KUHN, MAGGIE 1905-1995

ACTIVIST

Founder of the Gray Panthers

In 1970, when Maggie Kuhn turned sixty-five, her employer forced her to retire from a job she loved. Kuhn could have gotten mad. Instead, she got busy, organizing what became known as the Gray Panthers to protest not only mandatory retirement policies but also American involvement in the Vietnam War. One of the few protest organizations of the Vietnam era to survive into the 1980s, the Gray Panthers, with Kuhn at the helm, served as a model of grassroots organization for such causes as national health care, job training, and housing for the homeless. The organization was also a model of inclusiveness: though many elderly people belong to the Gray Panthers, and though it lobbies on issues important to the elderly, its members range from college students to people like Kuhn, who remained active in the Gray Panthers until her death at eighty-nine.

The Making of an Activist

Kuhn's parents lived in Memphis, Tennessee, but moved to Buffalo, New York, so that their daughter would not grow up in a segregated society. Besides being influenced by her parents, Kuhn was also influenced as a child by an aunt who was a suffragist at the turn of the century. Kuhn attended college in Cleveland at Case Western Reserve University, where she helped to form a college chapter of the League of Women Voters. She then worked for the Young Women's Christian Association and for the Presbyterian Church, where she helped to promote social change, especially concerning women's roles. Ironically, she was required to give up her job of twenty-five years because of a form of discrimination the church had not addressed—age discrimination.

The Gray Panthers

For the next twenty-five years Kuhn devoted her energies to battling mandatory retirement laws and other forms of injustice through the Gray Panthers, which grew from six members in 1970 to forty thousand by the time of her death. During the 1980s she spoke out against the Reagan administration's efforts to cut back on Social Security and in favor of a national health-care plan similar to that in Canada. Like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Kuhn and the Gray Panthers were powerful advocates for the elderly (she disliked the term senior citizens, stressing that there was nothing shameful about growing old). Unlike the AARP, however, the Gray Panthers included members of all ages and did not limit their activities to lobbying for matters of concern to the elderly. Kuhn was thus very much a part of her time in the 1980s and a reminder of an earlier era of political activism.