammograms were just being introduced, and very few women performed self-examinations—the feeling was that if cancer was fatal, there was no point in trying to find out if you had it. Ford became the national model for a new way of thinking, and she was happy to be a symbol for early detection and treatment. At one point she made her rationale political: “There had been so much cover-up during Watergate that we wanted to be sure there would be no cover-up in the Ford administration.” But in general, she simply expressed gratitude that she could be useful: “I’m sure I’ve saved at least one person—maybe more.” She was definitely a help. In part because detections were coming earlier, breast cancer survival rates improved, particularly for older women.
Ford was not the first famous woman to tell her breast cancer story. In 1972, Shirley Temple Black, the former child superstar who had served as a United Nations representative during the Nixon administration, discovered a lump that also turned out to be cancerous. Like Ford, Black was extremely open with her story—she held two press conferences to discuss it. Unlike Ford, she did not give her surgeons the go-ahead to remove her breast if a malignancy was discovered. “The doctor will make the incision, I’ll make the decision,” Black said. She wound up having a modified procedure.
In the 1970s, the idea of a patient making such a judgment herself was unheard of. As Ford’s daughter Susan observed, when the doctors took you in to check a lump for malignancy, you woke up and “either had a Band-Aid or no breast.” But some rebellion was blooming. In 1972, the New York Times profiled Rosamond Campion, who had refused to sign the papers that would allow surgeons to remove her breast if they found evidence of malignancy. Her surgeon, Campion said, warned her she’d be “dead in three weeks.” But when cancer was indeed discovered, Campion flew to Cleveland, where the Cleveland Clinic doctors performed what the Times called “a highly controversial operation” that left her breast intact. “There is a small underground of hospitals and surgeons who are willing to do a local excision,” reported Campion, who wrote a book about her experience. At the time, she seemed able to tick them all off on one hand (“one in Manhattan—and one in Litchfield, Minn.”).
Meanwhile, Betty Ford was trying hard to make people think of breast cancer surgery as a normal part of health care. She told the press that she’d heard women say they’d rather lose an arm than a breast—“and I can’t imagine such talk. It’s so stupid.” It’s hard to appreciate now what a breakthrough it was that this was becoming part of the national conversation. Nancy Brinker, who founded the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, said the media was originally so unnerved by any mention of the word “breast” that her staff had to describe the disease to the press as “female cancer.”
Ford had an unusual background for a presidential wife—she was a former dancer who had been married before. When she and Jerry Ford fell in love, the ambitious young politician kept the news of their engagement secret from his conservative constituents until he won a difficult congressional primary. After the wedding finally occurred, they had four children in quick succession. Jerry was moving steadily up the Republican ranks, often on the road, appearing at campaign rallies or fund-raisers. Betty, who was left taking care of the children, was tortured by a pinched nerve in her neck—it was the beginning of a long list of ailments that would afflict her for the rest of her life. Eventually—but quietly—she suffered a nervous breakdown and began seeing a psychiatrist.
When Jerry Ford became president, the media, sensing the public’s desperate need for some normalcy in Washington, portrayed the new First Family as extremely midwestern, homey, and uncomplicated. But Betty was quietly in treatment for the pinched nerve and a growing arthritis problem, becoming increasingly addicted to painkillers and suffering from the alcoholism she had developed over those long years of solitude while her husband pursued his career. The public, who had no idea, loved her. Her breast cancer emergency came just after Ford had pardoned the much-loathed Richard Nixon, and the nation’s attitude toward the First Family swung from outrage back to sympathy.
She was not a woman to be overly discreet about serious subjects, and cancer was hardly the end of her story. In 1975, she told a TV interviewer that she would not necessarily be surprised if her daughter, then 18, told her she was having an affair. “You just cost me 10 million votes—no, you just cost me 20 million votes,” her husband joked as the White House was deluged with 28,000 letters, mainly critical. It was emblematic both of Betty’s distance from social conservatives in the Republican Party and of America’s move to the second stage of the sexual revolution—when older, average people who had no plans for a torrid affair themselves became inured to the idea that a lot of extramarital intercourse was going on. In 1969, 68 percent of Americans said they were opposed to sex before marriage. By 1973, the majority felt it was okay. “No woman can be her glowing best without being in love,” decreed a writer for Harper’s Bazaar, counseling older women on how to turn their lives around. “An affair? If you have a going marriage… well.… Despite recent writings, I’m not a bit sure that extra-marital carryings-on are right for everyone.” The idea that a writer in a mainstream fashion magazine would suggest that even some married women might find their lives improved by extramarital sex was still—pretty new.
