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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2025
This article explores the role of race in discussions of women and aging in the early twentieth century. It first examines the uses of whiteness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s problematic defense of older women, and then compares it with works by Harlem educator Elise McDougald. It investigates McDougald’s use of different life stages to disrupt anti-Black representations that stand in stark contrast to Gilman’s project. The article incorporates history and theories of aging, gender, and race, as well as literary analysis, to evaluate the long-standing and under-theorized importance of race in constructs of age and aging.
1 See, for example, the works of Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); and Gullette, “Inventing the ‘Postmaternal’ Woman, 1898–1927: Idle, Unwanted and Out of a Job,” Feminist Studies, 21, 2 (Summer 1995), 221–53; as well as Kathleen Woodward, especially Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and her edited collection Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Marilyn Pearsall’s edited collection The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (New York: Routledge, 1997).
2 See, for example, Harm-Peer Zimmermann, “Alienation and Alterity: Age in the Existentialist Discourse on Others,” Journal of Aging Studies, 39 (Dec. 2016), 83–95; Emmanuelle Tulle, “Theorizing Embodiment and Aging,” in Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, eds., Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology (New York: Routledge, 2015), 125–32; Silke van Dyk, “The Othering of Old Age: Insights from Postcolonial Studies,” Journal of Aging Studies, 39 (Dec. 2016), 109–20; Sweta Rajan-Rankin, “Race, Embodiment and Later Life: Re-animating Aging Bodies of Color,” Journal of Aging Studies, 45 (June 2018), 32–38; Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, “Embodiment: Introduction,” in Twigg and Martin, Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 123–24; Twigg and Martin, “The Field of Cultural Gerontology,” in ibid., 1–15; Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, “The Cultural Turn in Gerontology,” in ibid., 29–36; Saloua Chaouni, Ann Claeys, Jennifer van den Broeke, and Liesbeth De Donder, “Doing Research on the Intersection of Ethnicity and Old Age: Key Insights from Decolonial Frameworks,” Journal of Aging Studies, 56 (March 2021), 100909.
3 For more historical/literary works see Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Sari Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Fiction and the Unmaking of Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For works focussing specifically on Black subjecthood and age see Nazera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Crystal Lynn Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Frederick C. Knight, Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
4 See Gullette, “Inventing the ‘Postmaternal’ Woman.”
5 See Knight, chapter 2; as well as the work of Nazera Sadiq Wright and Crystal Lynn Webster on Black girlhood and childhood.
6 Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, for example, makes age as well as life stages crucial to his argument for abolition.
7 The works of Sari Edelstein and Corinne T. Field have been instrumental in thinking through race and aging, especially in white women’s narratives.
8 See Knight, chapter 3.
9 According to prominent age studies scholar Margaret Gullette, “Early in the twentieth century, a problematical new midlife female ‘character’ appeared in Anglo-American cultural representation.” See Gullette, “Inventing the ‘Postmaternal’ Woman,” 425. More recently, Melanie Dawson has argued that beginning in the early twentieth century, American literature “was consistently preoccupied with aging’s significance” and that if “the aging individual was a woman, gender-specific forms of condition were added to age-based estimations”; “Rarely in such cases was the mature woman depicted positively. Melanie Dawson, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020), 2, 108.
10 Corinne T. Field, “‘Are Women … All Minors?’ Woman’s Rights and the Politics of Aging in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of Women’s History, 12, 4 (Winter 2001), 113–37, 115.
11 Ibid., 124.
12 Ibid.
13 See, for example, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Despite this, however, Webster and Wright have uncovered work by Black leaders of the antebellum period and beyond that carve out spaces for – and definitions of – childhood, especially in abolitionist societies, charitable institution, schools, and nineteenth-century Black periodicals.
14 Mia Bay, “The Battle for Womanhood Is the Battle for Race,” in Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 75–92, 77.
15 Maria Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). This has had dire consequences for Black girls. See, for example, Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century.
16 See Nazera Sadiq Wright’s discussion of Maria W. Stewart in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, 71–9.
17 Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, 19–20.
18 Wright, 74.
19 Maria W. Stewart, “The Proper Training of Children,” speech delivered 21 Nov. 1860 in Baltimore. See Wright, 73.
20 In 1849, Charles Lyell argued that Black children “up to the age of fourteen … advance as fast as white, but after that age, unless there is an admixture of white blood, it becomes in most instances, extremely difficult to carry forward,” quoted in Webster, 19–20.
21 Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, 49.
22 Ibid., 45.
23 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Success, 11, 173 (1908), 622–23, continues on 644.
24 C. T. Field, “What Does Come After?” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Speculative Sociology of Aging,” Studies in American Fiction, 46, 2 (2019), 113–37, 127.
25 As Field notes, this inclusion of motherhood and domestic life as a necessary stage of life was also a way for activists to address the argument that “expanded opportunities would cause white women to neglect their family responsibilities.” Ibid., 127.
26 See Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
27 See chapter 4 of Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions for discussions on What Diantha Did and Herland.
