When Maddy Dychtwald was in her teens and twenties in the 1980s, she was a working actor, shooting commercials for Skippy peanut butter and DuPont paint. It was clear that women, especially in her industry at the time, succeeded when they exuded youthfulness and met largely unrealistic beauty standards. The rhetoric that women hit their prime at a certain age dissuaded Dychtwald from thinking positively about getting older and the longevity of her career.
“You hit 30, 35 at the latest, and if you hadn’t made it big, you just weren't going to,” Dychtwald tells Fortune.
