When Everything Changed
25 Years in 25 Days: Then and Now
Brian Lehrer, on stage at the Society for Ethical Culture for the show’s 25th anniversary celebration. (Amy Pearl/WNYC)
This fall, the Brian Lehrer Show is marking 25 years of Brian at WNYC with a year-by-year look at stories that mattered from 1989 to 2014.
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
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.
Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times’s editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her book: “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.” She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.
Before joining The Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains.
Ms. Collins’ most recent book is “As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda,” published in 2012 by W.W. Norton. She is also the author of “America’s Women,” “Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics,” a biography of William Henry Harrison and “The Millennium Book,” which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6192234-when-everything-changed?ac=1
