In 1984, Gloria Steinem celebrated her 50th birthday in a much bigger way than the decade before, when her offhand comment about “this is what 40 looks like” had become part of the national consciousness. While Steinem had meant it as a jibe against women’s tendency to lie about their age, it had evolved into a thought about what 40 could look like if you put your mind to it. Or if you were Gloria. It was pretty much the same story when she turned 50, although the backdrop had certainly changed. She arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria “not in blue jeans but in blue silk, her arm circled in a serpent-shaped rhinestone bracelet, her bare shoulders dusted with glitter,” reported the New York Times, quoting another attendee as saying Steinem looked “younger, thinner and blonder than ever.”
Steinem did color her hair, and she had always watched her weight. But she hadn’t had plastic surgery, and she often told people who asked about her exercise regimen that she worked out by running through airports during her endless travels. If she had changed, she told a reporter, she was “more radical” than when she was younger. She was certainly more focused on fund-raising for feminist causes. The $250-a-plate 50th birthday celebration was going to the Ms. Foundation, to support its publications and education projects. Included in the crowd of about 750 was Diane Sawyer, the 38-year-old former Nixon aide who was beginning a new career as a TV journalist. Garry Trudeau, the creator of Lacey Davenport and Joanie Caucus, was there with his wife, Jane Pauley. So was Helen Gurley Brown, still going strong as the “Cosmo Girl” editor at 62. Carol Burnett, 51, told a journalist: “I remember when my grandmother turned 47—I wept. Now it’s a whole new world for women.”
People were trying to think about their passing years not as getting old so much as evolving into new spheres of life. But the message from the media wasn’t universally encouraging. In 1986, Newsweek ran an infamous cover story announcing that an educated white 40-year-old woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to marry. As the story told it, there was “an arid demographic study” that “confirmed what everybody suspected all along: that many women who seem to have it all—good looks and good jobs, advanced degrees and high salaries—will never have mates.” The numbers were even less promising, the magazine said helpfully, if you were black.
The story was deeply inaccurate—the numbers were garbled, and Newsweek eventually retracted it, although it took 20 years to do so. Meanwhile, it haunted an entire generation. In Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, a friend tosses the factoid at Meg Ryan, and when Ryan protests, “That statistic is not true!” her friend replies, “That’s right—it’s not true. But it feels true.”
Women who had gotten married before the new imaginary deadline still had a very good chance of eventually winding up without a partner. Tish Sommers frequently pointed out that 52 percent of women over 65 were widowed, compared to 14 percent of men. “Older men often remarry, while women rarely do,” she said in 1981, adding that nine times as many men over 65 tied the knot “despite the larger number of women in this age bracket.” The chances of a woman avoiding this sense of displacement by moving in with an extended family of children and grandchildren were minimal. Multigenerational families—home to a quarter of Americans before World War II—had bottomed out at about 12 percent. And communes never did seem to work out.
Still, there were newer options. In the 1980s, researchers attempted, for the first time, to count the number of people living in retirement communities. They estimated there were nearly a million—not much in a population of 27 million Americans 65 and older, but still a sizable chunk of people. Opinions on the benefit of these communities were varied. Betty Friedan couldn’t understand “why people would voluntarily put themselves into an age ghetto.” On the other hand, Charles Longino, a director of social research at the University of Miami, felt retirement community residents had “significantly fewer problems of loneliness and social isolation” as well as “more positive self-regard.” Longino believed the communities were “not so different from communes. First they came together in retirement, then followed a strong community commitment, then an effort to share their resources with others they cared about.”
That communal spirit didn’t necessarily span the generations. In 1989, retirement community residents were worried about a new federal law that could keep them from discriminating against families with children. “Older people who live in communities of their own age with no children live longer and live happier without all the stress, noise and turmoil,” said the head of the Seniors Civil Liberties Association, which filed suit to try to overturn the law. They were pretty successful. Residential developments that could prove they were only for “senior citizens” generally managed to ban anyone under 18 from moving in with their older relatives. To make it clear they meant business, some retirement communities instituted anti-children patrols.
