Their desire was for somebody who was civil and under 50 years of age, says Collins, 73.

I thought, Wow, this [perception of older women] can go up and down.

And there were plenty ofwomen pushing against, and sometimes helping to change, society’s perceptions.

Collins writes about many of them, including Sojourner Truth, Mae West and Mamie Eisenhower.

Her own thoughts on aging?

You’re not done until you see yourself as done.

Or on the way, began a 1971 ad for hair coloring.

It went on to assure the reader after quite a bit of depressing verbiage that all was not lost.

With Loving Care on your side, You’re not getting older.

You’re getting better!

Well, that was a relief.

The ad became a classic.

We’re a lot more sophisticated now.

Nobody thinks 25 is old.

It’s because of hair dye.

But that doesn’t mean our prejudice against growing older has been erased.

If it had, the 7,000 or so cosmetic surgeons in America would be way underemployed.

There were definitely some points when getting older was easier than others.

That’s always been the case, throughout history, around the planet.

The extremes in America, fortunately, have been somewhat less dire.

Who counts as an older woman?

Well, there have been some pretty dramatic swings in opinion.

In the early Colonial South, any woman short of menopause counted as a hot young marriage prospect.

This is not going to be a tale of steady progress toward an age-indifferent tomorrow.

However, we can definitely pick out some eras that look more enticing than others.

And then decide whether the one we’re living in now is a moment of real transition.

Traveling through American history, we’ll see how attitudes toward women in their middle and later years shifted.

There are some very clear patterns.

One is that matter of scarcity.

The second, inevitably, is economic.

In Colonial times, a widowed grandmother who was a skilled spinner or sausage maker got plenty of respect.

Their America still believed a woman’s place was in the home.

But some canny strategists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton came up with a pseudo compromise.

Now it was time to raise hell and fight for abolition and women’s rights.

Suddenly, women were composing odes to menopause.

One mid-19th-century reformer announced that the end of fertility was a time for super-exaltation.

There are no periods in American history when all the news is good.

You could be a glamorous singer at 50 and a famous beauty on the stage at 60 or 70.

That was the age when popular entertainment meant lectures and theater.

Older women were no longer in vogue or in view.

At about the same time, the New Left was preaching, Don’t trust anyone over 30.

They were probably downplaying physical attractiveness for the benefit of the visiting feminist.

Yeah, I say, well, what about Meryl Streep?

We’ll talk.)

Besides the social challenges aging women face, there are, of course, physical problems.

(And, in some quarters, avoidance of sex.)

Imagining the future is easier if we look back on where we’ve been so far.

And we’ll raise a glass to toast whatever comes next.

Excerpted from No Stopping Us Now by Gail Collins.

Copyright 2019 by Gail Collins.