The 'Golden Girls' were in their 50s — and that's still shaping how women think of aging today

Picture it: I was a little girl at my grandma's house, watching the NBC comedy about Miami-based best friends turned roommates Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), Rose Nylund (Betty White), Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) and Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) navigating life as widows or divorcées. They’d talk about sex, aging, men, menopause, womanhood, race and LGBTQ issues — often over cheesecake — in a way that women of that age had never been seen doing on television before.

Short gray hair, shoulder pads and communal living with gossipy catch-ups around the kitchen table or on the lanai. That was my vision of growing older, shaped by my ’80s TV education from The Golden Girls.

The show, which premiered 40 years ago, on Sept. 14, 1985, was an instant hit. For six of the seven years it ran, it was in the Nielsen ratings’ top 10 list of most-watched shows. It won back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1986 and 1987, and each of the four stars won individual acting Emmys. Currently, The Golden Girls sits in the No. 11 spot on YouGov’s most popular all-time TV shows via data collected this year.

What I didn’t know then was that the women being sold to the audience as late-in-life senior citizens weren’t actually that old. Marketed as being in their golden years, the characters — independent women with fulfilling lives and friendships — were actually in their 50s when the show began, with the exception of Dorothy’s mom, Sophia. In real life, McClanahan was just 51, Arthur and White were 63, and Getty was 62.

I’m far from the only one who thought that. A meme that regularly pops up in my Facebook timeline shows a cast photo alongside the surprisingly young age of each character. It has led to a trend of modern women having the realization that they’re in the same era as the girls, and along with it usually comes the observation that, wow, women in their 50s and 60s sure look different in 2025.

When it first aired, the groundbreaking show offered a rare glimpse at women of a certain age, who were often invisible onscreen in that era. The fashion and beauty reflected the era, but the unfiltered characters still feel ahead of their time.

Today, The Golden Girls has become a generational reference for many women over 50 — a reminder of how dramatically aging and society’s expectations around it have evolved.

A cultural touchstone for midlife women

The idea that the friends who became chosen family looked and acted much older than they were has come up in conversations for Yahoo’s Unapologetically series, which features interviews with women over 40 talking about aging and confidence. Time after time, people reference The Golden Girls as a marker for what they thought midlife would look like — or the idea that getting older is different from what they thought it would be.

Self-help guru Mel Robbins told Yahoo that The Golden Girls shaped her early expectations of what life after 50 would be like.

“I thought 50 would be time to get retired, time to start looking old, time to be irrelevant to society because, you know, it's about the 20-year-old celebrities, and we're like the old mayors getting thrown out into the corral,” the bestselling author and motivational podcast host said in June.

For Robbins, the opposite was true in real life. She feels more comfortable in her skin at 56 than ever before.

TV personality Kelly Rizzo, 46, expressed a similar sentiment about how her “goalposts” have shifted.

“Twenty-five years ago, 45 looked very different than it does today,” she said. “Now [that I’m here], it's a very different experience. … And then when I look [ahead to 65] — to me right now that still seems a bit old — but when I get there, I'm sure times will even change a little bit more.”

When it comes to The Golden Girls age meme, Rizzo blamed the era’s fashion and beauty norms for making women look more matronly than they do today.

“It’s the hair!” she said. “There was an expectation that when you’re in your 50s, you dress a certain way and look a certain way. Now, there [are] really no rules anymore.”

These changing attitudes aren’t just anecdotal. They’re reflected in research on how women perceive themselves across generations.

Yahoo’s own YouGov polling on antiaging culture in May showed that 55% of women aged 40 and older reported being "not very" or "not at all" concerned about wrinkles. It’s not just about appearances, either. According to a 2018 AARP study of women ages 21 to 72, 76% said they believed that “old age” begins at 70 years old — a far cry from 50.

J.Lo, Blanche and the debate over ageless icons

Still, for women over 50 in the spotlight, there are expectations, whether they are spoken or not, to maintain youthful appearances and be sexually appealing.

A prime example came when Jennifer Lopez, now 56, performed the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, nailing an acrobatic pole dance routine while wearing a low-cut, curve-hugging metallic bodysuit. At the time, side-by-side photo comparisons were made of the nearly 51-year-old tripled threat performer alongside a similarly aged Golden Girl Blanche in a conservative V-neck top with silver detailing on the shoulders.

Not that the comparisons were fair. Did Blanche have her own skin care line? On-call hairstylist? Personal chef? Trainer? As the “50 has changed” conversations swirled, there was a defense of Blanche.

When the show aired, Blanche epitomized sex appeal. She was overflowing with confidence, comfortable with her body and sexuality. She had suitors galore, bragging onscreen at one point to having had 143 relationships, and rocking a silk nightie like nobody’s business.

There have been similar conversations around the fashion-forward and sexually empowered Sex and the City characters Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) entering their Golden Girls era on And Just Like That…

Davis was asked about the comparison on the Today show in April and said, “Thank God” women are aging better today than they did then. "No offense to anyone."

“I thought [the Golden Girls] were 80,” she said, adding, “Sometimes it’s really good to remember these things ... that are just part of the big picture of what society is telling us to expect from our lives. And it’s not true.”

That led The Golden Girls creator Susan Harris to address the topic.

"I have to take issue with the fact that anyone makes comparisons to those other shows," she said in August. "The Golden Girls really spoke to what happens with older women. The other shows were just about young women. I just don’t think there is a comparison."

Owning your own journey

No matter how women today choose to age — whether it’s going gray or using cosmetic enhancements — the show remains a cultural touchstone that goes beyond bad hairstyles, wrinkles and shoulder pads. The Golden Girls was about putting women at the center and celebrating their agency over their sexuality.

Paulina Porizkova, who has become an important voice in redefining aging and often uses the hashtag #betweenjloandbettywhite when she posts on Instagram about it, thinks that the influence is more personal.

“To me, what an older woman looked like was my grandma and my mom,” she tells Yahoo. “Those are the first women [who] represent what aging is like for a woman to you. And my grandmother was a little old woman by the time she was 50. And my mother is 79 and very far from being an old woman. It's very individual.”

Rizzo said her own mother is in her 80s, but looks like she’s in her 50s and acts like she’s in her 30s.

“As long as you retain that sense of self and youthful spirit, and don't let your age define you in that way, I think you can always be as young as you want to feel,” she said.

What Porizkova sees as the issue is that it’s hard for women to age without judgment.

“When you go into menopause, society is just not interested in what else you can do, and so you're dismissed, whether you look good or you look bad, whether you have gray permed hair or long blonde flowing locks,” she says. “[However], I think that is where the times are changing a bit. We're kicking up the fuss. Us menopausal women are not gonna quit. I'm like: I'm not done yet.”

Porizkova’s hope is that younger women don’t see growing older as a terrible fate that necessitates going to extremes to escape it.

“We need to make aging look better,” she says. “This is what I'm trying to do on my end — make it look like fun because it is. It's outrageously wonderful.”

That makes me think: Maybe the vision I had as a child of those four gray-haired but loyal friends isn’t that far off. The norm-challenging independent women are a reminder to embrace aging on your own terms. And to have more fun — and cheesecake.