Almost anywhere older people were gathered—with the possible exception of golf courses—women dominated the population. In 1980, the Census Bureau counted three women for every two men over 65, with the gap getting larger as the age progressed. There were two women for every man over 85. While that meant women enjoyed the prospect of a longer life, the men knew that while they were around, they had the advantage. In Leisure World, a residential community near San Francisco, the New York Times reported, “women outnumber men 5,224 to 2,842. Residents say that no one is in more demand than a man who is handy with tools and is willing to do minor chores, such as repairing a sticking door or hanging a picture.
“Elsewhere,” the Times continued, “residents of retirement communities said that it was common for a man to be besieged with offers of meals from women within a few days of his wife’s death.” The writer quoted a male resident of a retirement community near Tucson as complaining, “If another women [sic] brings me one more casserole at dinner time I’ll scream.” An 81-year-old man at a community in Long Island reported there were 70 widows and only four widowers, so “the minute they find out you’re single, the pressure is incredible.” But experts said the women’s goal tended to be companionship and an escort to social events, while men who had lost their wives wanted a replacement. “They were looking for a woman in their home to do the household chores and take care of them,” said a professor at the University of South Florida who’d been studying life in retirement communities.
It was a familiar story—men had almost all the advantages, except for longevity and self-sufficiency.
“Twenty years ago, ‘midlife crisis’ was an affliction that struck only men,” Ladies’ Home Journal essayist Roberta Grant declared in 1987. But now that women had more career opportunities, she continued, they also had more opportunities for emotional crises when their career options began to narrow or fade. More choices, Grant warned, meant more “chances to make wrong choices—and, hence, to be discontent.”
In the 1980s, everybody talked about women “having it all”—husband, children, career. But, of course, that meant having more to lose. Your job was supposed to fill the vacuum that came with an empty nest, but as Grant pointed out, jobs didn’t last forever, either. Still, the Ladies’ Home Journal editors did not traffic in unhappy endings, so their story about midlife crises was really about midlife opportunities. Erica, who had devoted herself to a Wall Street job that turned out to be unsatisfying, started a new career as a journalist and moved in with a great guy 10 years her junior. A 43-year-old cosmetics executive discovered she was “trapped in middle management,” then found a new set of life options via a video dating service. The magazine’s psychology columnist assured readers that midlife brought an “incredible feeling of security and freedom.… It’s a time for women to go after what they really want out of life.”
The determined optimism of the “having it all” era did presume that women could look upon midlife as a chance for a big turnaround. You could emulate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and that first generation of change-of-life suffragists—devote yourself to home and family until the kids were launched, then fling yourself into a career. A newer option was to focus your 20s and 30s on work and then hope for a late-breaking pregnancy or a happy adoption after you hit 40. Or you could follow Erica’s lead and hook up with a younger man. That was happening more and more, although relatively speaking, the marry-your-junior option was still mainly reserved for men. When Jane Fonda, who was one of the decade’s wonder women, embarked on an affair with media mogul Ted Turner, Turner told her a relationship between two overachievers who were passionate about politics and social issues was perfect except for “one negative… your age.” At the time, Fonda was 51 and Turner 50. Shortly after that romantic interlude, Fonda had an eye lift and breast augmentation and began dating an Italian hockey player turned actor, 16 years younger than herself. “He makes me feel like a girl again,” she told reporters. Fonda flew to Milan to meet her boyfriend’s mother, who looked her over and said she was “too old to give Lorenzo babies.”
That was that. Fonda married Turner in December 1991. After the ceremony, the bride served her guests fresh quail she had shot herself.
If we’re contemplating overachievement, we have to spend some more time with Jane Fonda. In the 1970s, she had won an Oscar for Best Actress, opposed the war in Vietnam with such vehemence that her career appeared to be destroyed, and then quickly won another Oscar. In the 1980s, she published Women Coming of Age, a super-positive look at life in the late 40s. “I’m getting lines and gray hairs, but I want to think of menopause as an adventure. I am looking forward to my first hot flash,” she wrote. Fonda made a notable third career out of being middle-aged. She published a famous workout book, which sold 2 million copies and was translated into 50 languages. That was followed by the release of the bestselling workout video in history and the creation of a workout empire that earned $20 million by the end of its first year of operation. She also starred in 9 to 5, a huge hit in which she played a displaced housewife who teamed up with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton to triumph over a sexist boss. Then she purchased the rights to On Golden Pond, a drama about an elderly couple and their slightly estranged daughter, making it into a movie in which she played opposite her father, Henry.
