The Gray Panthers are watching: gray women’s media activism in the 1970s and 80s

Abstract

Armed with the recently coined term “ageism” and experience organizing in both the old and new lefts, in the 1970s and 80s the women of the radical movement, the Gray Panthers, set out to intervene in the representation of old age in U.S. media. Mobilizing through their Media Watch Task Force and local committees, they monitored media for examples of ageism, conducted media literacy campaigns, and even produced their own media content to construct an alternative vision of aging. By the mid-1980s change was visible on TV: older women appeared as active, successful, sexual beings—like The Golden Girls—leading some to ponder whether there was a representational shift on TV, even a “waning devotion to youth.” Such positive reframing of old age overturned portrayals of the old as sick, poor, and dependent, and contributed to emerging discourses of an old age that could be “successful,” “active,” self-reliant, healthy, and even sexy. This denial of dependency, larger structural issues, and differences in old age, however, set standards and expectations for “positive” aging that reproduced dichotomies of good (virtuous) and bad (deservedly miserable) aging for older people.

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Feminist Media Studies
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The Gray Panthers are watching: gray women’s
media activism in the 1970s and 80s
Amanda Ciafone
To cite this article: Amanda Ciafone (2019): The Gray Panthers are watching:
gray women’s media activism in the 1970s and 80s, Feminist Media Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2019.1667400
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The Gray Panthers are watching: gray women’s media
activism in the 1970s and 80s
Amanda Ciafone
Media & Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA
ABSTRACT
Armed with the recently coined term “ageism”and experience
organizing in both the old and new lefts, in the 1970s and 80s
the women of the radical movement, the Gray Panthers, set out to
intervene in the representation of old age in U.S. media. Mobilizing
through their Media Watch Task Force and local committees, they
monitored media for examples of ageism, conducted media lit-
eracy campaigns, and even produced their own media content to
construct an alternative vision of aging. By the mid-1980s change
was visible on TV: older women appeared as active, successful,
sexual beings—like The Golden Girls—leading some to ponder
whether there was a representational shift on TV, even
a“waning devotion to youth.”Such positive reframing of old age
overturned portrayals of the old as sick, poor, and dependent, and
contributed to emerging discourses of an old age that could be
“successful,”“active,”self-reliant, healthy, and even sexy. This
denial of dependency, larger structural issues, and differences in
old age, however, set standards and expectations for “positive”
aging that reproduced dichotomies of good (virtuous) and bad
(deservedly miserable) aging for older people.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 7 March 2019
Revised 22 August 2019
Accepted 9 September 2019
KEYWORDS
Media History; Activism;
Television; Sex and sexuality;
Ageism; Old Age
In 1969, psychiatrist and geriatrician Robert N. Butler coined a new term, “ageism,”(W.
Andrew Achenbaum 2014) for what most Americans knew to be a longstanding phe-
nomenon, but would become the focus of new activism and advocacy around old age in
the 1970s and 80s.
1
The context of its first use was in describing the material repercus-
sions of age prejudice: Dr. Butler was criticizing the opposition to a proposed site for
elderly public housing, which he saw as classist, racist, and ageist, as the potential
occupants were poor, black, and old. “‘Ageism,’” the doctor simply explained, “‘is not
wanting to have all those ugly old people around’” (Carl Bernstein 1969, A6). While
manifested in social relations and perpetuated in cultural representation, ageism had
material effect on people’s lives: employment discrimination and forced retirement,
social exclusion and isolation, disregard by medical practitioners and physical neglect,
usurpation of autonomy and coerced dependency.
Since industrialization in the U.S., aged bodies had been increasingly valued, or rather
devalued, based on their perceived productive capacity. Even social welfare advocates
inadvertently contributed to ageist narratives: in demands for a safety net for the elderly
CONTACT Amanda Ciafone aciafone@illinois.edu
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1667400
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

