When Everything Changed: A Keepsake Journal: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (Hardcover)
$20.00
Backordered at least 2 weeks or possibly unavailable.
November 2009 Indie Next List
“Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist, interviewed hundreds of people from not only the women's movement but, also, the civil rights movement, and her history encompasses the major events from the 1950s to the present, putting society's changes into context. This amazing book is necessary reading for everyone.”
— Barbara Hoagland, The King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
Description
Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style" (People).
When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation.
A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research -- covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work -- When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted -- Male" and "Help Wanted -- Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way.
Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known.
Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were -- Father Knows Best and My Little Margie on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams -- some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.
About the Author
Gail Collins is a columnist for the New York Times. From 2001-2007 she was editorial page editor of the paper -- the first woman to have held that position.
Praise For…
"Splendid...Collins is a masterful storyteller."—Glenn C. Altschuler, NPR.com
"Did feminism fail? Gail Collins's smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women's recent history in America not only answers this question brilliantly, but also poses new ones about the past and the present."—Amy Bloom, The New York Times Book Review
"Riveting and remarkably thorough in its account of this tumultuous period."—Rasha Madkour, Los Angeles Times
"Compulsively readable."—Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News
"Gail Collins has an unflaggingly intelligent conversational style that gives this book a personal and authoritative tone all at once."—Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books
"Exhilarating, accessible, and inspiring."—Katha Pollitt, Slate.com
"Gail Collins is such a delicious wrter, it's easy to forget the scope of her scholarship in this remarkable look at women's progress."—People