The Fondas were themselves semi-estranged, and Jane had suffered all the traumas of a daughter with a very successful and somewhat remote father. Suddenly she was giving him a big career opportunity—the role won Henry an Academy Award for Best Actor, an honor that had hitherto eluded him. The relationship between Jane and Katharine Hepburn, her film mother, was apparently less rewarding. Fonda theorized in her autobiography that Hepburn felt “vulnerable” about her age when they were together. “She was a legend, yes, but I was the younger actress who because of youth was currently more of a box office draw—and I was only one Oscar behind her.” The movie would go on to win Hepburn her fourth, a record that still hasn’t been broken.
On Golden Pond was a winner for Fonda personally, professionally, and financially. But it was the workout videos that made her an icon for contemporaries struggling with weight and muscle tone. She was the latest—and most successful—incarnation of female celebrity fitness gurus like Lillian Russell, who had urged her followers to roll over 250 times every morning if they wanted to live to be 100. Fonda’s success inspired other middle-aged actresses to produce their own, generally less demanding exercise programs. “I went out and I bought all these other tapes, which are excellent but I found that I really couldn’t keep up with them,” said Debbie Reynolds, 51, as she led a room full of older actresses and entertainers, including Shelley Winters, who served as sort of groaning comic relief. Angela Lansbury, 62, released a video called Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves: A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being at Any Age. Besides the exercises, it included a scene of Lansbury getting into a bubble bath and talking about sexuality. Neither Reynolds nor Lansbury achieved Fonda’s level of super-success, but they both seemed to do better than singer Pat Boone, then in his 50s, who made an exercise video aimed at “mature adults” with Connie Letney, the owner of a chain of exercise centers marketed to people 50 and above. The Chicago Tribune described Letney as “a svelte older lady who does a fine job. Too bad that Pat is too busy preening and cracking jokes to follow what she’s doing.”
In 1987, Jane Fonda enthusiastically signed up to play the lead in Music Box, the story of a lawyer who defends her Hungarian immigrant father against accusations that he ran a death squad during World War II. The project somehow morphed into a hot ticket despite its dark plot, and the high-profile filmmaker Costa-Gavras agreed to direct. Suddenly word came down that the 47-year-old Fonda was too old for the part. The scriptwriter, Joe Eszterhas, convinced her to do an audition—something established stars never did—and he felt she did a “terrific” job. But the director was not swayed and the studio paid Fonda $1.25 million to disappear quietly. Jessica Lange, 12 years younger, got the part instead.
It hardly seemed fair, especially since Hollywood appeared to be on a roll when it came to scripts written for actresses in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. Shirley MacLaine won an Oscar for Terms of Endearment, in which she played a grandmother who hated being called a grandmother. At 41, Cher won the Best Actress award as a widow who found new romance in Moonstruck. Olympia Dukakis won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Cher’s mother. At the time, Dukakis was only 56, but she had no complaints. “After that, we were able to send our children to college with no problems,” she said, calling up another aspect of the sandwich generation—women not only went directly from caring for their kids to caring for their parents; they leaped immediately from paying college bills to fretting about retirement.
So you could play a romantic lead in your 40s, but not necessarily… a lawyer.
When she reached her 70s, Katharine Hepburn announced she was retiring: “I’ve had my day—let the kids scramble and sweat it out.” That lasted approximately six seconds. Then Hepburn agreed to star in a Broadway play, which won her a Tony nomination, and she went on working until she was 87. Mainly she made TV films. For all the expansion of opportunities in film, television continued to be the place that offered older actresses the most chance to stretch. The old TV classic plot about Guys in a Group, from M*A*S*H to A-Team, had expanded during the Mary Tyler Moore era to the Gang at Work, of mixed sex and age. Then suddenly there were all-female starring casts, from Cagney & Lacey (cops) to One Day at a Time (divorced mom and daughters). In The Golden Girls, another sharing-a-house comedy, the cast was much older, and the audience loved it. The Golden Girls was one of the most popular shows of the era, featuring two widows, a divorcée, and the divorcée’s 80-year-old mother, all living together in Miami. Bea Arthur, the star, was 63 when the show started off. Estelle Getty, who played her mother, was 62—yet another example of the malleability of actresses portraying elderly mothers. Rue McClanahan played Blanche Devereaux, who was active on the dating circuit, entertaining a steady stream of suitors. Blanche, who went through her 50s and into her early 60s during the run, had a silky wardrobe and an eager sexuality that was one of the show’s breakthroughs. Although perhaps it wasn’t necessary that the creators gave her initials that spelled BED.