from the late 19th century through the 1930s (when the Social Security Act was passed),
they mobilized representations of the old as sick, poor, and dependent, but deserving in
comparison to other social groups because of the inherent declension of old age (Thomas
Cole 1993, 234). Twentieth century liberalism thus trafficked in ageism to win social protec-
tions from the very industrial capitalism that produced the old as unproductive and
incapable. These social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, provided elders with
historically unprecedented governmental support in old age in the U.S., but also contrib-
uted to perceptions of the old as dependent, docile bodies for governing.
Some mid-century social science justified these logics by suggesting that ageism was
an ontological part of youth and middle-age’s recognition of decline and necessitated
care at the end of the life course, resulting in society’s identification of old people as
a particular, and burdensome, group. Freudian psychoanalytic theories emerged to
define innate feelings of foreboding, gloom, and disgust of older people as representa-
tives of one’s future self and decrepitude (Kathleen Woodward 1999, 150). Others dis-
agreed: age might bring differences in minds and bodies, but ageism was socially
constructed, as not all societies and cultures treated their elders the same. Even in the
U.S., older people occupied different places within the social orders of different com-
munities, often because of the relative respect accrued to their age and experience, their
centrality in family structures and contributions of domestic labor, and even their
comparative life expectancies. This suggested that the perception of aging and the
old was varied and changeable.
From the 1960s on, the critique of the unprecedented power of media and cultural
industries, the rise of psychological and media effects-driven research within communica-
tion studies, and the broader impact of poststructuralism and the “cultural turn”in the
academy drove scholars to focus on the meanings being assigned to old age by media texts.
Many advocates for the old, and elder activists themselves, argued that these cultural factors
produced unfair, negative perceptions of old age. They set out to identify and critique such
ageist portrayals, and combat them with more “positive”representations.
Old age activists were also inspired by contemporary movements around race,
gender, and sexuality, as well as the student movement’s critique of Vietnam War
draft vulnerability based in part on age, to conceive of and fight for themselves on
the basis of an age-based identity. Their activism against ageism aimed to not only
attack portrayals of dependency, debility, and derisory old age, but demonstrate them to
be false through their strength and success. These were radical acts of rethinking old
age identity and agency. Even second-wave feminist thinkers who inspired the older
white women who constituted the core of much of the organizing around age had
portrayed their aging with a sense of mourning and loss. Simone de Beauvoir’s second
major theoretical work, The Coming of Age (1972), written when she was 54, used her
formula of “contrasting the marginalized Other (the old) with the norm (the young and
male)”to theorize the cultural situation that attached disparaging meanings to the
demeaned and negated older Other (Lynne Segal 2013,9–10; Roberta Maierhofer
2000). But at the same time, the book also revealed de Beauvoir’s personal dread and
loathing of her own aging body (Lynne. Segal 2013,9–10), and an “unrelievedly
pessimistic view”of old age (Kathleen Woodward 1994,3
1–38).
While radically reimagining old age, most of the activists and advocates against
ageism in the 1970s and 80s fell into an “interest-group liberalism”(Cole 1993, 234),
2A. CIAFONE

fighting for their interests as an identity-specific group, often without recognition of
their mutual dependence and effect on others. Such critiques of ageism neglected to
identify how it was produced by larger systems of oppression from which many had
already benefited and many others continued to suffer, if under different terms. The
American Association of Retired Persons and the National Council on Aging, two of the
most prominent senior citizen interest groups became such vocal critics of ageism (Bill
O’Hallaren 1977, 21).
The Gray Panthers: age and youth in action
Also concerned with ageism in the media at this time, the Gray Panthers were a different
beast. Most of their attention was focused on issues of structural inequality and inter-
generational coalition. The movement mobilized older people and their younger allies
around the motto “age and youth in action”in the fight for age-related causes like
universal healthcare, fair housing, social security, and an end to mandatory retirement,
but also on a broader social justice platform calling for an end to the war in Vietnam and
U.S. militarism, economic inequality, and persistent racism and sexism in the U.S. To the
Gray Panthers, media ageism like racism, sexism, and classism not only justified existing
hegemonic structures of power and discrimination by representing older people as
mentally and physically inferior, it also limited their potential economic, political, and
social power. And by producing a sense of disgust and fear around aging and older
people, ageism restricted the possibility for multi-generational solidarities to fight for
social justice.
Through the group’s national Media Watch Task Force and projects by its network of
decentralized local Gray Panther groups around the country, the Panthers took on the
representation of the elderly in the media. The group received training from the Council
on Interracial Books for Children, which monitored children’s books for racism and
pushed for greater representation of children of color in the virtually whites-only field
of representation in children’s literature. Media Watch argued that image-making insti-
tutions influenced societal perceptions and public policy; their perpetuation of stereo-
types and erasure of elders both had psychological effects on older people consuming
the media and affected society’s understanding of the place and worth of older people
(Bobbi Granger 1972). They conducted media literacy and education campaigns and
monitored the media for stereotypes, even more commonly, old people’s absence and
“symbolic annihilation.”But they also sought structural reform of U.S. media, and as such
strategized tactical media interventions, lobbied media industries and the government,
and produced their own content to construct an alternative vision of aging and broader
social change.
The elderly activists of the Gray Panthers came of age in (or “were children of,”to extend
the age-based assumptions of a youthful vanguard of a period’s social, political, and cultural
change) the “Old Left”labor radicalisms, socialist and communist parties, and fights for
economic, racial, and gender justice of the 1930s. But they did not “age out”of left activism,
instead influencing and being influenced by the New Left social movements of people of
color, women, LGBT groups, students, and anti-war activists. The Gray Panthers declared
their affinity and affiliation with these movements of the long 1960s: “We identify with these
other liberation groups and collectively reflect the widespread nature of the status
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3

