Share
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
By Gail Collins. Little, Brown. 480 pages. $27.99.
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," 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.)
One of the biggest challenges, however, continues to be the lack of affordable child care for working mothers. Collins quotes first lady 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 Clinton and Sarah Palin's history-making races for the White House, which transformed the political conversation.
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.
