LESLEY: So, Gail Collins, thank you very much for joining us today to talk about your new book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, which I have to say I loved and read and learned, because it’s about really the Women’s Movement from 1960 to today, which I obviously lived through; but there’s so much I didn’t know. Let me start by asking you a big question. This is the Women’s Movement – the movement for women’s equality. First question: Did we win? Have we achieved equality?
GAIL: We definitely won. I’m not quite sure I know exactly what equality is, so I’m not sure that I would be willing to go that far. But to look back, which it’s hard to do, I was talking to the people who’ve been there. You forget what it was actually like. And, for perspective, you really have to go back and look at, say, 1960. And it’s such a stunner on every possible level.
LESLEY: Give us some examples.
GAIL: My very favorite one, and it is not the most profound by any means, is the one that I start the book with: Lois Rabinowitz was a secretary in Manhattan and in the summer of 1960 made history, or at least headlines, when she was expelled from traffic court in Manhattan for attempting to pay a parking ticket while wearing slacks. And the judge went nuts. She was defaming the honor of the traffic court. And this was true, and so many women I’ve talked to who remembered back on those days, how awful it was. If you worked in the Post Office you had to wear a skirt. And it was extremely uncomfortable; extremely cold for some women. And just the right to wear sensible clothes was completely withheld.
LESLEY: Oh, right.
GAIL: And then there is the executive express, the plane flight United used to have from New York to Chicago every day, and it was men only; a woman could not buy a seat on the executive express – too bad if you wanted to go to Chicago at that point in time. And they would serve the men these big, huge steaks and cigars and the stewardesses were taught how to lean over and light the cigars and so on. And whenever I tell that story somebody says, "Well wasn’t that illegal?" Nothing was illegal back then. It was perfectly legal to say, "Well we don’t hire women for those jobs," or as Newsweek used to say, "Women don’t write. They only research."
LESLEY: I can remember being on a flight and the pilot came on, and it was a woman, and a bunch of men stood up and walked off the flight. And I know stories about people going to doctors, and if the doctor was a woman they turned around and walked out. And this isn’t just men walking out either. But when you say "we won," you’re just saying that some of these things that you got people to remember seem ridiculous? Is that what you mean by "we won"?
GAIL: No, I mean that in 1960 the vision of women’s limitations of the proper role for women in society was not at bottom much different than it was, say, in 1200 or 1600, but there was the same vision of what women were, and what women could do, that existed throughout Western civilization. And it changed in my lifetime and your lifetime, Lesley, in this tiny sliver of time that we live in. And that knocks me out every time I think about it. Women being born today are going to have all kinds of problems, many of them having to do with trying to balance family and career, I will tell you, but that kind of sense of limitations that existed throughout civilization and society just is not there for them. And that’s so huge.
LESLEY: And is it irreversible?
GAIL: I think it is. I think it is, in part, because of the way the economy has changed. You know, young women now presume that they will work their entire lives, and they will probably work their entire lives, and even if they don’t want to they will work their entire lives, because it’s almost impossible to have a family, a middle-class lifestyle, on one paycheck anymore.
LESLEY: As I said, I learned so many things and some of them were big, and some of them were small. Here’s a small one. You write about the famous bra-burning rally at the Miss America contest in 1968, and then you tell us that no bras were burned?
GAIL: No bras were burned.
LESLEY: No! Is that really … I circled and starred that when I read it.
GAIL: Oh, and it was a bitter thing for the women when they went over that again and again and again and again and again. But it was actually …I think there was actually a spot that they might burn foundation undergarments that were constricting. But there was a fire law in Atlantic City that made that impossible. So nothing was burned. But one of the women who was very sympathetic to the cause, who worked at the Post, was under the impression that there was going to be some kind of a burning thing and she wrote a story saying, "Well we’ve heard about draft-card burning, how about a bra burning?" And that just sort of took off and could not be stopped no matter how many women, how many times, said nothing was burned. But nothing was burned.
LESLEY: But here’s the part of the book where I learned the most, and as you say, I lived through this, but didn’t know about how much women had spearheaded the Civil Rights movement in the South. How many black women put themselves on the line, and as you recount, over and over with many different women. Because you talk about them as individuals (which is what’s so delicious about the book), we get to know so many individual women, how brave and fearless they were – so much more than the men.
GAIL: And no one really … there was a presumption that this was because the men were in more danger, since it was much more likely that men would be shot or beaten or whatever if they stood up, than women. But the people who have studied the movement say that never really came up when you asked the women, that there were some theories it was because women were more in touch with the community and had a stronger sense of community. But nobody really knows. That just knocks me out. It’s always knocked me out in our history when you read about women who just stand up against ridiculous odds, often with nobody thinking it’s a good idea. Nobody’s saying, "You go, girl. What a great thing." Just stand up and say, "No, I’m not going to go there anymore."
LESLEY: Well, you write that the women were beaten.
GAIL: Yes. The women were beaten and had their houses burned down, and had their living room windows shot out, and had their sons arrested and beaten, had their property lost, their businesses ruined, were expelled from their homes if they were sharecroppers. They suffered greatly, and they had a lot to lose on every front.
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[Photo Credit: AP]