disadvantaged and call for a massive redistribution of opportunities and privileges as well as
major ideological and cultural changes”(Gray Panther Manual 1978, 18). The Panthers
“developed as a liberation movement and not as a social organization,”the group’s1978
Gray Panther Manual asserted of its revolutionary grassroots action orientation. The move-
ment took on a consciously decentralized structure in which members organized in local
“networks”and maintained a loose relationship with a National Steering Committee and
each other through conferences, their newspaper Gray Panther Network, and joint direct
actions. At its peak in 1980 there were at least 7,000 active members, 122 local networks,
60,000 individual contributors and even more self-identified members (Roger Sanjek 2012,
233–235). The Panthers articulated powerful structural critiques of U.S. society, while also
taking on the new cultural and personal politics, modes of analysis, and protest that
characterized the New Left.
2
One of these was an activism around representation. Parallel to and even before the
bulk of academic discourse on representation, activists were analyzing and organizing
around the portrayal of disempowered groups by the media. The Panthers’Media Watch
was a part of the larger Broadcast Reform Movement in the 1970s and 80s with various
groups concerned with the underserving and exclusion of people by the media and
broadcasters’failure to fulfill their public mandate (Anne W. Branscomb and Maria
Savage 1978). This moment of U.S. media activism is often overlooked, appearing at
the tail end of the liberal corporate state and staring down the face of rising neoliber-
alism in a decade otherwise known for general political and social conservatism.
Gray Panthers Growl Back at TV
The Gray Panthers had a lot to growl about on TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On
the entire prime time TV schedule in 1975, older characters accounted for only 7 roles of
any significance (Sanjek 2012, 54). Characters in prime time and late-night comedies
especially raised their ire: the overtly ageist “Old Man”(the character’s only name), the
“Mama”character, as well the frequent old lady minstrel performances by much of the
cast on the Carol Burnett Show, for example (Bragger to Taylor 1975;GP Network
1977a, 6). The middle-aged (and older) man dressed in “granny drag”was a common
trope in such comedy. Johnny Carson’s longstanding Tonight Show character, “Aunt
Blabby,”was representative—confused, anachronistically dressed, and infirm, and, typi-
cal of these ageist and sexist characterizations and especially angering to the Panthers,
much of the comedy was derived from mocking her randy interest in sex through the
presumed absurdity that she might be a sexual being (Lydia Bragger Undated).
This was the type that Maggie Kuhn was casting herself against when she walked
onto Carson’s stage in 1977 to call him out on his “Aunt Blabby”characterization. Gray
Panthers founder and figurehead Maggie Kuhn had become a media darling herself with
media outlets relishing in the contrast of her diminutive size and gray hair against her
large-scale political critique and direct, energetic presentation. When Carson wanted to
have her on the show, she engagingly gave him a lesson in ageism while also using it as
a stage for presenting a broader social justice platform of Panther concerns including
universal healthcare, expansion of social security and services, and housing reform. She
became a repeat guest, ended the segments on her own terms no matter how Carson
might try to direct the conversation, giving him a Panthers pin, or t-shirt (often
4A. CIAFONE

physically expanding out of her designated space to foist the Panthers accoutrements
onto Carson’s body). Over time, she disappeared “Aunt Blabby”from Carson’s routine.
In fact, the Gray Panthers came into being with and through media representation—
like many of the New Left movements that demonstrated a postmodern politics of not
just being reflected in the media, but making themselves with it, and trying to make
change through it. In Roger Sanjek’s(2012,27–29) account of the history of the Gray
Panthers, he marks its launch through Maggie Kuhn’s public naming of the group at
a 1972 press conference, when it was still composed of just a several dozen militants in
progressive church and community groups, hailing it into being for a larger group of
activists and like-minded people who were looking for such a formation to help network
their critiques, but were not yet an organized force. News stories about the upstart
Panthers appeared immediately in newspapers nationwide, followed by invitations from
NBC and CBS’s morning shows, and an “avalanche”of media requests for Kuhn (“The
Panthers and the Press . . . ”1972). Up until that point, a group of about 100 people had
been meeting and organizing as the Consultation of Older Adults, a name that derived
from its origins amongst aging staffof the Presbyterian Church, and did not reflect the
radicalism of even this group’s early actions (Sanjek 2012, 29). Naming the “Gray
Panthers”was itself a semiotic act, appropriating the power and visibility of the Black
Panthers.
3
That revolutionary organization not only changed American society by having
direct effect on the lives of many urban African Americans, but also had broad cultural
impact through the power of its statements, actions, and representations (Jane Rhodes
2007). After some debate over the name change, Kuhn reported that “‘the name has
delighted most of the members of the Consultation [and] conveys an immediate
message to society and to old people ourselves . . . we decided if people are turned
offby the name, we should not try to change their minds. Obviously, they are not ready
for action that creates a stir and changes things’” (Sanjek 2012, 23). The Gray Panther
Manual (1978) deconstructed the name further: “the word ‘panther’expresses our will-
ingness to be radical and action oriented.”Responding to some younger Panthers’fears
that the emphasis on the word “gray”signaled a minimization of the group’s interge-
nerational membership and broader social justice mission beyond age-related issues, the
Manual insisted that “gray”did “not necessarily stand for gray hair. It means the
mingling of all kinds of people; rich, poor, black or white, all working together in
common effort to make our whole society more responsive”
4
while also serving as “an
affirmation of the dignity of ageing”(21).
Television constructed the image of the Gray Panthers while they critiqued it. Kuhn
appeared as a guest of host Candice Bergen on Saturday Night Live’sfirst Christmas
episode in 1975. During a sincere interlude between comedic sketches, Kuhn gave
a lesson about ageism and the Panther sign-off:“Offyour asses!”This was just one of
numerous appearances by Kuhn on a range of TV programs in the group’s early years. In
addition to her visits to Carson, she was a guest on multiple episodes of the Phil
Donahue show (twice in 1973), on David Susskind’s interview show, and was the subject
of a 1975 Studs Terkel TV documentary (1975). In fact, four documentaries about the
Gray Panthers were produced in just four years (Sanjek 2012, 53). Many of these
appearances were with progressive media producers receptive to Panther issues. But it
didn’t hurt that Kuhn was an appealing media persona: physically diminutive with white
hair tied up in a bun, she looked like a granny but spoke trenchantly about radical
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5

