17/02/2026
💜💜💜 When I get old….
Can you rewrite this for the 21st century ? We are holding a poetry hour at Coppice Library and Wellbeing Centre on Tuesday, 10th March, for International Women’s Day at 7.00pm and would love to reprise your version of this modern classic.
Please email your poem to GFG@bluesci.org.uk
At twenty-nine, she wrote about escaping into old age. By the time she died, millions of women understood why she needed that escape so badly.
In 1961, Jenny Joseph sat at her desk in London and wrote a poem that would outlive her. She was twenty-nine years old, married to Tony Coles who worked at an old people's home, listening to his stories about residents who behaved strangely and wonderfully.
She started writing. "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple."
The poem imagined an elderly woman doing everything improper. Wearing a red hat that clashes. Spending her pension on brandy. Sitting on the pavement when tired. Pressing alarm bells for fun. Running a stick along public railings. Making up for the sobriety of youth.
It felt whimsical. Rebellious. Joyful.
But here's what makes the poem extraordinary. Jenny Joseph wasn't writing about a distant fantasy. She was writing about waiting to be free.
At twenty-nine, Joseph was already trapped. Not by age. By expectation.
She was supposed to be respectable. Well-behaved. A proper example. The poem states it plainly: "But now we must have clothes that keep us dry / And pay our rent and not swear in the street / And set a good example for the children."
The poem isn't really about being old. It's about waiting for permission to stop performing respectability.
Joseph first published "Warning"—the poem's actual title—in the newsletter of her husband's old people's home in 1961. Then The Listener magazine picked it up in 1962. It appeared in her 1974 collection Rose in the Afternoon.
The poem was a slow burn. Through the 1970s it circulated quietly. Then the 1980s arrived and something shifted.
Women started recognizing themselves. Not in the old woman wearing purple. In the young woman dreaming of the day she could stop pretending.
By the 1990s, the poem had become a phenomenon. In 1996, a BBC survey declared it Britain's favorite post-war poem, beating even Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."
Then came Sue Ellen Cooper.
In 1997, Cooper bought a red fedora hat on a trip to Tucson, Arizona. She gave it to a friend for her fifty-fifth birthday along with a copy of "Warning." The friend loved it.
Cooper gave red hats to more friends. On April 25, 1998, six women gathered for tea in Fullerton, California, wearing purple clothes and red hats. They called themselves the Red Hat Society.
The idea caught fire.
The Red Hat Society became a global movement. Women wearing purple clothes with red hats, gathering in groups, refusing to apologize for taking up space, being loud, having fun, and living on their own terms.
By the 2000s, there were over forty thousand chapters worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of members. Tea parties. Parades. Mall crawls. Women celebrating themselves publicly, visibly, unapologetically.
Jenny Joseph was bemused by all of it. She hadn't intended to start a movement. She'd just written a poem about longing for freedom from expectations.
"I can't stand purple," she reportedly said when asked if she'd join the Red Hat Society. "It doesn't suit me."
That response is perfect. The poem was never about actually wearing purple. It was about refusing to perform what society demanded.
And wearing purple because a poem told you to? That's just another performance.
The Red Hat Society understood something essential though. The poem resonated because women of all ages knew exactly what Joseph meant.
Young women read it and thought: "I can't wait to stop caring what people think."
Middle-aged women read it and thought: "I'm tired of performing. How much longer until I'm old enough to stop?"
Older women read it and thought: "Finally. Permission."
But the poem's genius is in its final lines. "But maybe I ought to practice a little now? / So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised / When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple."
Practice a little now.
Don't wait for old age to give you permission to be yourself. That's the revolutionary idea hidden in a whimsical poem. You don't have to wait for permission to be free. You can start now.
Jenny Joseph lived by this. She was a poet, a teacher, a traveler. She wrote extensively about social issues, women's experiences, and everyday absurdities. She wrote thirteen poetry collections and won multiple awards including the Cholmondeley Award.
She refused to be defined by any single poem, even though "Warning" overshadowed everything else she created.
When she died on January 8, 2018, at age eighty-five, every obituary led with the same line: "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple."
She'd spent fifty-seven years being known for those words. Words she'd written before she'd even begun to experience the life she was imagining.
But here's the beautiful truth. She did grow old. And she did wear purple, metaphorically if not literally. She lived authentically, wrote boldly, and refused to be quieted or contained.
The poem's power isn't just about aging. It's about the decades women spend performing respectability, waiting for the moment when society finally stops caring what they do. And realizing maybe we don't have to wait at all.
Joseph once wrote about the poem's popularity. She theorized it succeeded because it was a fantasy about old age, not a realistic description. "Poems in which a realistic description of the condition of an old person is central are not requested much," she noted.
People didn't want reality. They wanted permission.
The purple isn't about age. It's about audacity. The red hat isn't about fashion. It's about visibility when you're told to blend in. The frivolous spending, the public sitting, the alarm bell pressing—it's all about choosing joy over propriety.
And that final question—"maybe I ought to practice a little now?"—that's the real warning.
Don't wait for old age to give you permission. Practice being yourself now. Practice taking up space. Practice saying no to expectations that cage you.
Joseph knew something at twenty-nine that took many women decades to learn. The cage doesn't unlock when you turn sixty-five. You have to unlock it yourself.
Her notebooks, now archived at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, show early drafts of "Warning" with corrections and revisions. You can see her working through the lines, shaping the voice of a woman imagining freedom.
The poem became bigger than Joseph ever intended. It appeared on tea towels and cancer campaign posters. It inspired a Broadway musical. The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History displays a red hat and purple feather boa from the Red Hat Society.
Joseph was sometimes frustrated that the poem overshadowed her other work. But she seemed to accept that art takes on its own life. "The spirit and life of a poem can be much more than just what's on the page," she acknowledged. "And poets don't always know the full scope of their own work."
For those who were raised to believe that being yourself shouldn't require waiting for permission, Joseph's poem speaks across generations. For anyone who's ever felt trapped by expectations of how you should behave, dress, speak, or live, her answer is written in those final lines.
Practice a little now.
The cage is real. The expectations are real. The pressure to be respectable, to set a good example, to have clothes that keep us dry and pay our rent and not swear in the street—that's all real.
But the lock on that cage? You control it.
Jenny Joseph wrote the key in 1961. Millions of women have been using it ever since.
She died at eighty-five having lived exactly the way she'd imagined at twenty-nine. Not by wearing purple and pressing alarm bells. But by refusing to wait for permission to be free.
What are you waiting for permission to do? What version of yourself have you postponed until you're old enough, or brave enough, or free enough?
And what would happen if you practiced a little now?
