The Amazing Journey of American Women

If the New York Times has a face, columnist Gail Collins might be the one. She has been there for fifteen years now, sometimes making us laugh, sometimes making us either elated or angry. But there has been no ignoring Gail Collins. Writer Nettie Hartsock has again struck gold for BoomerCafé, interviewing Collins about her new book, “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.” Of course since it happened to our boomer generation, the title might be, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

BC: How did the book come about?

Gail: My editor wanted me to write an introduction to a magazine edition we did that was just about women. What women had done in the last thousand years. And my editor handed me the assignment and said, “I don’t know what you want to do with this, but this feels to me like a story of a win.”

I hadn’t much thought about it in that fashion, I’m sort of in the business of complaining …it’s what I do for a living. But I really thought about the idea of the “win” in the last thousand years and realized most of those wins came in the last fifty years from my decade to present.

As I was writing the introduction, I realized that all the presumptions about what women could do and their place in society had changed during my lifetime. All of those had shattered and that was such a huge thought for me, I knew I wanted to write a book about it.

BC: You start the book out with the pants story and the theme of pants. What is it about pants and women?

Gail: I’ve always found it amusing that the judge in that opening story seems to equate putting women up on a pedestal with having them wearing skirts. Which doesn’t make any sense at all really.

When there’s a real rule of what people ought to be wearing, it does really say something about your role in general. That is really all about a vision that women should not move around very much. You can’t go outside the house basically. In the 19th century women were presumed not to go out much, they just stayed home. Different world then, but that whole idea of not moving much really struck me.

That was before pantyhose came out, and if you were wearing a skirt you were probably wearing a girdle and nylon stockings. And even girls in junior high were wearing that and that’s a lot of restriction. You weren’t going to bounce around a lot.

That was the same time girls couldn’t play sports and you couldn’t get a job that involved travel unless you were going to be an airline stewardess.

BC: Did you feel that growing up?

Gail: It’s funny and what’s interesting about the book is, if you talk to women in their 50, 60, 70s about life back in the day, they did not remember a lot of this stuff until prompted. Because back then you didn’t feel oppressed, you didn’t feel like things were bad, it was just what everybody was used to. Things were also getting better economically. Women didn’t feel like they were being beaten up on. So you tend not to remember that type of stuff.

BC: What is a childhood memory you have about it?
Gail: I remember my brother was allowed to play in the woods and I was not allowed to play in the woods. I did not, however, regard that as a central crisis in my life. (Laughs)

BC: How do you feel your wit and humor inform your work? It’s a really amazing gift to make people think and laugh at the same time.

Gail: That’s a great question. A while back, a magazine editor called me and wanted to talk to me and Maureen Dowd and how we use humor. I thought about it and realized I started doing it when I had a news service in Connecticut. I covered the state legislature. No one wanted to pay attention to the coverage, and so we started trying to come up with ways that people would be engaged. We came up with quizzes, songs, puzzles, and bits of humor to make the news pieces livelier and hopefully draw more awareness to the stories and what was really happening in the legislature.

I did find if you wrote things that were funny, people were much more likely to read them. I really started it to get people to read about their own state government.

I love to do quizzes but it’s harder more than ever because people’s attention spans are so much shorter.

BC: What do you think about your book and all the advancements in your own career? I think you said in the book that all the women who paved the way were two steps ahead of you. How do you define baby boomer?

Gail: There definitely was a really large multi-generation that came of age during that period of super prosperity in the late 50s and early 60s. They grew up feeling that they could do anything and not feel restrained anymore. That was the generation that did civil rights and women rights and it’s also the generation that people find very irritating because it’s a very sort of self-aware and self-evolved generation. But I think it is still a very spectacular moment in the history of our nation.

BC: How do you feel about the new generation of women, “alphawives”, 24/7 moms juggling it all and a career on top?

Gail: The great thing about our problems is that they were so specific and there were laws and policies and it was very easy to rally around those issues. Now things tend to be so much more personal. You have a problem with your boss, or in your house, and people don’t see those as universal problems, so it’s very hard to get people to rally around them. I think there is a benefit to not having everything so personalized.

BC: You say in our country one of the biggest problems is class now as opposed to race or gender?

Gail: I think we live in a time now that if you come into the world, your dad is going to be happy that he has a girl and there is a presumption you can do anything you want to do. It’s not attached politically. I don’t know a single conservative that didn’t have the same dreams for their daughters as they do for their sons. A little girl baby being born doesn’t have any expectations different than what a son might accomplish. I think now the challenge is very much predicated on education and whether you are born at a significant economic disadvantage. The economic disadvantages are really the whopping barrier now and very difficult to overcome.

BC: I know you said “Obama being elected was a Woodstock moment.” What did you mean by that?

Gail: It’s funny, when I was thinking about the Woodstock thing at the inauguration I was struck first, that once I made my way to where everybody was, you realized there was no way out. No way to leave. People were all very cold but incredibly cheerful and happy and you kept walking places in the middle of crowds and feeling squished but all those things really reminded me of being at Woodstock. It was in its effect a very Woodstocky moment. It just felt like such a big deal and it was a moment to savor because of course it’s not going to last. But it was such a privilege to have experienced that.

BC: I loved the Obamas’ first dance at the inaugural ball and it reminded me of how you wrote in your book about the Twist and how the 50s changed in terms of women dancing with men.

Gail: There are all those kinds of little moments in history that really fascinate me. It’s like when the bicycles came along and it was okay for women to ride those and you finally saw them emerge and zipping down on all these bicycles. What a feeling that must have been. This impacted history because it led to dress reform and that led to more freedom about where you could go. Getting back to the Twist, it was really the first time you had a popular dance that anybody could do but also that women did not have to follow the guy for the first time. That led very soon to women just getting up and dancing whenever they want to dance and that’s very freeing.

BC: When I went to Goddard College many of the women, we would dance all in the middle of the night and that really struck me that we didn’t anyone else to dance with us.

Gail: Absolutely, it’s an amazing feeling that brings to you and helps you understand what you can do all by yourself! That transforms us each time something like that occurs.

BC: And we’ll end with a call to dance. Thank you again.

Tags: BoomerCafe, Gail Collins, Nettie Hartsock

Category: Baby Boomer Culture, Baby Boomers, Nettie Hartsock