political ideas. The media seemed to relish in what it perceived as an intriguing, even
entertaining, incongruity. If it was this presumption of contradiction that got Kuhn on
screen, she used the airtime to call it out as prejudicial, or dispel it in practice.
The Gray Panthers are watching
In response to these problems in the portrayal of old people and the structural inequal-
ity in U.S. broadcasting, the Gray Panthers embarked on a media research, literacy, and
empowerment campaign, holding conferences, workshops and producing the remark-
able Gray Panther Media Guide in 1983. The Guide was meant to move people to
“catalytic action”around media power and representation (GP Media Guide 1983, iii).
Focusing primarily on radio and TV, it provided a history and political economy lesson
on U.S. broadcasting’s public interest mandate, the FCC, as well as contemporary
deregulation under the Reagan administration (GP Media Guide 1983,iv–v).
The Guide also gave members strategies for analyzing the representation of old
people—how to identify and critique common stereotypes, distortions, and exclusions
of old age. It provided suggestions for organizing a media watch group within the Gray
Panther’s local networks, recommendations of books and materials for consciousness
raising, and sample monitoring forms. And it offered examples of such networks’work—
the San Francisco Panthers’research around ageism in popular music on the radio; the
Twin Cities Panthers’monitoring of newspaper coverage of the elderly; etc.
The monitoring and critique of ageism in the media was also a form of activism for many
of its members. The Media Watch was a way for those who were unable to attend Panther
protests or meetings, perhaps because they were disabled, unable to drive, or ill, to take
action against the marginalization and stereotyping of the aged. They could monitor the
media and voice their discontent in letter writing to the Panthers, media companies, and
regulators. The media activism also reflected the social location of many older people, who,
as a result of housing patterns, inequality, ageism, and ableism, and their perpetuation in
public policies, found themselves isolated and segregated, relying on TV and radio for
a sense of social engagement. As a Californian media watcher explained “‘I’mwheelchair
bound and my only enjoyment is watching television. But I only get frustrated and
depressed when I see the way they make us elderly look’” (Sanjek 2012,54).
In 1975 the Gray Panthers received fifty letters a month from media watchers nationwide
and regular reports from Panther networks on their media monitoring and production
projects (Rita Ciolli 1976). Panther media watchers pointed out advertising’sglorification of
youth and the treatment of age as something to fight off. They documented portrayals of
older characters as meddlesome, crotchety, and inept, as well as jokes about older people
being senile, infirm, and sexless in nightly comedies. But even more frustrating, they saw
that few old people even existed on TV: “There are more than 32 million persons in the
U.S. aged 60 or over—15 per cent of the population. Yet, with a few exceptions, they are the
invisible people of videoland,”Media Watch Chairperson Lydia Bragger wrote (1976,20).
Media Watch also encouraged its local networks to influence media production and
produce their own (GP Media Guide 1983, 43); to be “heard and seen”where they were
so often erased (GP Media Guide 1983, 3), providing detailed steps for creating press
releases, public service announcements, radio programs, and public access TV shows.
The group followed up with training workshops (GP Media Watch 1979) and experience-
6A. CIAFONE

sharing from models produced in various networks, which were reported on in the
group’s bi-monthly newspaper, Gray Panther Network (Jim Davis 1986a;1986b). As
a result, Panthers not only asserted their presence in established media outlets by
encouraging coverage of their events and actions, publishing articles, and making TV
and radio appearances (GP Network 1989, 10), they also created their own radio and TV
shows in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, the Bay Area, and LA (GP Network
1977b, 7), and most networks produced newsletters and print campaigns.
The Gray Panthers sought to increase the self-regulation of the representation of old
age by the media, directly lobbying the Code Board of the broadcasting trade group, the
National Association of Broadcasters, in 1975. As Media Watch head Bragger reported:
“‘When we entered the board room, there were 25 network executives—all white men—
and 2 women secretaries, both white. No one smiled when I remarked that the make-up
of the board reflected the sexism and racism of our society”(Bragger 1976, 20). But by
the end of the campaign the NAB had been persuaded to add “age”to the list of identity
characteristics requiring precautionary “sensitivity”alongside “physical or mental afflic-
tions or deformities . . . sex, race, color, creed, religious functionaries or rites, or national
or ethnic derivation”in its 1976 Television Code (GP Media Guide 1983, 4).
Unlike critics of ageism who argued simply for the education of mediamakers in order to
replace negative stereotypes of old age with more positive representations, the Gray
Panthers sought broader structural changes to empower more elderly mediamakers, chal-
lenge the profit motivation of U.S. broadcasting, and create alternative media outlets. They
targeted changes to media policy and regulation. Pressured by such activism, the House of
Representatives’Select Committee on Aging called a hearing on “Age Stereotyping and
Television”in September 1977. Kuhn and Media Watch Head Lydia Bragger testified along-
side a former FCC commissioner-turned-broadcast-reformer, as well as very defensive
executives from all three broadcast networks and the largest TV entertainment production
company. Kuhn asserted the conclusions of Panther Media Watchers:
What do we see? When old people are portrayed, we are unusually stereotyped. In our
appearance our faces are blank and expressionless, our bodies are bent over, and the ‘senior
shuffle’is just a step away from the embalming room. Our clothing also reflects low self-esteem.
Old men are shown wearing baggy, unpressed suits. Old women’s clothing is frumpy and ill-
fitting. Our voices are high-pitched and querulous . . . We are shown as stubborn, rigid, inflexible,
forgetful, and confused ... old people are depicted as dependent, powerless, wrinkled babies,
unable to contribute to society. We believe pervasive agism in our society is a destructive
stereotyping that is damaging to the whole society, as well as old people.
The Panthers proposed concrete, material recommendations including the elimination of
mandatory retirement for media workers, employing people over 65 in creative positions,
and regulatory review of the representation of the elderly. They demanded a more active
FCC by requiring greater investment in public service and public access media outlets and
programming for underserved groups rather than just the market segments deemed most
commercially profitable. As the Reagan administration pushed for the deregulation of
broadcast TV and the growth of the cable industry in the 1980s, the Panthers became
vocal critics of corporate media’s failure to serve the public interest.
The Panthers also came to the defense of TV shows they felt drew critical attention to
the experience of old age in the U.S. A 1979 episode of CBS’sMary Tyler Moore Show-
spinoffdramedy, Lou Grant, featured a fictional undercover investigation of the paucity
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7

