Maggie Kuhn - The Presbyterian Church of The USA

The Presbyterian Church of The USA

During the 1950s and 1960s, Kuhn worked for the Presbyterian Church, where she hoped to give emphasis to the social dimension of the Gospel. While tradition confined most seminarians to fieldwork within churches, Kuhn declared that none of her students would pass unless they went out and found poverty within the local community.

Her interest in elder rights began, not as a personal issue, but as one of human rights and basic justice, when she attended the 1961 White House Conference of Aging as a church member. When she began to visit Presbyterian retirement homes, which one resident described as "a glorified playpen," she realized the need to reverse the cultural tendency to treat old people like children.

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