Gail Collins' Whirlwind Tour Through Feminist History

I expected to be somewhat irritated by Gail Collin's new book "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present" based on its title alone. After all, everything hasn't changed for women: feminists are still here. And the word "amazing" sounds a little perky for the serious work of securing women's equality.

But it turns out that writing a popular history of feminism was a brilliant move on the part of Collins, NY Times Columnist who served as the paper's first female editorial page editor. Collins' book covers the recent revolution in women's roles, from culture to politics to fashion, from the bedroom to the workplace, from Rosa Parks to Gloria Steinem to Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton. She approaches each of the past four decades without the burden of self-scrutiny that would be carried by someone trying to advance feminist theory or muse on the movement from within. Instead, she evaluates feminism's successes and failures with unemotional briskness. And needless to say from her title, Collins chronicles far more successes than failures, compiling evidence suggesting that (although she doesn't say it expicity) the movement for women's equality may in fact be the most accomplished social change movement of the last century.

Collins starts in a juicy, if frightening place, with a detailed and blunt description of existence for women pre-1960. Her stories make the verbal harassment and belittling comments faced by the women on "Mad Men" look like a picnic. The cards were stacked against us, she writes:

"Everything from America's legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were in almost every way, the weaker sex. They were not meant to compete with men, to act independently from men, to earn their own bread or to have adventures of their own."

This applied equally to suburban housewives and to the majority of women who had to work, says Collins. She offers a series of hair-raising anecdotes of women bullied, impoverished, confined and policed by unfair laws and restrictive customs: widowed or divorced women who couldn't support their families, working women demoted or denied raises, young women ashamed of their sexuality, steered away from studying math, told a husband was their only worthy goal, and forbidden from even calling boys for homework help.

Based on this evidence alone, readers know there's going to be a huge leap forward. And the bulk of that leap--as well as the most riveting part of "When Everything Changed"--takes place in the 60s and 70s, when social upheaval and protest from all quarters rocked America.

Even for those of us focused on battles for the future, it's not a bad idea to pause and note how far we've come. Collins charts a trajectory so speedy and impressive that it might inspire even the most history-conscious feminist to utter a second series of "thank-you"s to her forebears. And the women name-checked by Collins are not just the mainstream figures we're used to, either. Collins describes seminal moments like Marian Anderson singing and Betty Friedan writing, yes, but we also get the less-celebrated trench warriors whose courage boggles the mind, from early female politicians who had to use public restrooms, to the middle-aged African-American women of Montgomery, Alabama who planned to make radical demands during the famous bus boycott. There's Ella Baker, the "Gandhi" who guided young SNCC activists marching for civil rights during the early 60s, Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer during "Freedom Summer"  shot down in broad daylight by the KKK for having a black man, another volunteer, in her car, and Margaret Chase Smith, the female senator who managed to get an anti-sex discrimination amendment put into the Civil Rights Act because her male colleagues thought it was a joke.

A parade of Lily Ledbetters march through Collins's history, brave women who began suing for pregnancy leave, for equal pay, for an end to sexual harassment--often getting meager results for themselves but blazing a trail for following generations. And most importantly, she (and her research team) has found "ordinary" women's voices, women who experienced "click moments" that we think of as the cliches of feminism: being moved to tears by "The Feminine Mystique" while folding laundry, appalled by the chauvinism of a colleague in the civil rights or antiwar movement, invited to a consciousness-raising or to join in a discrimination lawsuit. We meet women for whom donning blue jeans or wearing their hair in a natural afro was a huge act of transgression and freedom. Through these women, Collins reminds us that "Women's Lib," the stuff of myth today, was real and had a real effect on American women, despite its imperfections.

And threaded throughout the legal and social battles is an endless tussle over sex and women's bodies that we're still fighting. Again, the timeline may be familiar but it arrives in compulsively readable style--the planning behind Griswold vs. Connecticut, the move from diaphragms to the Pill, the first skirmishes over abortion flaring into pitched battles, the abandonment of girdles and the forcible breaking down of social taboos around virginity and premarital cohabitation. It's true, as Collins notes, that a dam burst: within a few short years, co-eds around the country went from curfews and formal teas to sit-ins and men sleeping over in the dorms.

Like the movement it chronicles, the book's energy fades a bit during the 80s and today while discussing the Mommy Wars and the rise of sexual harassment suits, glossing over the anti-feminist backlash that Susan Faludi documented so memorably. The reality is that "When Everything Changed" serves largely as a democratic, wide-angled history of the "Second Wave" and its impact on the fabric of America--and it's a necessary and sweeping history at that.

Collins doesn't skip over feminism's foibles; she is frank about racial tensions, homophobia, and class-insensitivity when it appears in her history. Nor does she claim that today's women should be joyful because they have more rights and options. Instead, she's looking at the movement based on what it accomplished in concrete terms-- opened doors-- and it's enough to inspire today's feminists to double down their efforts to solve the problems we still face today.