of regulation and abundance of dehumanizing practices at nursing homes. The show
caused public outcry when it aired, and a defensive nursing home industry went on the
attack via its lobbying group the American Health Care Association, which persuaded
the likes of Kellogg’s, Oscar Meyer, and Prudential Insurance to drop advertising from
the re-run episode in an effort to stop it from airing and contain its social critique
(Letters and Clippings 1979a; Letters and Clippings 1979b; Letters and Clippings.
1979–1980). Media Watch defended the show in letters to CBS and the FCC, and
launched a boycott of the companies involved in the show’s“censorship.”The group
used the opportunity to denounce the deleterious effects of profit-motivated corporate
interests in both the suppression of public communication and the exploitation of older
people in residential care (GP Network 1979b, 10).
Media Watch directly engaged the TV industry itself. It targeted CBS, which aired The
Carol Burnett Show (whose portrayals the Panthers found especially repulsive), pushing
executives and producers to consider the negative characterization of old people, and
even more importantly, their dramatic absence. CBS invited the group to meet with
producers and Program Practices, and the Panthers began reviewing scripts by request.
Media Watch consulted on age-related content like documentary A Matter of Indifference
on nursing home neglect. Panthers also advised TV shows in which age was not a central
theme, often after waging a critique of them, such as PBS’s 1970s evening comedic talk
show Over Easy (Kuhn served on the program’s advisory board and the Berkeley
Panthers attended tapings after publicly criticizing a Phyllis Diller segment). They devel-
oped a relationship with Virginia Carter, Vice President of Norman Lear’s production
company (and feminist activist; president of the LA chapter of the National Organization
for Women) and for the first time were asked to consult on fictional, prime time TV
shows, “a breakthrough for influencing program content,”providing comments on
episodes of All in the Family and later One Day at a Time (GP Network 1978,5;
“National Gray Panther Media Watch Project”1978; Bragger to Carter 1978). In the
early 1980s the Panthers considered opening “Gray Panther Media Centers”in LA and
New York, to “test the media’s willingness to be educated,”by organizing “research,
archives, exhibits, and other resources in addition to providing consulting services.”
Media Watch Chair Bragger imagined a “network of centers . . . criss-cross[ing] the
country”for monitoring and advising “at the community level as well”(GP Network
1981, 1, 17). The centers never materialized, but Panthers, especially those near produc-
tion centers in LA and New York, continued to organize around ageism and educate
mediamakers.
Gray Panthers adjust their eyes to TV’s Adjustment to Wrinkles
By the mid-1980s, TV screens were presenting a different version of old age. Newspapers
blared headlines “Prime Time ‘Discovers’Older Women”and “TV Adjusts to Wrinkles,”
acknowledging that “on prime time, age 60 has been equated with living death . . . older
persons were either invisible or insipid . . . .depicted as pathetic, dottering, helpless, and
senile, and . . . the butt of cheap jokes,”and claiming there was a change underway,
a“waning devotion to youth”(Howard Rosenberg 1985; Jonathan Peterson 1985). It was
called a “golden age”of television portrayals of older people with several prime time
network shows featuring older characters in major roles (John Bell 1992, 306). A 1986
8A. CIAFONE