The Golden Girls—which also gave Betty White yet another new career at 63—ran for seven seasons and drew more than 27 million viewers to its finale. You couldn’t exactly say it was a celebration of age, given all the puffy-thigh jokes. But it had good humor and a story arc that was very much built on the displaced women phenomenon—the 80-year-old mom became homeless when her retirement home burned down. When they weren’t jibing each other about going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, they were luxuriating in their semi-communal living arrangement. (“We were all so lonely and then by a miracle we found each other.”)
The biggest star turn for an older woman came with Murder, She Wrote, a detective series in which Angela Lansbury played a bestselling mystery writer who solved real-life killings in her spare time. Lansbury began the series in 1984, two weeks before her 59th birthday, and ended it at 70, when she switched back to her theater career. Murder, She Wrote was on CBS, which had decided that gearing their programs toward older women made business sense, given their relatively high purchasing power. It was not a philosophy shared by its competitors. “The networks seem to be chasing people 20 and under,” Lansbury complained. “Why? I don’t know. They don’t buy anything. They eat cereal. They drink Coke.”
The pro-youth programmers argued that younger people would never watch shows starring people their grandparents’ age, but older viewers would eventually tune into popular programs about kids. It was a theory very similar to the one about targeting your movies toward men because women would always watch guy shows, but not vice versa. “Shows that can generate heat with younger audiences tend to be shows that have a greater potential of turning into major hits,” said Perry Simon of NBC. “Shows that start off with an older audience rarely bring younger audiences in.”
If women wanted to be really paranoid about the way TV regarded them as they aged, there was always the famous elevator moment on LA Law, a TV drama of the gang-at-work genre. There were several female characters on the show, and Rosalind Shays, the Older Woman, was the unpopular one. Played by Diana Muldaur, Shays was a difficult personality, and she slept with the boss. But she was also a pretty good lawyer, and perhaps the creators were afraid if she hung around too long they’d wind up making her sympathetic. So in one fabled episode, Rosalind was rejected by her lover as they stood at an elevator door, calmly told him “I don’t want to talk about it” as the door opened, and then walked into—an empty elevator shaft.
Muldaur had no idea what was going to happen to her character until she opened the script. “I was as shocked as everybody else,” she said. “I thought maybe I had asked for too much money!” The episode was titled “Good to the Last Drop.”
In 1981, Christine Craft, the 36-year-old co-anchor at KMBC-TV in Kansas City, vanished from the screen. It probably wasn’t a great trauma for viewers since she’d only been on the job for about eight months. But it was a moment that reverberated. Craft claimed she was demoted because she was “too old, too unattractive and not deferential enough to men.” She filed a lawsuit, and the trial brought out details that made it very, very hard to believe the station’s claim that her dismissal was just a matter of falling show ratings. The ratings were actually up, and the market research firm that recommended her demotion had conducted focus groups in which viewers were asked questions like “Is she a mutt?” It was a story awash with implications about age and gender. A New York Times editorial noted Craft said she was told that Kansas City viewers “liked warm, pretty things” delivering their news. TV news management, the editorial complained, was way behind the times: “There are few female film stars under 40; one of the biggest, Katharine Hepburn, is 73; and nobody ever called Bette Davis ‘a warm pretty thing.’”
Women news anchors—an unheard-of phenomenon a few decades before—had become commonplace, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission’s order for affirmative action plans. Claims that good-looking women were being given preference were complicated by the fact that on TV everybody was supposed to be attractive. But the age issue was clearer. There were approximately 1,200 local news anchors in the early 1980s. About half of the men were over 40. Only 3 percent of the women were. And while 16 percent of the men had managed to stay on the job after they passed 50, there was no such thing as a 50-year-old news anchorwoman.
