When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 0316014044
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style" (People).
When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation.
A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research--covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work--When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted--Male" and "Help Wanted--Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way.
Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known. Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were--"Father Knows Best" and "My Little Margie" on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams--some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.
public-relations job for Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. On the day she preached a sermon for a final exam at the seminary, she raced out of the classroom before the other students took their turns and jumped into her car to make two closely scheduled appointments—one to tape a television appearance for the hospital, and the other a job interview with 60 Minutes. “And I got stuck on the 155th Street bridge.” She laughed. Trapped in traffic as the minutes ticked away, she realized it was time to make a
struggle how injustice can run deep in a nation’s laws, traditions, and customs. They did not believe that the fact that things had always been done one way made them right. To the contrary, that made them suspect. And they could see, even by the late 1960s, that history was going to celebrate the people who had the strength to stand up against popular conventions and demand justice for black Americans. They had confidence from the beginning that women, too, would win. So there it was: the
sitting in at white-only lunch counters, picketing white-only restaurants, and allowing themselves to be dragged off to jail in defiance of unjust laws. The demonstrations spread quickly from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Nashville, Atlanta, and other cities, drawing in the best of the postwar generation of black youth. Many of them were children from poor families whose parents had placed all their hopes on their smart, striving sons and daughters. To join the protest movement was to risk the
students started raising hell. She had gone to Shaw University, a proper Baptist school in Raleigh, at a time when the regulations made Spelman of 1960 look like a Woodstock reunion. Her most daring rebellion involved a petition that girls be permitted to wear silk stockings on campus. (Part of the uniform of the proper young African-American lady a generation later, silk stockings were regarded as a sign of vanity, and perhaps exhibitionism, in Baker’s college days.) The petition was denied, and
were not necessarily being paranoid if they felt that the women’s movement was looking down on their choices and repudiating the things they valued most. The young female revolutionaries who argued ideology and competed to make themselves heard in places such as New York and Chicago and Washington in the late ’60s and early ’70s had thrown around a lot of theories. Some had, indeed, compared housewives to prostitutes or slaves. Some had described childbearing as a curse that might someday be