report from the National Commission on Working Women, which also followed ageism
and sexism in the media, almost cheered: “the number of female characters older than
50 has tripled since 1975, with 19 female characters older than 50 on 16 prime-time
shows.”While many of those characterizations weren’t ideal from the perspective of the
group, the mere existence of older women on TV was an improvement. Of all the new
shows, “Golden Girls, in its frankness about aging, stands alone,”the report said (LA Times
1986, G10). And Gray Panther Media Watchers were watching.
According to industry narrative, the mandate to make a show about older women had
come directly from NBC’s programming chief, Brandon Tartikoff, who cited the aging
demographics of the U.S. population (Todd Gold 1986, 60). As the Panthers had long
pointed out, no one was making TV for them. Nielsen ratings demonstrated the vitality of
this market—with over-65 viewers, The Golden Girls ranked second only to Murder, She
Wrote, which featured its own elderly female lead, and was sixth overall with viewers of all
ages (in 1988–1989; Jake Harwood and Howard Giles 1992,405–406). So, in the late 1980s
two of the six most popular shows had elderly female protagonists.
Sex and the Golden Girl
Leaders of Media Watch seemed to appreciate The Golden Girls, with 82-year-old Media
Watch Chair Bragger publicly praising the show (Betty Ommerman 1986, A23). “I think it
makes people feel better about older people and about getting old themselves, which is
a great service. It’s a more realistic image, and that’s what we’re after,’” she proclaimed
(Gold 1986, 60). Gray Panthers Network noted the focus on single, older women who
were living together and flourishing, which corresponded with Kuhn’s early promotion
of shared housing and living arrangements (GP Network 1986, 8). Bragger did take issue
with the title’s reference to the main characters as “Girls,”presumably because it was
a denial of adult womanhood and a comic commentary on their actual old age: “It’s
a shame that ‘Women’does not have the same appeal as ‘Girls.’We need to change
that”(Bragger to Jenny and Carol Jean 1985). But such nomenclature also contributed to
the sense of the characters as active, flirtatious, almost living out a second adolescence,
which seemed to contribute to the appeal of the show.
Some critics and academics argued that shows like TheGoldenGirlsput elderly characters
in the spotlight only to mock them for engaging in behaviors, most notably sexual ones,
considered to be uncharacteristic of their age (Robert W. Kubey 1980; George Gerbner 1997;
Harwood and Giles 1992). Counter-stereotypical behaviors—their open and ribald discus-
sion of sex and sexuality, attention to physical appearance, and active sex lives—were often
the subject of humor, these scholars argued, thus further affirming that the only alternatives
to the stereotypical conception of aging were laughable.
The representation of old people as sexless and impotent was a major point of issue for
the Media Watch. The Gray Panther Media Guide emphasized a concern about the common-
place and pernicious characterization of older people as “without love or sex”(12). The Guide
specifically noted the prevalence of “older people ridiculed when they show sexual feelings
(dirty old man/woman syndrome). When there is an age difference in romantic relation-
ships, older women are not accorded the same respect as older men”(24–25).
The Golden Girls, in contrast, had rich romantic and sex lives, which were worthy of humor
and far outweighed some laughs at their expense. Sex for older women was fun and funny, as
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9

suggested by one of Kuhn’s most cited quotes: “sex and learning end only when rigor mortis
sets in.”Challenges in the sexual lives of older women had been a longstanding issue for Kuhn
who authored a report she referred to as “sexandthesinglewoman.”As Betty Friedan recalled
it, Kuhn “interrupted the polite jargon”about old women and sex. At a Washington conference
on aging she stood up and asked with whom old women were going to have sex when so
many men their age were dead and the remaining ones partnering with younger women: “if
we were going to have sex, it would have to be with younger men, someone else’shusband,
other women, masturbation,”all options Kuhn celebrated. She would joyously explain her own
non-exclusive arrangement with a younger, married man (Betty Friedan 1993,24–25). And
later with another man fifty years her junior (Attie and Goldwater 2002). Kuhn’s vocal stance on
the breadth of sexual identities and relationships was not held by all Panthers, but seems to
have appealed to many, and Media Watch was especially attuned to stereotyping of sex and
sexuality in old age.
Much of the critique about The Golden Girls’portrayal of sexuality has been linked to
the episodic nature of the sitcom. Only rarely did a romantic interest last more than an
episode, so there were always new men floating in and out of the women’s lives, which
some critics read as lack of success in love and making aged sex a point of humor. But
what was success in love and sex for the Golden Girls and their viewers? “Successful”
relationships, as defined by critics, would have jeopardized the very thing that audiences
loved about The Golden Girls—the Girls’living and loving arrangements—and the show’s
challenge to normative conceptions of companionship and sex in older age. From the
first plot of the pilot, the constant looming threat of the diegesis was that a romance
might break up the women’s living arrangement and thus bring down the structure of
the whole show.
5
So, the strictures of the episodic sitcom freed the Golden Girls from
mandatory monogamy (let alone celibacy) and hailed the gray women who watched
them to imagine and root for an alternative old age with vibrant, dynamic sex lives.
6
But
such characterizations also provided a new expectation for a successful old age: sex.
Sex and successful aging
The sexualizing of the Golden Girls countered the asexuality or deviancy of the stereo-
typical portrayals of old people, with the vitality of the show’s older characters evi-
denced by their sexual activity. But this “positive”challenge to stereotypical portrayals
also communicated a standard that was socially or physically difficult and perhaps even
undesirable for many older people. Sexuality became another angle through which
older people could demonstrate their “success”at aging, an element of the emerging
gerontological paradigm and larger political discourse of “successful,”“productive,”and
“active”aging. Such positive aging discourses had long challenged the assumption of
old age as a period of “disengagement”with others, but now in the 1980s and 1990s
became a dominant way of framing older people as living “positive healthy independent
lives.”Ideologically, positive aging approaches set new standards and expectations for
elder lives, individualized definitions of success, and neglected the “larger structural
issues and differences in old age”(such as employment discrimination, a weak welfare
state, race, class, gender, dis/ability, frailty, etc.), and stigmatized dependency amongst
the old as a lack of positive activity. Such discourses that could be mobilized in
a neoliberal anti-welfare agenda to justify cuts to support as well as compel the old
10 A. CIAFONE

