Is Feminism the Province of Old (or Middle-Aged) Women?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when sociologist Verta Taylor and I were first working on our coauthored book about the U.S. women's rights movement in the post-Second World War period--the years when feminism was supposed to have been dead as a doornail--we took pains to explain to audiences that it was women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and even eighties who kept the flame burning in the inhospitable climate of the 1950s. ¹ From the perspective of second wave feminism, we felt we had to account for such an anomaly. Despite feminist Jo Freeman's depiction of both an "older" and "younger" branch of the women's movement that blossomed in the late 1960s, we, like the media, tended to think of feminists as young women. ²

But it was not too far into the 1980s that we realized, with something of a shock, that members of the younger generation were not surprised to hear that feminism seemed "as quaint as linen dusters and high-button shoes" in the 1950s. ³ For, increasingly, they viewed it the same way: anachronistic, out-of-date, and the obsession of women who, if not in their seventies, were at least in their thirties and forties rather than twenties. Our images of young college-age women protesting the Miss America pageant, disrupting bridal fairs, and taking to the streets--or, thinking of the 1910s instead of the 1960s and 1970s, picketing the White House and launching massive suffrage marches--did not necessarily jibe with how young women in the 1980s viewed feminist activism. Rather, they tended to see it as the province of middle-aged women whose consciousness had been raised in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This realization is what first prompted me to think about the issue of age and feminism. There are really two questions here: 1) at what stage in the life cycle are women most likely to become feminists at different times and in different places? and 2) what impact do cycles of mobilization and abeyance have on the age patterns of women's movements? ⁴ My research on the international women's movement in the first half of the twentieth century, where I found much the same phenomenon as in the American women's rights movement in the 1950s, and my reading about movements in other parts of the world have led me to speculate that, at most times and in most places, women have come to feminist causes as middle-aged, rather than young, women and then stuck with the movement (or at least its issues) into old age. Certainly, the persistence of feminist commitment is a phenomenon borne out by sociologist Nancy Whittier's work on contemporary American radical feminism. ⁵

The image of feminists as young and militant tends to come from such relatively rare periods of "white-hot mobilization" as the 1910s and late 1960s/early 1970s in the United States, but, even in those moments, the age range of activists was wider than it might seem. ⁶ In the 1910s, for example, militant suffragists of the National Woman's Party (NWP) who picketed the White House and went to jail for their beliefs always merited such descriptions as "young," "spirited," "energetic," "zealous," and "radiant," in contrast to what NWP members themselves called the "nice old ladies" of the mainstream suffrage organization. ⁷ Yet the "spirit of youth" could apply even to old women if they joined the militant ranks. Doris Stevens, epitome of the bold, free suffragist, bestowed the spirit of youth on "the white-haired grandmothers" demonstrating outside the White House. ⁸ And, when Stevens was fifty-five, a colleague commented on "the rebellious attitude," noting that "it need not be a prerogative of youth but is beautiful at any age." ⁹

But, outside such periods of...