Media executives pestered by claims of age discrimination liked to point out that TV reporter Dorothy Fuldheim had signed a three-year contract with her Cleveland station, WEWS, just before her 90th birthday. Fuldheim would, in fact, eventually sign a contract that was supposed to last until she was 115. But she was unique and very much in the tradition of beloved local institutions. She was also a good example of the rule that when a profession is new, disorganized, and low paying, women thrive. When she was first hired, at age 54, in 1947, WEWS was the only television station operating between New York and Chicago.
Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-anchor a national news broadcast in 1976, when she was 47. Her brief stint in the job was something of a disaster, thanks to her partner, Harry Reasoner, who made it abundantly clear he didn’t like having her sitting next to him every night. “I remember reaching toward him at the end of one broadcast, in a friendly manner, just to touch him on the arm. He recoiled, physically recoiled, in front of millions of people,” Walters wrote in a memoir. There was a happier story under way on the local level—in Seattle, Jean Enersen, a young reporter at KING-TV, had been named co-anchor in 1972. The outside world didn’t necessarily notice she was making history, perhaps because there was no drama to her story. “Other than being turned down numerous times, my experience was pretty positive,” she recalled. “I was lucky—I worked for a station that was founded by a woman.” She was also lucky in having a male co-anchor who was “totally supportive.” Enersen stayed at her job for a record-breaking 42 years.
Christine Craft, by the way, was awarded $500,000 by a jury who agreed she had been discriminated against by the news station that demoted her. But the Kansas City judge tossed the award out and ordered a new trial, pointing to what he claimed was Craft’s “below-average aptitude” in matters of clothing and makeup. The next jury came back with exactly the same pro-Craft verdict, but it was overturned on appeal. The Supreme Court declined to get involved. And that was that. Craft worked for a while in California TV news, then went back to school and became an attorney specializing in employment law.
The 1980s were the heyday of the “power suit”—pantsuits with broad shoulder pads, thick lapels, and tailoring that didn’t emphasize the figure. Their arrival was, at least in part, a reflection of the fact that women’s presence in management positions had nearly doubled between 1972 and 1985. The suits looked so very, very powerful—some critics said “aggressive”—that they didn’t last all that long. On the other side of the fashion spectrum, the miniskirt returned, forcing women who had worn them in the ’60s to decide whether they were still a good idea. “A miniskirt doesn’t suit you if you’re over age 40,” decreed Jean Shrimpton, the 44-year-old ex-model who had helped popularize the trend the first time around. “I’m outraged by the whole idea,” Betty Friedan told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like trying to put women into girdles again.”
While Friedan was anti-mini, she did assure the reporter, “I still have good legs.” That was the appeal of the skirts: many older women who bemoaned the toll age had taken on their bodies still felt their legs were holding up just fine. (Two decades later, actress Diahann Carroll would publish a memoir titled The Legs Are the Last to Go.) Helen Gurley Brown, who didn’t necessarily accept the idea that anything was going to go, loved the new trend. “Betty Friedan takes it all too seriously,” Brown, 65, told a reporter in an interview she gave while wearing a skirt three inches above the knee.
While slacks were just about everywhere, women hoping to be elected to public office stuck to dresses. “I didn’t ever wear pants, and the reason I didn’t was that I didn’t want people to think I was trying to be a man. I had to be very careful about things like that,” recalled Geraldine Ferraro, who made history when she became Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984. Having a woman on the national ticket was a moment that thrilled women who had come of age in the ’50s and ’60s. And some of them were shocked when their own daughters… yawned. “I guess I can understand how some older women, like my mom, would get all sentimental over it [Ferraro’s nomination],” Erin Murphy, a 24-year-old graphic designer, told the Los Angeles Times. “But, I don’t know—it just seemed reasonable to me. I thought it was nice. But it wasn’t any big drama. I mean, I certainly wasn’t surprised… I guess I just expected it.”
We’ll see some more of that particular generation gap a few decades down the line.
Ferraro had a lot of problems during the campaign, from scandals about her husband’s finances to the overall difficulty Mondale was having with Ronald Reagan. But her age was never a factor. At 48, she was a spring chicken by the standards of presidential/vice-presidential candidates. But if you wanted to see a battle over age issues, you could have checked out Michigan. Martha Griffiths, who had retired from the House of Representatives, returned to politics at age 70, when James Blanchard, the Democratic candidate for governor, made her his running mate. They won and remained a successful team until 1990, when Griffiths was 78 and Blanchard dropped her from his ticket, claiming she was getting increasingly frail. Griffiths rejoined that it was a bad idea to offend an elderly woman when it was women and the elderly who had made him governor in the first place. Blanchard stuck to his guns but lost reelection. “I don’t know if I feel vindicated, but I think it clearly shows that I won it for him the first two times,” Griffiths said.
