Book artfully chronicles women’s revolution


“When
Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to
the Present” (Little, Brown and Company, 480 pages, $27.99), by Gail
Collins: In 1960, a secretary named Lois Rabinowitz was reprimanded by
a New York City judge for appearing in court wearing slacks. Less than
50 years later in the same city, bus driver Tahita Jenkins was fired
from her job because she refused to wear slacks.
This full circle
is symbolic of Gail Collins’ “When Everything Changed: The Amazing
Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present,” which is riveting
and remarkably thorough in its account of this tumultuous period.
“A
generation that was born into a world where women were decreed to have
too many household chores to permit them to serve on juries, and where
a spokesman for NASA would say that any ‘talk of an American spacewoman
makes me sick to my stomach,’ would come of age in a society where
female astronauts and judges were routine,” Collins writes in her
introduction.
The book is full of anecdotes that show that change
didn’t come easy. In the 1970s, for example, Billie Jean King won three
Wimbledon titles — and hefty prize money — in a single year but was
unable to get a credit card unless it was in the name of her husband, a
law student with no income. A woman who attended Columbia Journalism
School and applied for a position at The New York Times was told that a
cafeteria job might be available. (That would-be journalist, Madeleine
Kunin, would visit the Times’ editorial board in later years, as
Vermont’s first female governor.)
As the country started to get
used to the idea of women seeking serious careers, Sandra Day O’Connor
was among the pioneering women who managed to “have it all” and be
successful in a way that didn’t threaten men, Collins writes. The first
woman on the Supreme Court was not only “clearly prepared” when the
attorney general came to her home to interview her for the position,
she had also made a salmon mousse lunch for him and his assistant — and
was recovering from a recent hysterectomy, which she never mentioned.
One
of the biggest challenges, however, continues to be the lack of
affordable child care for working mothers. Collins quotes Michelle
Obama talking about the president’s sister and her husband, both with
Ph.D.s, wondering whether to have a second child, since the additional
child care costs would wipe out one of their incomes.
The book
concludes with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin’s history-making
races for the White House, which transformed the political conversation.
Collins
writes: “By the time the campaign was over, the idea that women could
hold any governmental post, no matter how powerful, was so ingrained
that people hardly bothered to take note of the fact that in 2009 the
Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line of succession
after the vice president, was a woman, Nancy Pelosi. And the secretary
of state, fourth in succession, would turn out to be Clinton herself.”
Collins,
a New York Times op-ed columnist and the first woman to have served as
the paper’s editorial page editor, not only recounts the progression of
the women’s movement, but explains authoritatively why and how events
unfolded as they did. The diversity of women she profiles for the book
is laudable, especially the several sections devoted to the struggles
faced by African-American, Hispanic and Native American women.
In
short, Collins draws on an impressive variety of sources — oral
histories, legislation, court cases, polls, demographic statistics,
newspaper and magazine articles, and even TV shows — and employs her
engaging and accessible writing style to create a very readable history
book.