28 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898), at https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.html, chapter 1.
29 Edelstein, 90.
30 Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Success, 622.
31 Gilman uses both terms repeatedly in both versions of “The Woman of Fifty.”
32 Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Success, 622.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Beth Blum, “Modernism’s Anti-advice,” Modernism/Modernity, 24, 1 (2017), 117–39, 126.
36 For example, in the Success magazine version of her essay, Gilman suggests both the “laundry trade” and the “food trade.” Also, unlike McDougald, she argues that these industries are natural to women as their “essential instinct is to give, to serve, to make.” Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Success, 644.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Corinne T. Field also remarks on this connection in Gilman between work and youthfulness in her article “What Does Come After?”. Field focusses more of her research on Gilman’s use of late nineteenth-century evolutionary theories.
40 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Forerunner, 2, 4 (1911), 96–98, added emphasis.
41 Bay, “The Battle for Womanhood Is the Battle for Race,” 88.
42 See, for example, Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
43 Gullette, Declining to Decline, 6. See also ibid., chapter 5; and, more recently, Melanie Dawson’s Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age.
44 Gilman, “The Woman of Fifty,” Success, 622.
45 Rajan-Rankin, “Race, Embodiment and Later Life,” 32.
46 Gilman’s ability to erase any possible aesthetic problem with the aging body is also based on the hierarchy of race. While Gilman sidesteps any whiff of physical decline in her articles, the very fact of her subject’s whiteness puts them in a specific aesthetic category. As Stephanie Camp argues in her chapter “Making Racial Beauty in the United States,” the early nineteenth-century shift to locating race in the body “did so in a way that was fundamentally aesthetic,” and, further, as “race moved in to the body, the ostensible beauty or ugliness of that body was no longer considered superfluous or even coincidental.” Thus, as a believer in eugenics and white superiority, Gilman could also lean on race to protect her woman of 50 from being excluded from an important aesthetic category of beauty. See Stephanie Camp, Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 101.
47 See Gullette, “Inventing the ‘Postmaternal’ Woman”; and Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Fascinating History and Promising Future of Middle Age (New York: Scribner, 2013).
48 See Dawson.
49 Ibid., 105.
50 Ibid.
51 Arguments like Gilman’s have staying power and are intimately tied to broader feminist history, both prior to the early twentieth century, as discussed, and in second-wave feminism, with its emphasis on what white women could and should be able to accomplish in their post-reproductive years. For example, Betty Friedan’s biographer Judith Hennessey argues that we can find the seed of Friedan’s book on aging, The Fountain of Age (1993), in the final footnote of The Feminine Mystique (1963): “new studies of aging in humans indicate that those who have the most education and who live the most complex and active lives, with deep interests and readiness for new experience and learning, do not get ‘old’ in the sense that others do.” Such arguments mirror Gilman’s decades later. See Ruth E. Ray, “The Personal as Political: The Legacy of Betty Friedan,” in Toni M. Calasanti and Kathleen F. Slevin, eds., Age Matters (New York: Routledge, 2006), 21–45, 34.
52 I will use Elise McDougald here as that was her name when her 1920s articles were published. In her later life, once she remarried, she used the name Gertrude Elise Ayer.
53 Laila Haidarali, Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 28.
54 See Elaza Barka, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
55 Haidarali, 26.
56 As Haidarali writes, “‘The Task of Negro Womanhood’ broke with older reformist traditions by foregrounding a scholarly and social scientific approach to define the problems facing modern women; it relied on investigations, firsthand observations and data collected on women’s industrial, domestic, and professional employment.” Ibid., 33.
57 Survey Graphic, 53, 11 (1 March 1925), at https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll336:2133/p16022coll336:2029?child_index=0&query=&sidebar_page=1.
58 Her data collection was first used in the 1919 publication A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker under the auspices of the Consumers’ League of the City of New York. See https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/women-working-1800-1930/catalog/45-990026325480203941.
59 According to Lean’Tin L. Bracks and Jessie Carney Smith, eds., Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), McDougald (whom they refer to as Gertrude Elise Johnson McDougald Eyer) was born either in 1884 or 1885, underlining the earlier point about exact chronological age being problematic for Black writers in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth.
60 Gertrude Elise McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925), at www.proquest.com/docview/2352541168/Z001825809?accountid=14055&parentSessionId=91wJJIK977lkEwIIMXfP%2FMOYJmEoOpWyDxBt1bpXaYQ%3D&sourcetype=Books, 369. All quotes from McDougald’s “The Task of Negro Womanhood” are from this source.
61 There is, more overtly, a class element in her designations of “girls” versus “women,” as those working in factories and other working-class jobs were often referred to as girls well into mature adulthood. See, for example, articles on Black women in different professions in The Messenger, 7 (1923).