Betty Ford never endorsed affairs—beyond that one fabled remark about her daughter, she just made it clear she enjoyed sex with Jerry. When she told a Washington columnist that nearly the only question she had not been asked was how often she slept with her husband, the columnist asked, “Well, how often do you?”
“As often as possible!” she replied.
She was a fun First Lady. On a trip to China in 1975 Betty took off her shoes and danced with the children at a school she was visiting. She pushed her unsuspecting and fully clothed husband into a swimming pool while a photographer was recording a day in his life. When Susan and a friend were having a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom, she put on a sheet, walked in, and terrified the girls by reciting the Gettysburg Address.
Betty was hugely popular when her husband ran for a full term in 1976. But Jerry was less so, and Jimmy Carter won the election. The president had lost his voice during the final hours of campaigning, so it was his wife who read the concession announcement. Post-election Jerry Ford was once again on the road, giving speeches, fund-raising for his party, and playing in golf tournaments. The children were off on their own, and Betty was alone—not a widow or divorcée but a kind of displaced housewife all the same. She was supposed to be writing her memoirs, but her long-term alcohol and prescription-drug use, mixed with loneliness and a loss of her sense of mission, turned her into what Betty herself called a “dopey pill-pusher, sitting around nodding.” Susan organized a family intervention. Just after her 60th birthday, Betty checked into an alcohol and drug treatment program at Long Beach Naval Hospital.
She was less enthusiastic about making her drug and alcohol use public than she had been about breast cancer, but she nonetheless was frank about her situation. And once again, Ford’s candor was transformative. Women who would never before have discussed such a problem picked up the phone. “The reverberations from her latest bombshell already are being felt in alcoholism treatment centers,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “A spot check of such centers in the Chicago area shows a noticeable increase in the number of women seeking help for drinking problems as well as an increase in the number of husbands and children referring their wives and mothers for treatment.” A representative of the South Suburban Council on Alcoholism told the paper, “Some of the women have told us that ‘If Betty Ford can do it so can I.’”
Experts said the number of women alcoholics was about equal to the number of men. But their problem was less well known and carried a greater stigma. Ford’s candor was immeasurably helpful. She was also very conscious of the fact that women alcoholics were less likely to get treatment than their male counterparts, and she began a fund-raising crusade to create a facility with space divided equally between the sexes. In 1982, the Betty Ford Center was opened, and a few years later she was honored for her work by the National Association of Alcoholism Treatment Programs. “Awards are often given to people who are old and decrepit because you don’t think they’ll be around much longer,” the 67-year-old Ford told the audience. “Well, if that’s your idea, it’s premature because I don’t plan to retire—and I plan to be around for quite a while.” She was right—she lived to be 93.
Part of Ford’s problem had stemmed from the pain of her arthritis. It was the bane of so many otherwise healthy older women and so seemingly intractable that women’s magazines, in desperate search of some good news, sometimes just fell back on positive thinking. One writer described a friend so crippled by arthritis she “walked with difficulty, could barely wiggle her gnarled fingers.” Then one day she seemed… transformed. Even her fingers looked straight. The author claimed that when she inquired about what had happened, her friend simply said: “I gave up being sick and started playing a lot of golf.” It was Beautiful Thoughts all over again. Lydia Maria Child would have approved—although she’d have wanted a few good deeds thrown into the mix.
For those who preferred medical intervention, there was hip replacement therapy, but it had always been a terrible ordeal with mixed results. Margaret Chase Smith tried that method in 1968, and the operation—followed by months of hospital rehabilitation sessions—left her exhausted and contemplating retirement. But things were about to change. In 1970, Smith’s other hip was giving her pain, and she had a second replacement surgery. The technique had changed so much in two years that Smith was back in full swing in only a matter of weeks.
In the 1970s, hip replacement became one of the fastest-growing fields in surgery. There would be between 20,000 and 25,000 performed in 1972—up from fewer than 5,000 in 1970. Of course, it was far from an overall arthritis cure, but for some victims, it seemed almost magic. In fact, the media reported on it with the same sense of wonder it had used in days of yore to describe those imaginary estrogen therapies that made elderly retired housekeepers suddenly race up and down the stairs and become pregnant. “Four weeks ago an elderly woman arrived at a New York City hospital in a wheelchair,” reported the New York Times in 1972. “Crippled by arthritis, she was unable to walk or even stand erect. Last week she left for home on her own two legs, aided only by a cane.” This time, the results were frequently as good as advertised. The keys to the breakthrough included joints made from new alloys and the use of a cement, known as methyl methacrylate, to keep the replacement together.
