It was the right moment. The President, Ronald Reagan, was a septuagenarian who made a show of chopping wood and riding horses. More generally, healthy seniors—the “wellderly”—were on the rise. Popular culture’s usual parade of toothless codgers and crones increasingly seemed obsolete. “The Golden Girls” (1985-92) joined a silver surge of television shows featuring energetic older protagonists, including “Murder, She Wrote” (1984-96), “Matlock” (1986-95), and Susan Harris’s “Empty Nest” (1988-95).
“The Golden Girls” was particularly adored. It ranked among the ten most watched shows for six of its seven seasons. Emmys rained down: three awards for best actress in a comedy, in three consecutive years, for White, McClanahan, and Arthur, and a supporting-actress award for Getty. In ratings and acclaim, “The Golden Girls” blew “Miami Vice” and its speedboats clear out of the water.
Not bad for a show that was almost militantly unglamorous. The Golden Girls had old-lady hair, wore loose clothes, and joked about their faltering bodies. A much loved scene, written by Harris, has the Girls considering the effect of various body positions on the sagging of their faces and breasts. There was a burlesque quality to this but also defiant pride. Here was a senior subculture, with its own fashion, politics, and humor.
It also had some continuities with what the historian Steven Mintz calls the “youthquake” of the postwar years. The baby boomers developed “intense generational self-consciousness,” Mintz writes, as they came to identify more with their peers than with their parents. Something similar happened at the other end of the age spectrum—a geriatric rumble. “Older Americans are now historically in the process of changing from a category into a group,” the sociologist Arnold Rose observed, presciently, in 1965.
The emergence of senior politics is chronicled in James Chappel’s new book, “Golden Years” (Basic). Chappel, who’s a historian at Duke (I overlapped with him briefly at another university), describes how older people changed the narrative about aging and created “perhaps the most powerful interest group in twentieth-century America.” Today, he notes, they receive about a third of federal spending. “Golden Years” is a highly perceptive account, the most substantial one we have, of how seniors rose to become a dominant force in the United States.
“The Golden Girls” captured this gung-ho spirit. Estelle Getty recalled letters from older viewers who found the show “tremendously liberating.” Yet, with the boomers now fully in the Golden Girl age range—the youngest are now turning sixty—it’s worth asking where this liberation leads.
