Its iconic opening lines— “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me”— went on to inspire the Red Hat Society, an international social organization celebrating aging with boldness and joy.
Though Joseph was not directly involved in the group’s founding, its ethos closely mirrored the poem’s central impulse: to reject quiet compliance in favor of visible, unapologetic presence. Such was the poem’s popularity that an illustrated gift edition, first published by Souvenir Press in 1997, has since been reprinted forty-one times.
“Warning” was also included in the anthology Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors (Scottish Poetry Library, 2014), and a copy was gifted to every graduating doctor in Scotland that year—an acknowledgment of the poem’s encouragement to live fully, even in professions defined by pressure, responsibility, and restraint.
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