into their own self-care and independence (Stephen Katz 2002, 138, 147; Debbie
Laliberte Rudman 2006, 184, 197; Christopher Gilleard and Paul Higgs 2000).
The Boston Gray Panthers saw these problematics in these new Golden Girls, analyz-
ing the show as part of the emerging trope of the “wealthy elder”on TV. This repre-
sentation was consistent with that being promoted by the advertising industry and
commercial TV which “emphasized the vast ‘discretionary income’of elders and misused
statistics to give the impression that elders are a wealthy class of people willing to spend
freely,”in order to market advertising services to companies interested in selling to older
people. They saw this new portrayal as posturing as empowerment, when in actuality it
was politically dangerous. These successful, vibrant “wealthy elders”were the ideal that
validated the derision of those that did not meet the new successful standard. The
Boston Panthers worried that “slick TV characters like the Golden Girls who assume no
financial stress and no concern about society, juxtaposed against the standard stereo-
type of frumpy, inept, grouchy elderly, unable to maintain self-care”perpetuated this
dichotomy. Such characterization “obliterates the reality of those who are below poverty
level,”undermining the fights for socio-economic justice for older people and the
potential for solidarity with others, even justifying threats to entitlements which come
to seem unnecessary if elders are wealthy, independent, and successful (Panther Tracks
1986, 7). They put out a call for members to watch the show and report back (GP
Network 1986, 8).
7
But the Panthers were not uniform in their concern about older
people’s social power being linked to their perceived economic power or their con-
gruence with standards of productivity and success defined by younger society. Media
Watch head Bragger frequently referenced and promoted the growing power of the
“‘gray’market”in consumerist terms in pushes for more “positive”representations from
media industries: “‘As the media realize older people have money to spend, there will be
a more positive approach to the way they are portrayed . . . the over-sixty-five population
is a sixty-million-dollar market’” (Ommerman 1986, A23).
This was the bind of challenging ageism with more “positive”visions of aging and old age
—as with other stereotypical characterizations. As Herman Gray’s classic analysis of The Cosby
Show, which functioned in a similar way as a corrective to existing African American repre-
sentation on TV screens around the same time in the eighties, “positive”portrayals may
counter dominant representations by presenting successful, idealized versions of black middle
class life, but they also powerfully reinforce hegemonic ideology around the conventions and
standardsofsuccess,suchthatthosewhodonot live up to them are further constructed as
failures. Not only that, such positive representations can be justifications for disregarding and
perpetuatingtheconditionsthatcontributetothatlackofrelative“success”(Herman Gray
1989). If the Cosbys could make it in America, then structural racism must not be such a big
problem. If the Golden Girls could live a vibrant later life in sunny Florida, then old age
discrimination, poverty, and physical debility must not be major concerns. Such positive
representations were concomitant with the “successful,”“active,”“productive”aging para-
digm that began to emerge at the same time.
The Golden Girls episodes sometimes echoed the wider concerns of the Gray Panthers,
albeit palatably broadcast to serve the advertising imperative of commercial TV. The
protagonists were thrust together out of economic necessity—none could afford to live
on their own, at least not in the lush standards of their Miami home—and age
discrimination, job loss, health crises, relationships with children and grandchildren,
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11

sexual health, were plotlines. The show was created and written by Susan Harris, who
had been a writer on Lear’sAll in the Family and Maude, where she penned the famous
“abortion episode.”And The Golden Girls similarly tried to marry some dramatic social
tension with a light comedic touch, regularly featuring several “social problem”episodes
in a season. But as a highly formulaic episodic sitcom, there were limits to the depth or
urgency produced around any theme. The next week the Girls would be right back at
their jokes, sitting on the sunny lanai, seemingly having forgotten the concerns of the
previous episode.
8
And even as they were sometimes portrayed as worrying about bills,
they always had an endless number of sequined gowns for dates and chocolate
cheesecakes in the fridge for post-date debriefs.
Conclusion
Productive, healthy, social, funny, and even sexually satisfied, the Golden Girls were argu-
ably “positive”prototypes of a successful, active, self-caring old age. And they were just
some of the independent, capable, admirable (and white) elderly protagonists that sud-
denly populated U.S. primetime in the 1980s; Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia had
compatriots in the no-less-than-murder-solving Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote
9
), Ben
Matlock (Matlock), and William Gillespie (In the Heat of the Night), all the more successful
because they headed some of the most successful shows on TV (Bell 1992, 306). A centrist
liberal chorus of voices against ageism in the 1980s, excluding the radical critiques of many
Gray Panthers, sang the praises of these representations.
Doing so, revealed that many of the liberal critiques of ageism were motivated by “the
same drive for accumulation of individual health and wealth, the same preoccupation with
control of the body”that drove industrial capitalist society’sageisminthefirst place (Cole
1993, 233). Throwing offportrayals of the old as sick, poor, and dependent, such campaigns
attempted to construct an old age that was “successful,”“active,”“productive,”self-reliant,
and healthy. But this positive reframing of old age and denial of dependency, even
difference, only updated earlier dichotomies of good (virtuous) and bad (deservedly miser-
able) aging. And now there were additional standards and expectations for health, wealth,
and even sex for “good, successful”aging that were not always reasonable or even desired
by all old people (Cole 1993, 233). Such standards of successful aging would become
ideological justification for threats to liberalism’s social welfare system and pit generations
against each other, threatening a vulnerable sense of mutual dependence.If the old are now
active, successful, empowered, sexy agents of their elderly futures, and focused mostly on
their own needs and concerns, perhaps they no longer need the social safety net or the
resources being paid into them by younger generations facing their own rising costs of
education, healthcare, and housing, such logics go. The ongoing success of this liberal
critique of ageism, then, necessitates its own radical movement of “age and youth in action”
against it, like the one the Gray Panthers envisioned.
Notes
1. Perhaps the twentieth century U.S.’s most prolific public intellectual of aging, Butler
characterized major periods in both the history of aging and its study with terms like
“productive aging”in the 1980s to recognize and encourage the contributions of elders
12 A. CIAFONE

