Wrinkled Radicals

Age may just be a number, but with the current debate over how old is too old to serve as President or a member of Congress, it’s a good time to remind ourselves that Americans were once automatically consigned to a decrepit and ignominious old age on their 65th birthday. Self-described “wrinkled radicals” joined the civil rights movement to prove that everyone deserves the right to make a contribution, regardless of age.

When Maggie Kuhn was forced to retire from the job she loved at the mandatory age of  65, her colleagues gave her a sewing machine as a parting gift. Outraged, she shut the sewing machine in a closet and, instead, stitched together the first-ever movement against ageism in the U.S. The Gray Panthers would galvanize an older citizenry and youth alike to challenge the way Americans think about aging.

Guests

• Katherine Ott, curator and historian in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
• Emily Krichbaum, founding director for the Center for Girls’ and Young Women’s Leadership at Columbus School for Girls and scholar of women’s history
• Paul Nathanson, founder and former executive director of Justice in Aging (formerly the National Senior Citizens Law Center), a national advocacy group for the elderly poor
• Jack Kupferman, president of Gray Panthers NYC

Maggie Kuhn with Gray Panthers members protesting outside the American Medical Association’s convention in Chicago, June 1974. Photograph courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries via The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

Links and Extras

• Get Maggie Kuhn’s story straight from the source in her autobiography, No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn.
• For more on the founding and lasting impact of the Gray Panthers, check out the documentary, Maggie Growls: All About Maggie Kuhn and the Gray Panthers, available on YouTube.
• Read more about the efforts undertaken by the Gray Panthers to create better representation of older adults on television and the media landscape they faced in the 1977 article Nobody (in TV) Loves You When You’re Old and Gray from The New York Times.
• What does aging look like in America today? The 2023 report, The New Age of Aging examines today’s life expectancies and how expectations have shifted as longevity and quality of life increase.
• Author Roger Rosenblatt offers a frank, humorous, and heartfelt look at the everyday challenges of aging in his recent essay, What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old.
• We receive plenty of messages about the downsides of aging, but growing older also offers more opportunities than we may think! Anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite explores the upsides and how we can combat age-based stereotyping in her 2017 TED Talk, Let’s End Agism.
• Get practical tips for combatting age-based descrimination in your community with publications, fact sheets, and toolkits from the World Health Organization’s Global report on ageism.

Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, with Paul Nathanson at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, circa 1976. Photograph courtesy of Paul Nathanson

Listen now

Transcript

Wrinkled Radicals – S10, Ep6

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