As American women fought for rights and respect and power in the last decades of the twentieth century, older women were visibly part of the team. They were everywhere—marching for liberation and helping to support their families and working out at the gym. But it was not as if the nation had embraced the idea that a woman should actually look her age. The specter of wrinkles still showed up in ads for beauty products, and wrinkles had the same air of doom as they did in the decades before. “It is a gradual process, this facial aging,” warned an ad in Harper’s Bazaar. “Then one day you attend a class reunion… or chance to run headlong into an old beau… or renew your lipstick in the unrelenting brightness of the sun. Then you see what has really happened, and it hits you: this is what those around you see and live with, every single day.”
The clarion call of cosmetic surgery became ever louder. It was depicted, more and more, as a business decision. “The brilliance of intellect, the advantage of experience and competence can be hindered by exterior aging for both men and women,” counseled Harper’s Bazaar. “To look as young and vital as your mind is, is not only desirable, but often necessary if you are to cash in on that investment of years.” Betty Ford, after her release from the alcohol and drug treatment center, made her next headline when she announced she was having a face-lift. “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m 60 years old and I need a new face,” she told a reporter. The public seemed to prefer the idea of former First Ladies growing old gracefully—and without surgical intervention. But Ford was cheerfully determined. A lot of male politicians had privately had hair transplants, she told the press. “I prefer to grow old looking as well as I possibly can.”
Still, there was always the Beautiful Thoughts route. “Hypnotize yourself into thinking ‘I am unshakably, unquenchably, deliciously myself and thus I am young,” commanded a writer in Harper’s Bazaar. But the much more common message was that women who wanted to keep their looks could only do so with lots and lots of intervention. In another very different article, Harper’s Bazaar suggested women could look 30 for 20 years—as long as they had the help of “invaluable aides-de-camp,” which included “hairstylists, colorists, visagists, plastic and reconstructive surgeons, masseuses, manicurists, pedicurists…”
In 1978, Mae West tried a comeback with the release of Sextette, in which at 84 she played an ageless sex goddess who had six husbands. When asked why she was starring in another film, West said, “Public demand. They’ll see me as they always like to—as myself. You know, sort of sexy.” The rest of the world didn’t agree. “One eye sometimes sags,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times, “and the voice, despite Hollywood’s electronic skills, cracks like the voice of the old lady she really is. Under these circumstances, the sexual innuendoes are embarrassing. Granny should have her mouth washed out with soap, along with her teeth.” Critics of the future, watching replays, weren’t much less horrified, although one Chicago reviewer, after calling Sextette one of “the world’s all-time worst movies” added supportively, “[T]hat doesn’t detract at all from its immense charm and lewd fascination.” It was West’s last encore. When she died, in 1980, the Los Angeles Times obituary noted that she had starred in only 12 films. “No one else had ever established so secure a place in film history on the basis of so few roles, but then no other woman had become a sex symbol after making her screen debut at 40, either.”
The movies of the 1970s weren’t all that friendly to women in general—it was the decade of frat boys (Animal House), three men on a boat (Jaws and Jaws 2), two guys and a gimmick (The Sting), mob guys with Diane Keaton looking worried (The Godfather), Superman, Rocky, Smokey and the Bandit, and Blazing Saddles. When actresses did get major parts, it was generally in stories about young love (Love Story, Grease, American Graffiti). Older women were pretty much cut out of the picture. In her early 50s, Shelley Winters did have a leading role in the action-disaster movie Poseidon Adventure, in which she played an aging former competitive swimmer who saves hero Gene Hackman. Of course, the effort caused her character to collapse with a fatal heart attack.
On the plus side, Ellen Burstyn won an Academy Award for her work as a 30-something widow in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and mesmerized the country as a terrified mom in The Exorcist—although all the attention in that one, of course, went to the kid with the spinning head. At 46, Audrey Hepburn played Maid Marian in Robin and Marian, opposite Sean Connery—for once, the male star was about the same age as the actress playing his romantic interest. Ruth Gordon made a huge splash in 1971 with her starring role in Harold and Maude, a movie about a young man obsessed with death who falls in love with a 79-year-old woman who’s obsessed with—well, “with life.” Maude does commit suicide with sleeping pills when she turns 80, but she makes it clear this is a positive move. (“Go and love some more.”) Many viewers found the movie wonderful; many found it… strange. But Gordon was on a late-life roll. She’d received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Rosemary’s Baby) when she was 72 and told the audience, “I can’t tell you how encouraging a thing like this is.”