in society, and later the “longevity revolution”in the 2000s to describe the societal
challenges and possibilities of the dramatic demographic shift of population aging.
2. The movement is vastly understudied—only one monograph exists, Roger Sanjek’sGray
Panthers (2012)—perhaps due to academic ageism.
3. There was some direct interaction between the Black and Gray Panthers. Bobby Seale met
Kuhn and spoke to the Berkeley network and Elaine Brown and Kuhn met in Philadelphia.
Sanjek describes collaboration between the Berkeley and Oakland GP networks and the BPs:
at the suggestion of a GP during Bobby Seale’s Oakland mayoral campaign, the BPs
expanded their “survival programs”to include Project SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful
Environment) an escort service to protect senior citizens on Social Security check day; GPs
donated materials to the BP School in Oakland; in 1977 the GP Berkeley network’s Over 60
Health Clinic planned to rent space from the BPs, but the BPs eventually decided to use the
space themselves (Sanjek 2012,71–73).
4. While the GP’splatform was concerned with racial justice, and each local network had
adifferent racial composition based on location, the Panthers were an overwhelmingly
white group. Network’s publication of thirty portraits of Panthers “reflect[ed] the move-
ment’s membership, twenty-two were old, five young, and three middle-aged (in their
fifties). Two-thirds were women, and one-third men. One was African American, the others
white”(Sanjek 2012, 6). The National Steering Committee was eager to diversify its member-
ship and while networks purposely held meetings in black churches and senior housing
complexes and libraries in multi-racial neighborhoods (Sanjek 2012, 71), they were mostly
unsuccessful in fostering the leadership or meeting the needs of non-white communities.
But they were vocally committed to anti-racist politics, and successful at building coalitions.
At the movement’s origin, it helped organize a “Black House”conference to counter the
White House Conference on Aging, and members subsequently participated in a Minority
Elders Coalition and worked with the National Caucus of the Black Aged. Panthers of all
races participated in non-age-related activism, often with a focus on racial justice. Jackson,
Mississippi Panther Eddie Sandifer, featured in Network, was a self-identified white, gay man,
and not only a licensed nursing home administrator advocating for nursing home reform,
but also an organizer around mental health, police brutality (waged “against Blacks and
Gays”), Medicaid protections, confronting the KKK, and “working for economic democracy,
redistribution of wealth, and to crush oppression”(1979a, 12).
5. Thomas Küpper calls this a “successful conclusion”to a “failed flirt”(Thomas Küpper 2016,262).
6. Scholars have examined the show’saffirmation of female sexuality and homosociality, and
potential for queer readings (Mimi White 1987, 162; Patricia Mellencamp 1992, 303;
Alexander Doty 1993,43–44; Bonnie Dow 1996, 143). They’ve also shown how the show
asserts its main characters’heterosexuality and the ways in which lesbian and gay guest
characters “contain or deflect . . . the charge of lesbianism”(Doty 1993,43–44). Shows like
TGG “validate women’s bonding as a form of social stability, a viable and attractive alter-
native to the traditional family, and even hint at the possibility of lesbian lifestyles—at least
as far as possible within dominant ideology”(White 1987, 162). Writers including David
Halperin 2012, Eleanor Patterson 2016, and Jim Colucci 2006 also see the pleasures of
queering TGGs’insistent heterosexuality.
7. Neither the GP National Steering Committee nor the GP of Greater Boston archives contain
the viewer reports, so we are left with only summaries.
8. Mellencamp (1992)notes the characters are static and “frozen into a typology”(198), which
limits character and story development.
9. See Mellencamp’sreading of Murder, She Wrote’s“fantasy of old age”of “older women, and
men, as independent, surrounded by a stable and supportive community, an extended
family without economic woes, illness, loneliness, and boredom”(1992, 307).
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 13

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Media Studies for their generous and
generative feedback, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for its support for this
project, as well as Symbol Lai, Gregory Laynor, Jessica Holden, and Jonothan Lewis for their
archival research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Notes on contributor
Amanda Ciafone, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. E-mail: aciafone@illinois.edu
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