Margaret Eliza "Maggie" Kuhn was an American activist known for founding the Gray Panthers movement, after she was forced to retire from her job at the then-mandatory retirement age of 65.
19 Facts About Maggie Kuhn
2.
Maggie Kuhn's father managed the Memphis, Tennessee office of the conservative Bradstreet Company and spent her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio and Buffalo as her mother did not want her children raised in the then-segregated South.
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Maggie Kuhn majored in English at the Flora Stone Mather College of Case Western Reserve University.
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Maggie Kuhn worked for the YWCA in both Cleveland, OH and Philadelphia, PA from 1930 to 1941, and for the National Board of the YWCA in New York, NY from 1941 to 1947.
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Maggie Kuhn educated women about unionizing, women's issues, and social issues.
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Maggie Kuhn worked for the General Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women in Boston, MA from 1947 to 1948.
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Maggie Kuhn then worked for the Presbyterian Church's national Board of Christian Education from 1948 until 1965, and for the Presbyterian Board of National Missions from 1965 to 1970.
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Maggie Kuhn was able to work at the national level of the church to help shape the shift in focus from the social gospel framework to that of social justice.
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Maggie Kuhn called it the "Gray Panthers," and that name stuck.
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Maggie Kuhn believed that teens should be taken more seriously and given more responsibility by society.
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Maggie Kuhn implicated the American lifestyle for treating the old as problems of society and not as persons experiencing the problems created by society.
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Maggie Kuhn accused gerontologists of perpetuating the illusion of old people as incapacitated, noting that grant money seemed to favor such research.
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Maggie Kuhn called into question the representation of old people in popular media.
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Maggie Kuhn took a stance on Social Security, arguing that politicians had created an intergenerational war over federal funds in order to divert public attention from the real budgetary issues: overspending on the military and extravagant tax breaks for the rich.
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Maggie Kuhn criticized housing for the elderly, calling them "glorified playpens".
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In Maggie Kuhn on Aging, she described the structural reforms needed to address these problems with elder housing, mandatory retirement, and social and economic inequities.
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Maggie Kuhn shared that home with younger adults, who received a break on rent in exchange for their help with chores and their companionship.
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Maggie Kuhn worked with Anne Hays Egan and Carroll L Estes to develop the Festival of the Ages in Princeton, in 1981.
19.
In 1995, Maggie Kuhn was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.