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Baby Boomers Refuse to Age
By Rukmini Callimachi, the Montreal Gazette
March 8, 2004
In 1970, when the law forced Maggie Kuhn to retire at age 65 from her executive position in a Philadelphia church, colleagues gave her a sewing machine as a parting gift.
She never opened it. Instead, she rebelled against everything it stood for, leading marches and staging guerrilla theatre to protest against discrimination against the elderly.
The Grey Panthers, the group she founded with a name inspired by the Black Panthers, aimed to radicalize older Americans and fight the image of the old as useless, infirm and withdrawn. The group's achievements are many, including the repeal of the mandatory-retirement law in the United States.
But the group, once a force, is in decline - from a onetime high of 60,000 members to just 22,000 today - and sociologists blame tomorrow's seniors, the baby boomers, who are still unwilling to call themselves middle-aged.
"They hear the word 'grey' and it turns them off. I think it's such a juvenile attitude," said May Hollinshead, the 90-year-old president of the North Jersey chapter of the Grey Panthers.
It's a paradox, said Robert Butler, founder of the National Institute on Aging, since the boomers, a group representing a third of the United States population, will put an unprecedented strain on social services when they become too old to care for themselves. They stand the most to gain from groups like the Panthers, who continue to fight for nursing-home and health-care reform.
The Panthers' leadership agrees that the group is at a crossroads. "We're going to have to do things differently," said Susan Murany, executive director of the Grey Panthers' office in Washington, D.C. "The baby boomers have celebrated youth; if you want to attract folks, you can't set it up at the senior
centre."
The group's troubles are nothing new to the AARP, the largest senior organization in The United States with a membership of 35 million.
Several years ago, when studies showed it was failing to reach the boomers, the AARP stopped spelling out its name, the American Association of Retired Persons, to avoid mention of the word "retired."
"The boomers want to be seen as vibrant - and we need to be responsive to that," said Christine Donohoo, a director of AARP's membership division.
A different type of organization is taking the world by storm. Its success holds clues to what the boomers are seeking.
The Red Hat Society didn't start out four years ago to be a movement, but a play group for women over 50. Its stated aim is to wear fancy red fedoras and matching boas, have fun and greet age with humour, verve and
elan.
It has struck a chord, ballooning to 18,755 chapters in 21 countries. "We now have 400,000 members," said Sue Ellen Cooper, its 59-year-old "Exalted Queen Mother" in Fullerton, Calif.
Butler sees groups such as these as symptomatic of the boomers' agenda of staying young.
"I really see them as a generation at risk," he said, citing a study which shows that boomers have not saved for old age, even as census figures indicate theirs is the generation that will break the back of social security.
The Red Hat Society, meanwhile, fights off advances by various senior-oriented groups and actively eschews serious causes. "That would be the death of us. Our goal is to be a recess for women," Cooper said.
Copyright © 2004
Global Action on Aging
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