Older women's newer models: Gray is glam (Excerpt)

Christian Science Monitor - June 9, 2000

By Sara Terry
Special correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

When Marie Brenner left college in 1971, she was an ardent feminist with greasy hair and "Joan Baez clothes," who had little use for the gloved and pearl-clad women of her mother's generation.

But as she grew older - establishing a career as a writer and raising a family of her own - Ms. Brenner found herself casting about for role models. Confronting midlife questions and issues of aging, she began looking to a generation of older women.

"I was inspired by them - they were tough. They were soldiers in high heels," says Brenner, author of the bestseller, "Great Dames: What I Learned From Older Women."

As members of the baby-boom generation enter their 50s, women like Brenner who left college on a wave of feminism and went on to juggle high-powered careers with family life are redefining what it means to age. True to their 1960s roots, they're rebelling against a cultural landscape obsessed with youth - and breaking through stereotypes that equate gray with decline.

Cultural renaissance for older women: Gray is glam

Take, for example, Tyne Daly's character on the CBS drama, "Judging Amy." As played by Ms. Daly, Maxine is a gray-haired, 60ish woman who's renewed her career as a social worker and who also has a serious love interest.

There is a broad range of novels, like Margaret Drabble's, "A Natural Curiosity," which explore the ways women in midlife approach their older years.

Even Neiman Marcus ran a fashion spread in a recent cataloge that featured a silver-haired model and an accompanying essay about older women which declared, "When we become evolved enough to separate silver hair from the idea of personal decline, then we can see the color for what it is: symbolic, spiritual, splendid."


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