Television still offered a broader vista for older actresses, even though TV had moved beyond the early years when any former movie star, whatever her age, was a real catch. Mary Tyler Moore was in her mid-30s when she debuted her comedy about a Minneapolis TV producer who was—big breakthrough—unmarried and 30. “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” the show asked, and there was Mary, by herself, dancing under an umbrella. The show ran from 1970 to 1977, and during that time Mary remained single and unconcerned about her age. It was one of the most popular shows of the era—even Betty Ford made a guest appearance. But when The Mary Tyler Moore Show first arrived onscreen the initial reviews were tepid at best. The St. Petersburg Times, while celebrating “the return of a delightful and talented actress,” found it hard to get excited about “the life of a 30-year-old spinster.”
In 1973, the show’s creators added Betty White, who was then at the ripe old age of 51, to the cast. White, whom we first met in those early Geritol commercials, was hired to appear as Sue Ann Nivens, a cooking show host with a sickly sweet on-air personality who was, behind the scenes, a man-hungry, sharp-tongued cynic. The producers had presumed the single, middle-aged, and extremely sexually active Sue Ann was so off-putting no one would stand her for more than an episode or two, but the writers—and the audience—loved her, and White won two Emmys for the role.
The 1970s were a breakthrough era in television. All in the Family, the benchmark comedy about the racist misogynist Archie Bunker, made history of a sort when it featured an episode about Archie’s wife, Edith, going through menopause. But that was nothing compared to the moment in 1972 when Bea Arthur, 50, arrived as Maude, the title character in an All in the Family spin-off about an outspoken and sexually active middle-aged liberal. Maude took Miltown and drank until she woke up one morning in bed with a neighbor. She had an abortion at 47—two months before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Eventually she wound up in Congress. Bea Arthur called Maude “the Joan of Arc of the middle-age woman.”
So older women were certainly visible. But those who showed up on TV were almost always in comedies. In a New York Times essay, Caryl Rivers complained that they were never “the lawyer who fights for justice, the doctor who makes the vital decision, the candidate for Congress, the reporter on the trail of the story.” Well, there was Maude going to the House of Representatives, but that happened at the very end of the series’ last gasp. And Mary Tyler Moore, Rivers complained, might have been on TV through her 30s, but she always looked “like a gorgeous 25-year-old.” Why, Rivers asked, was the entertainment world still a place where the double-chinned John Wayne or the silver-haired James Stewart could be a romantic hero while women of the same age were only stars of the Bette Davis model, settling for “bit parts or chopping-people-to-bits parts.” Maybe, she theorized, it was because “the media are still male-dominated, with the male ego as the retina.” The discussion would continue for decades to come.
In 1972, a reader wrote to the Hartford Courant: “Could you advise an older woman, say one beyond age 60, what to do about the pantsuits women are wearing? I don’t like them. In fact they are contrary to my training since girlhood on what a woman should wear. Yet everywhere I go—to the grocery store, to meetings, even to church, for heaven’s sake—I see the awful pants.” Nobody could know then, of course, that in the twenty-first century a 68-year-old woman would run for president in pantsuits. But the Courant advice columnist warned that it was “a fashion that may not pass. Women like them, what with no girdle and no nylons and freedom from eternally pulling down a skirt.”
Some older women resisted. “I’m 45, and I’ve been working too long in a skirt to go to pants now,” said Alicia Munnell, a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “The miniskirt is the first fashion trend that I’ve not adopted. I waited it out. I will wait out pants.” But it turned out, there was no real retreat. Women began wearing pants to the office, to restaurants, and to formal social events. After a while, nobody was surprised to see a 70-year-old woman in jeans. School boards that had busied themselves preventing married women from teaching earlier in the century were now voting to allow their faculty to wear pants to school. Older women were showing up in slacks or pantsuits so often that in 1975 a New York Times style commentator suggested that “the more adventurous woman” might want to “look for a new kind of fashion excitement.”
