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When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
When Everything Changed The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present Author:Gail Collins Picking up where her previous successful, and highly lauded book, America's Women, left off, Gail Collins recounts the sea 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, an... more »d agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for. 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; 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.
We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960--and the rare setbacks. "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." At a pre-graduation party at BarnardCollege, "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. 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). What happened during the past fifty years--a period that led to the first woman's winning a Presidential Primary--and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born to tell.« less
I am reading this right now and I can not put it down!! It is written in a fun conversational style but filled with fascinating information about our history! I highly recommend it!!
I loved this book! Born in 1973, I'm too old to have learned about this time in history class (it was still new!) and too young to have lived through it. Reading this book made me feel like I'd taken a really great women's studies survey course about the US. It is both academic and readable covering political issues that stunned me (Republican women were in favor of the ERA), dramatic barriers women faced (no ability to go to graduate school, no ability to prevent pregnancy, no ability to purchase a home or get credit without a husband), the civil rights movement, famous names I'd heard of but didn't know details about, and the fact that universal child care was seriously considered at the federal level. She uses data from the New York times as well as interviews with famous and "regular" people to really provide a sense of what the era felt like. A comment near the end of her book sums it up for me. "Few women under 30 had any real concept that things had ever been different." I'm glad Collins took the time to fill us in.