'No Stopping Us Now:' The Surprising, Inspiring Story of Older Women in America

The Introduction from No Stopping Us Now by Gail Collins, excerpted with permission from Little, Brown and Company:

"In this youth-made world, when a woman's over 25, she's considered old. Or on the way,” began a 1971 ad for hair coloring. It went on to assure the reader — after quite a bit of depressing verbiage — that all was not lost. With Loving Care on your side, “You're not getting older. You're getting better!”

Well, that was a relief.

The ad became a classic. For years the “You're not getting older” slogan would pop up all over the place — at one point in a heavily orchestrated song with a melody so triumphant you'd have thought it was celebrating a moon landing, or the evacuation of Dunkirk.

We're a lot more sophisticated now. Nobody thinks 25 is old. But virtually nobody who spots her first gray hairs is going to sigh virtuously and let nature take its course, either. “There's a reason why 40, 50, and 60 don't look the way they used to,” Nora Ephron once wrote, “and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye.”

We've expanded our vision of what women can do at any age — Ruth Bader Ginsburg working out with her personal trainer at 86 before a day at the Supreme Court sounds perfectly reasonable, not to mention deeply desirable. But that doesn't mean our prejudice against growing older has been erased. If it had, the 7,000 or so cosmetic surgeons in America would be way underemployed.

This is the story of women and age in America, from the colonies to the 21st century, from Martha Washington to Hillary Clinton. There were definitely some points when getting older was easier than others. That's always been the case, throughout history, around the planet. “Herodotus tells us of some tribes who worshipped their elders as gods and of others who ate them,” wrote historian David Hackett Fischer. The extremes in America, fortunately, have been somewhat less dire.

Who counts as an “older” woman? Well, there have been some pretty dramatic swings in opinion. In the early Colonial South, any woman short of menopause counted as a hot young marriage prospect. But after the American Revolution, in female-laden Northern cities, turning 30 without a husband meant entering the realm of old maid-hood. This is not going to be a tale of steady progress toward an age-indifferent tomorrow.

However, we can definitely pick out some eras that look more enticing than others. And then decide whether the one we're living in now is a moment of real transition.

Traveling through American history, we'll see how attitudes toward women in their middle and later years shifted. There are some very clear patterns. One is that matter of scarcity. A 50-year-old widow could start her own business while choosing from among a dozen eager suitors, if she happened to be one of a handful of females in a gold rush town in the middle of the 19th century.

The second, inevitably, is economic. Eras in which older women were able to earn money or increase their family's assets were eras in which they were ... popular. In Colonial times, a widowed grandmother who was a skilled spinner or sausage maker got plenty of respect. Jump ahead 100 years, move to a city, and your middle-class housewife had only one job to do: have babies and rear them. When the kids were grown, she was consigned to a rocking chair in the corner — metaphorically and frequently literally.

Our first generation of great female public figures came into their political prime in the mid-19th century, when they were in their 50s or 60s. Their America still believed a woman's place was in the home. But some canny strategists — like Elizabeth Cady Stanton — came up with a pseudo compromise. They stayed home, raised the kids, and then took off on their lecture tours, bearing their gray hair as the proud proof that they'd followed the rules. Now it was time to raise hell and fight for abolition and women's rights.

Suddenly, women were composing odes to menopause. One mid-19th-century reformer announced that the end of fertility was a time for “super-exaltation.” On the other hand, that was also a time when some doctors were beginning to theorize that postmenopausal women who engaged in sex were risking their lives and their sanity. There are no periods in American history when all the news is good.

During the period between the Civil War and the end of World War I, female entertainment celebrities tended to be older. You could be a glamorous singer at 50 and a famous beauty on the stage at 60 or 70. That was the age when “popular entertainment” meant lectures and theater. Then came the movies, with their unforgiving close-ups, at the same time that an enormous economic boom put outrageous new consuming power into the hands of the young. Older women were no longer in vogue or in view. In popular films of the day, they were usually busty dowagers sternly disapproving of their male counterparts, who swanned around speakeasies with showgirls.