Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
by Genna Buck
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, by New York Times columnist Gail Collins, epitomizes the spirit of the women’s movement: it is gripping, full of drama, and changes the way you look at the world.
Like other children of the 80s and 90s, I don’t remember when everything changed for women. And until I read this book, I had no appreciation for what life was like before.
It was virtually impossible in the 1960s for a woman to live independently and support herself. Collins illustrates this brilliantly with an anecdote about the extraordinary tennis player Billie Jean King.
As one of the most successful professional athletes of the time, King made hundreds of thousands of dollars in endorsements and prize money from tournaments such as Wimbledon and other Grand Slam events. Still, when she applied for a credit card, her husband had to give her written permission. He was a law student who earned no income.
The book is packed with other stories of sexist discrimination from the past 50 years across Canada and the United States. Many of them portray instances that are absolutely degrading, even brutal, all of them once being routine. They are enraging and enthralling at the same time, making When Everything Changed worth the read.
But, Collins gives the reader so much more. Unlike other books on the subject, her account does not ignore or glaze over the profoundly different, but still transformative experiences of black women, poor women, and farmwives.
Her method of storytelling grabs your attention in such a way that you not only absorb her message, but continue to think about it in the days and weeks after you put the book down: not something I would say all other history books.
Telling statistics are interspersed with detailed and revealing interviews with women who were there – from factory workers, telephone operators, and mothers whose newfound freedom changed the course of their lives, to Gloria Steinem, probably the most famous and influential feminist of all time.
When Everything Changed wraps up with several chapters about issues facing women today in the home, in the workplace, and in the public sphere. Here, Collins asks more questions than she answers, but they are the big questions that our generation of women, men and families will be facing.