Gail Collins’ ‘When Everything Changed’ chronicles women’s revolution over past 50 years

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.