62 In Brown Beauty, Laila Haidarali uses McDougald’s life and work to pursue another angle of that concerns age. She argues that “McDougald’s concern with the ‘multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women’ showcases beauty as not merely a youthful concern or matter of superficial vanity among modern middle-class women who were seen to emblematize New Negro womanhood of this decade.” Haidarali, 34. For a broader historical discussion on the history of New Negro Womanhood see Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
63 Rankin, “Race, Embodiment and Later Life,” 33.
64 Ibid., 33.
65 Habiba Ibrahim, “Any Other Age: Vampires and Oceanic Lifespans,” African American Review, 49, 4 (2016), 313–27, 313.
66 Ibid., 313.
67 Webster makes a similar argument about Black childhood, noting that “dominant ideas of childhood were established through the marginalization of northern Black children.” Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, 9.
68 See also Harm-Peer Zimmerman, “Alienation and Alterity: Age in the Existentialist Discourse on Others,” Journal of Aging Studies, 39 (2016), 83–95, 92.
69 McDougald, 369.
70 Ibid., 369.
71 Ibid., 371, 372, 272.
72 Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, 6.
73 McDougald, 369–70.
74 Ibid., 369–70.
75 See M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).
76 Kimberly Wallace-Sander, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 50.
77 McDougald, 369.
78 Painted by the German-born artist Winold Reiss.
79 See Gertrude E. Ayer scrapbook (microform), 1931–1966, Schomburg Center, Research and Reference.
80 Haidarali, Brown Beauty, 33.
81 Ibid., 33.
82 Wallace-Sanders, 4. Similarly, Mary McLeod Bethune, who was elected to lead the NACW in 1924 when she was 49, also “worked to realign the groups’ focus more clearly around economic issues rather than women’s individual behaviors and morality.” Haidarali, 33.
83 McDougald, 371, added emphasis.
84 Wallace-Sanders, 6.
85 McDougald, 371–2, added emphasis.
86 Ibid., 371.
87 These lines offer a direct rebuttal to Eleanor Taylor’s 1904 article in Outlook, “The Negro Woman: Social and Moral Decadence,” which argued, “Here the children are born to be thrust out into the street as soon as possible to get them out of the way, and thus the mother and the child are deprived of the home influence that is one of the strongest powers for good in the world,” quoted in Martha H. Patterson, ed., The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader 1894–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 72–73.
88 McDougald, 372.
89 Ibid., 373.
90 Ibid., 372.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., 378.
93 Ibid., 374, added emphasis.
94 See chapter 1 of Haidarali’s Brown Beauty for a full account of McDougald’s career.
95 McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” 375, added emphasis. I believe McDougald is talking about herself here.
96 Interestingly, in the speech preceding her award from the Community Church of New York, her essay for Survey Graphic is mistitled as “The Colored Woman in Industry.” See Gertrude Elise Ayer Papers, 1931–1966, Schomburg Center, Manuscripts and Archives, Box 1, Folder 1.
97 The Messenger, 5, 7 (July 1923), at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000117880769&view=1up&seq=221&q1=Elise%20McDougald.
98 This too reflects McDougald’s own history. While her brother went to college and graduate school, she never finished her graduate degree, despite graduating from a prestigious high school as class president. See Haidarali, 39–40; and the Gertrude Elise Ayer Papers, 1931–1966, Schomburg Center, Manuscripts and Archives, Box 1, Folder 1.
99 The Messenger, 769.
100 Ibid., 770.
101 Ibid., 757.
102 Gertrude Elise Ayer Papers, 1931–1966, Schomburg Center, Manuscripts and Archives, Box 1, Folder 1.
103 See Daniel Perlstein, Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), at https://ansleyerickson.github.io/book/chapters/01/. In chapter 1 he argues, “Schoolteachers created much of Renaissance Harlem’s intellectual infrastructure,” noting that teaching “constituted a way of articulating and fostering new consciousness as befit a new age.” See also the commendation speech from the Community Church of New York, which recognized McDougald Ayer for “teaching through live situations rather than through rules and regulations.” Gertrude Elise Ayer Papers, 1931–1966, Schomburg Center, Manuscripts and Archives, Box 1, Folder 1.
104 McDougald, 381.
105 Ibid., 381, added emphasis.
106 Ibid., added emphasis.
107 Ibid..
108 Ibid., 380.
109 See Bay, “The Battle for Womanhood is the Battle for Race.”
110 McDougald, 380.
111 See Corinne T. Field, “Frances E. W. Harper and the Politics of Intellectual Maturity,” in Bay et al., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, 110–26.
112 Frederick Knight’s Black Elders also charts these kinds of empathetic multigenerational relationship. Gilman, of course, also critiqued the family structure in Women and Economics, noting that the marriage market made the roles of women outside it, including those she referred to as “loose women,” lacking all value. She went on to critique what she called the “virtuous woman” who sought to protect the marriage market and her role in it, and made sure to make women outside it unwelcome and undesirable.
113 It is interesting to think about the ramifications of this for white women, especially in light of struggles between different generations seen within the feminist movement.