Book: “When Everything Changed, American Women from 1960 to the Present,” Gail Collins
New York Times columnist and best-selling author Gail Collins takes us back to 1960 to remind us how our lives have changed since then. In 1960, American women had to get their husbands’ permission to get a credit card, but then in 2008 when Hillary Clinton became the Presidential candidate, 400 years of American women’s expectations of our lives were smashed.
In a compendium of research and oral history covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work, this book takes readers back through these dramatically changing decades. The advent of the birth control pill, the end of Help Wanted/Male vs. Help Wanted/Female ads, the end of women who worked in banks who could only be tellers, and the end of quotas for admission to medical and law schools were part of the earth-shattering changes.
“Father Knows Best” and “My Little Margie” were top-rated TV shows before. Stewardesses had to be weighed regularly. Few females were professors. Car salespeople wouldn’t even talk to women because they didn’t make those decisions.
Boys enrolled in math and science classes and girls got home economics. Boys went to college and girls didn’t. Betty Friedan was kicked out of a Ritz-Carlton bar for drinking alone. And in 1960, a woman was ejected from traffic court in New York City for wearing slacks after the magistrate exploded in outrage, “Do you appreciate that you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” No women ran in the Boston Marathon, served in combat or were employed in police departments.
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This book offers a compelling story of what we lived through but have probably forgotten, and younger readers will appreciate what we went through in just one generation. Our victories were definitive but not easily won. It was a time when airlines scheduled business flights that could only be booked by men, flight attendants had to light their passengers’ cigars, and women who graduated from Barnard College who weren’t engaged by graduation were given lemons at commencement.
Many of us protested the Vietnam War, became caught up in the sexual revolution or many of the popular liberal causes of the 60’s and 70’s that became the great Social Revolution. Back then our career choices were limited to nursing, teaching, being a social worker, an executive secretary who had to pass a typing test, or a homemaker, but now women can hold professional, high-paying jobs.
The best aspect of this book is that the author records the voices of individual women and brings diverse threads of history together to demonstrate the changing expectations of women’s lives and women’s issues. It was hard work and a struggle and many sacrifices made over a long time by brave people so we could come of age in the last 50 years, but as Hillary Rodham Clinton says, “Women in America aren’t finished yet.”