In 1980, Millicent Fenwick ran for reelection to another term against a 26-year-old Democrat who promised not to bring up the age issue “unless she does.” She won with nearly 80 percent of the vote. Fenwick kept getting more famous. TV’s 60 Minutes did a profile: “This old-fashioned lady is also a thoroughly modern woman… she is an elegant, literate, dead-honest legislator whose somewhat patrician manner gets on some people’s nerves and amuses others.” The Wall Street Journal claimed that Fenwick was “unique” in American politics: “a 72-year-old pipe-smoking patrician who wears a heart pacemaker and rarely works less than 12 hours a day.”
Like Fenwick, that pipe story never seemed to get old. But then her congressional district was eliminated during the every-10-year redrawing of the boundaries. There was no place for her in the House—it was either move up or go home. On Thanksgiving of 1981, in bed with a cold, she wasn’t sure. “I lie here now, 71 years old, wondering endlessly whether or not to run for the Senate next year,” she wrote in her journal. “I’ve never thought I was ambitious, but is it pushing me now?” She ran and won the Republican primary—at a steep cost. She had never liked taking campaign donations, so she spent $776,000 of her own money on the effort. Then she ran up against Frank Lautenberg, the Democratic nominee, who had more cash than Fenwick and a far greater willingness to spend it. “She had never raised money until the Senate race and then she was unprepared for it,” her grandson Joseph Reckford said. “She had a professional consultant, but she let him go.”
One of her eccentricities was a refusal to leave Washington while Congress was in session—a practice other House members regarded as near insanity. Fenwick was not in New Jersey for much of the campaign, and her organization was a mess. Lautenberg had no compunctions about pointing out that he was 14 years younger. “The last thing I wanted to do was assault her,” he said, “but I thought it was important to remind the voters of age, because to develop standing, starting out in your seventies, it would be harder to garner seniority and ranking positions.” He also referred to her as “eccentric,” a term he claimed was not the least bit age related. One way or the other, Lautenberg won. Whatever issues he had about age in the Senate seemed to dim as time passed. He ran his own final campaign in 2008, when he was 84, and died in office in 2013.
“I think it hurt her a lot,” Fenwick’s grandson said of the loss. “But she didn’t show it. She had no patience with self-pity.” Rebounding, Fenwick accepted an appointment by Ronald Reagan to be permanent representative to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. She went happily to Italy, where she promptly replaced the Cadillac that was assigned to her with a Ford. “I am accredited to an organization that is trying to feed the hungry. There’s something very inappropriate about that,” she said of the expensive car.
“She loved that work,” recalled Reckford. “Absolutely adored it.” Since Fenwick’s job covered much of the impoverished world, he added, “She would talk about nothing but Africa. She wanted me to leave law school and go to Rwanda.” He decided to stay put, much to his grandmother’s disappointment. “She thought I was wasting my life. She was never big on higher education.”
The age requirement for First Lady, once Jackie Kennedy left the job, seemed to have crept upward. Except for Rosalynn Carter, who started at 49, and Barbara Bush, who was 63, all the presidents’ wives from Lady Bird Johnson through Laura Bush were in their 50s. Nancy Reagan entered the White House at 59, and she went for a look of mature-Hollywood glamour. She was not a particularly age-conscious woman—perhaps that was due to a sense that everything related to birth dates was subjective. When filling out Nancy’s birth certificate, her mother made herself four years younger; eventually Nancy dropped two years from her own age and eliminated her father from the document entirely, since he had abandoned the family. By the end, one biographer jibed, the only two accurate pieces of information on her birth certificate were “her sex and her color.”
