Kuhn, Margaret Eliza (“Maggie”)

(b. 3 August 1905 in Buffalo, New York; d. 22 April 1995 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), crusader against age discrimination who helped found the Gray Panthers, an activist group dedicated to improving the lives of older Americans.

Maggie Kuhn was the elder of Minnie Louise Kooman and Samuel Frederick Kuhn’s two children. Her father managed the Memphis, Tennessee, office of the conservative Bradstreet Company (later Dun and Bradstreet), but both Maggie and her brother, Samuel Kooman, were born in their grandmother Kooman’s Buffalo, New York, home because Minnie did not want to bear her children in the segregated South.

Samuel Kuhn’s job took the family to Louisville, Kentucky (1910–1915), Cleveland (1915–1930), and finally Philadelphia (1930). Maggie attended schools in Cleveland and in 1926 graduated from Flora Stone Mather, the women’s college of what is now Case Western Reserve University, where she majored in English and took sociology courses from Charles Elmer Gehlke, a forceful proponent of community activism. He introduced her to the works of August Comte, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, and class visits to city jails, sweatshops, and slums made a lasting impression. Her first job was in Cleveland with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), then an active advocate for working women and a champion of the notion that a strong group can empower the individual and change society. It marked the beginning of her long career in social activism. In 1929 the YWCA sent her to New York City for courses in social work and theology taught by the Christian activist and preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr at Columbia University Teacher’s College and Union Theological Seminary.

For the next eleven years Kuhn worked in both Cleveland and Philadelphia for the YWCA, organizing social and educational programs for young women employed in factories and low-paying clerical jobs. At the beginning of World War II she moved to New York, where she worked from 1941 to 1945 coordinating United Service Organization (USO) programs to assist female defense plant workers working in abysmal conditions. Many of these women had no place to sleep for lack of housing, and at work they handled unsafe chemicals that made their hair fall out. Working with these women made Kuhn even more aware of the life experiences of the poor and socially marginal. After the war she worked briefly in Boston for the Unitarian Church (1948–1950) before returning to Philadelphia to care for her aging parents and to be near her brother, who was institutionalized with mental illness. She joined the national staff of the Presbyterian Church’s Social Education and Action Department and edited its magazine, Social Progress, urging the church leadership to take a stand on desegregation, poverty, nuclear arms, and the aged. But in 1970, after twenty years of service and seven months before her sixty-fifth birthday, Kuhn was asked to retire.

Stunned and outraged, Kuhn joined with five friends and organized the Consultation of Older and Younger Adults for Social Change, setting up shop in 1970 in a converted janitor’s closet in the basement of Philadelphia’s Tabernacle Church. Kuhn insisted that the fledgling group represent all ages—not just the old—united by an interest in social change. Early causes included not only the elimination of mandatory retirement but also opposition to the Vietnam War. Kuhn abjured the term “senior citizen” (“old people are old,” she said) and advocated the elderly’s place at the table: “We’ll do it with militancy, demonstrations, badges—anything.” She encouraged older people to take control of their lives and to “speak out, even if your voice shakes.”

By 1971 Kuhn had gained national attention. A melee at the White House gates between Kuhn’s pickets and mounted police prompted the host of a New York television talk show, the Reverend Reuben Gums, to label them Gray Panthers. The name stuck. Kuhn appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and scolded the host for his “Aunt Blabby” portrayal, and she admonished President Gerald Ford at a White House meeting for calling her a “young lady.” “I’m an old woman,” she told him. By 1979 the group claimed 30,000 members, contributors, and supporters in thirty-two states, with 25 percent comprising Gray Panther “cubs,” or members under the age of thirty.

The Panthers became a part of the contemporary counterculture. It ran joint campaigns with Ralph Nader’s Retired Professional Action Group, the National Organization of Women, Hospice International, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, targeting nursing homes, the American Medical Association, the National Gerontological Society, and various courts, banks, and insurance companies. Spirited demonstrations and rallies called for the liberation of residents from unsafe nursing homes, an end to mandatory retirement, public ownership and control of utilities, elimination of the income cap on social security benefits, nuclear disarmament, prison reform, and a national health care program. In 1978 the World Almanac called her one of the world’s most influential people, and the Gray Panthers were publishing their own newspaper, running radio programs in several cities, conducting a media watch to monitor press coverage of old people, and producing Over Easy, a public television program on social issues. In 1981 the Gray Panthers were recognized as a nongovernmental organization and given consultant status at the United Nations. It also opened an office in Washington, D.C.

On the local level Kuhn cowed the chief executive officer of Philadelphia’s largest bank into granting no-fee money orders and free checking accounts and eased bank loan terms for people over sixty-five. Kuhn never married—“sheer luck,” she said. In her eighties she boasted of love affairs with a married minister and a man fifty years her junior. She died in her sleep in the big stone Victorian twin house she shared with several young people, just one month before she was to have been honored by a White House Conference on Aging. She had endured two muggings, bouts of cancer, mastectomies, severe arthritis, osteoporosis, and a degenerative eye ailment. But in the end, her heart just stopped. She is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

A tiny, frail-looking woman who always maintained that she was born with activism in her blood, Maggie Kuhn was an inspirational speaker and persuasive in private conversation, described as “forceful yet gracious” by Sue Leary, her personal assistant. Kuhn’s is the story of a fiercely independent woman who struggled to defend both the old and the oppressed and in the process covered a large part of the history of American social reform in the twentieth Century. She came to age sixty-five at a time when gerontologists viewed the separation of the elderly—from work, families, and communities—as the norm. Kuhn challenged the stereotypical perception of old age, empowering the elderly to take on tough social issues of the day, ranging from housing to economic justice to national health care. She never tired of articulating her outrage at society’s injustices or of fighting prejudice against the elderly. “Old people,” she said, “are the only ones who have the sense of history and the time to do their jobs.”

Papers, correspondence, photographs, and original files documenting Kuhn’s activities and the Gray Panther organization from its inception to the mid-1990s are housed in the Urban Archives, Paley Library, Temple University, Philadelphia. Personal and professional papers and letters from childhood through retirement in 1970 are located in the Presbyterian Historical Archives, Philadelphia. Her autobiography, No Stone Unturned: The Life and Times of Maggie Kuhn (1991), written with Christina Long and Laura Quinn, details her upbringing and the forces that influenced the choices she made. Her outlook on age and ageism is the focus of Maggie Kuhn on Aging (1977), edited by Dieter Hessel. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 23 April 1995). She is the subject of two film documentaries: Maggie Kuhn: Wrinkled Radical (1975), an interview with Studs Terkel; and Maggie (1994), a discussion of her intergenerational views.

Martha Monaghan Corpus