Getting comfortable with the new look took time—and the helping hand of marketers. In 1971, Jack Winter, a Milwaukee-based pants manufacturer, organized an advertising campaign to promote slacks in the workplace. He also distributed pro-slacks petitions for women to sign and hand in to their employers, which promised, “We will not wear freaky far-out things that have no place in the office.” Slacks became a union issue, too. “The beginning of the new spirit in the offices came a few years ago when employers imposed dress codes that decreed we couldn’t wear pants to work,” wrote Margie Albert, a steward for the Distributive Workers of America. “Women rebelled. They petitioned, sent delegations to management, or simply agreed that on a particular day they’d all wear pants. We relearned the old truism: ‘In unity there is strength.’”
In 1973, at a bill signing, President Richard Nixon turned to Helen Thomas, the 53-year-old veteran reporter for United Press International, and asked, “Helen, are you still wearing slacks? Do you prefer them actually? Every time I see girls in slacks, it reminds me of China.” Then it got worse. “This is not said in an uncomplimentary way, but slacks can do something for some people and some it can’t,” the president continued. “But I think you’ll do very well. Turn around.” As the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, and other dignitaries stood smiling, Thomas, who was wearing white pants and a navy-blue jersey shirt, dutifully did a pirouette. “Do they cost less than gowns?” Nixon asked the reporter. When she replied in the negative, the president concluded, “Then change.” To more male laughter. But a few weeks later, the White House lifted its prohibition on female employees wearing pants. The deputy press secretary claimed it was because temperatures had been decreased to conserve energy.
“In the past, women after 25 started to dress like matrons,” wrote Lance Morrow in Time in 1978. “But the vivid costume party of the [19]60s taught women of all ages to wear almost any damn thing they pleased. Fashions are more subdued now, but many women, of all generations, have escaped the typecasting of dress.”
In 1974, Maggie Kuhn was invited to the Ford White House for the signing of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act, which established minimum standards for pension programs in private industry. It was a good day, and Gerald Ford jovially asked her, “Young lady, do you have something to say?”
“Mr. President,” Kuhn replied, “I’m not a young lady. I’m an old woman.”
It was a salvo in the ongoing battle to get a little dignity. Helen Gurley Brown was attempting to make peace with women’s liberationists but ran into trouble with the nouns. “Twelve of us—I almost said girls, but they say I must stop that and refer to us as women—sat about and related our hang-ups,” Brown wrote in an editor’s note about her first consciousness-raising session, admitting she had been on her eighth hang-up when she was told to relinquish the floor. The session was a success, but it was going to be rather difficult to get the author of Sex and the Single Girl and the editor of a magazine that defined its readership as “that Cosmo girl” to drop the g-word.
The problem of being addressed in an irritating-to-insulting way wasn’t limited to older women—the male veterans of the 1960s New Left were still around and still referring to their female companions as “chicks.” During the student occupation of a building at Columbia University, two protesters got married by a clergyman who asked whether the bride, Andrea, would “take Richard for your man” and whether the groom would “take Andrea for your girl.” To a cheering crowd, he then pronounced them “children of the new age.” Who had been joined as man and girl. Madeleine Kunin, a state legislator climbing the very difficult ladder of politics in Vermont, went to a Democratic convention in Kansas with another female lawmaker, one of the state’s top political leaders. They were greeted on arrival by the governor, who called out, “Hello, girls.” Kunin, who later became governor herself, recounted the story more than 30 years later. She had never forgotten the moment. The difference between “women” and “girls,” she decided, had become “the Maginot line of feminism.”
The only road out of “girls” territory seemed to dead-end at “gals.” After a certain age, you could not be strong without being an “old gal.” The Chicago Tribune’s positive report on the health of the mother of former president John Kennedy ran with the headline “‘Tough Old Gal’ Rose Kennedy OK After Surgery.” A Los Angeles Times celebration of a 92-year-old fashion designer who finally got her college degree reported that Irene Horvath had been a “spry 72-year-old gal” when she went back to school. And then there was the media’s fondness for describing any older woman, whatever her achievements, as a “grandmother” whenever possible. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee tried to call a halt, ruling that “words like ‘divorcée,’ ‘grandmother,’ ‘blonde’ (or ‘brunette’) or ‘housewife’ should be avoided in all stories where, if a man were involved, the words ‘divorcé,’ ‘grandfather,’ ‘blond’ or ‘householder’ would be inapplicable. In other words, they should be avoided.” But a few months later the paper announced that Lenore Romney had been nominated for the U.S. Senate, “a 60-year-old grandmother making her first bid for elected public office.”