She was, however, very conscious of fashion and of her weight. A slightly catty Chicago Tribune writer compared her to the Duchess of Windsor and announced the First Lady was “much prettier” although “they shared the same bony dress size and apparent fear of food.” Her husband was her obsession, and while everybody liked happy marriages, feminists were somewhat appalled by how far she went in her devotion. (“My life began with Ronnie.”) While he was in office, she wasn’t particularly popular. Critics sniped about her $200,000 presidential china, and a Washington postcard showed “Queen Nancy” in a fur cape and crown. When doctors discovered cancer in her left breast, Nancy was open about the mastectomy that followed and urged other women to have annual mammograms, but she did not spark the same national applause that Betty Ford had. Even when her husband was shot, the nation’s appreciation of her devotion was mixed with reserve. While polls showed natural public sympathy, there were also lots of eyebrow-raising stories about Nancy’s use of an astrologer to warn her if Ron was ever going to be in danger again.
Nancy Reagan became a real national heroine late in life, after her husband developed Alzheimer’s disease. “Later, in her long goodbye with President Reagan, she became a voice on behalf of millions of families going through the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s, and took on a new role, as advocate, on behalf of treatments that hold the potential and the promise to improve and save lives,” said President Obama after her death. She spent more than a decade standing by her husband’s side as he declined, and her vigor in supporting Alzheimer’s research caused her to break with President George W. Bush, who opposed embryonic stem cell research due to its connection to abortion.
Even before Ronald Reagan became a victim of Alzheimer’s, he was a supporter of medical research—in 1983, as president, he signed a resolution declaring National Alzheimer’s Disease month, which sent federal funding for the then little-known ailment up from $1 million to $11 million. The government’s contributions soared in 1994 when he announced his own diagnosis and hit about $700 million in the year after his death. It was not, until then, regarded as a problem that generally afflicted men. During the first congressional hearing on Alzheimer’s in 1980, one of the psychiatrist-experts lamented: “We have a classic notion of what the disease is, and unfortunately, we have a stereotype. It is—and I hate to be sexist, but because there are more older women than men, it is usually sort of a little old woman who is doddering around, sitting in a geriatric chair, not knowing time, place or person. This is not the way we see the disease.” In fact, some of the other stereotypes made the one about doddering old women look peachy. “They steal. They shoplift. They’re violent. They ‘expose’ themselves in public,” warned a sensational paperback on Alzheimer’s titled The Living Death.
At about the same time, American women—particularly the ones living in large cities—were becoming obsessed with the image of the shopping bag lady. The bag lady was a mainly urban phenomenon—dragging her earthly possessions around in a suitcase or a shopping cart, talking to herself, and sleeping, homeless, on the streets. Even for people who were in no real danger of ever becoming homeless, she represented things they knew did happen to women on every rung of the economic ladder: ending up alone, perhaps demented, avoided by the rest of society.
The bag lady legend might have begun in 1979, when Irmgard Meyer, described as “a ‘shopping-bag lady’ who wandered the streets of midtown Manhattan homeless and alone,” was found raped and suffocated near Grand Central Station with 90 cents in her pocket. Further inquiry revealed Meyer was a former employee of a New York ad agency who had thousands of dollars in assets, including some land in the Southwest. Nobody knew what had happened to her, but women around the country read the story and shivered at the idea that everything could fall apart—your marriage, your job, your sanity. The image scared even the impossibly wealthy. Oprah Winfrey said she once rejected her financial advisers’ suggestion about stocks and hoarded $50 million in cash as a “bag-lady fund.” Sherry Lansing, the former chair of Paramount Pictures, told the New York Times that her recurrent nightmare was being a homeless woman sitting on the street when her ex-husband drives past in a Rolls-Royce and tells his blond partner she was “just someone I used to know.”
While homelessness would continue to be a major problem in American cities, new social service programs were reasonably successful in getting the shopping bag ladies off the streets. But there was still something about the image that nagged at women who had absolutely no reason to worry they’d become one. In 2011, Adrienne Arsht, the chairwoman of TotalBank, told an interviewer while discussing her philanthropy that she was constantly fighting to “get over the fear that I’ll give it all away and be a bag lady.” Alexandra Penney, a former bestselling author and magazine executive, lost all her investments in the Bernie Madoff scandal of 2008. She did still have all the jewelry she had bought in her prime, telling herself that “if you’re ever a bag lady, you can sell it.” She went on to become a successful photographer and blogger—and the author of a book called The Bag Lady Papers.