Book Review: When Everything Changed by Gail Collins


When you think Hachette Publishing, you don't automatically think of hard hitting historical books. BUT I think that is about to change with the release of When Everything Changed by Gail Collins!

Picking up where her previous successful, and highly lauded book, America's Women, left off, Gail Collins recounts the vast change women have experienced since 1960. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Collins's keen research, this is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for.

Having been born in the latter half of the 60's (no I am NOT telling WHAT year!) I was shocked to realize just what was going on for WOMEN when I was born! It was shocking to think how different things have become for my daughter all these decades later! it astounded me that a woman could not go into a city court to pay a ticket WITHOUT being in a skirt! the judges sent her out to get a skirt on, even though she had a respectable job as a secretary, she had to send her HUSBAND in to pay the ticket (which wasn't even hers)- even though HE was in pants..... WOW, i can NOT even fathom that! And yet, this happened just a couple of years before I was born!

The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room (think Mad Men and you've got it exactly!) ; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers' cigars on the men-only 'Executive Flight' from New York to Chicago.I found that the personal accounts help to make the author's point more than anything she herself proposed!

I grew up knowing my mother WAS making strides for me, and in many ways I took things for granted because of things she and her peers did to help break down the walls holding women back. When I went to apply for college I only had to consider financial means and the ability to get picked. I didn't have to deal with quotas or professors afraid of having too many women in their classes: "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." . Can you imagine? I can't. We were brought up to know that we did NOT have to get married, that we could go get the education our mothers fought for and THEN decide  if we wished to get married! Such a changed form the 1906os when at a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, "they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren't."

In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn't approve of the idea of a female president.
And now we have had not one but TWO women running for President. they may not have won, but they RAN. Men I know, who were never pro-women ticket, even decided to vote for them. What a wonderful change!

Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed (requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs) and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by congress (as they wanted to keep women HOME raising the kids, not working!). I grew up being able to play on teams with boys (soccer, baseball) and knowing other family members being able to play hockey with the boys. When Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in 1973, it drove home to me that women were just as good of athletes as men, and deserve an equal chance.

The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born to tell. Gail joined The New York Times in 1995, as a member of the editorial board, and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times’s editorial page. Before joining The Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains.

I really think ALL girls should have to read this book in junior high or high school i think it would be an eye opener to ALL of them, who have been born with SO many rights and equalities that their grandmothers had to fight to win for them! If you teach or home-school your children the examples used in this book are noteworthy and bring history alive for children! Get your copy today and give it to all the girls in your lives!


Disclosure:  Hachette Publishing sent me this book, at no cost to me, for review purposes.I was NOT compensated in any other way, nor told how to rate or review this product!

Comments

  1. I really want to read this book. It sounds like one every woman young and old might enjoy. Great review.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment