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The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present
By Gail Collins
Did feminism fail? This year, the radio host and comedian Steve Harvey wrote in “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” that “men want women to act like ladies at all times.” The book has been on the best-seller list for months. Did feminism fail?
In a 1964 Congressional hearing, when airline executives testified that it was imperative for businessmen that attractive women light their cigars and fix drinks, Representative Martha Griffiths said, “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?” and the conversation began to change.
Collins aims, she writes, to tell social history “by combining the public drama of the era with the memories of regular women who lived through it all.” She digs up stories from headlines of the past that a sensitive reader must choose to read as pointed farce. In 1964, the conservative, elderly Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the Rules Committee, offered an amendment to add women to the list of groups to be protected from workplace discrimination. Though no women were on the speaking list, the men “kept pointing out that they had, after all, asked Marian Anderson to sing.”
These were times, Collins writes, in which women “were not meant to compete with men, to act independently of men, to earn their own bread, or to have adventures on their own. . . . They could not go into business without their husbands’ permission or get credit without male co-signers. . . . Then, suddenly, everyÂthing changed. The cherished convictions about women and what they could do were smashed in the lifetime of many of the women living today.”
Our country got used to the idea that most women would work outside the home, and in the 1980s, as Collins writes, it got used to the idea “that women would not only make money to help support the family but also have serious careers.” She describes this as a decade for women’s optimism. More women than men attended college; the gender gap in pay began to narrow. (If you don’t want any gap at all, remain young, single and childless.) One of the many pleasures of When Everything Changed is that Collins also reminds us of what women did in private - stopped shaving their legs, started shaving their legs, took the pill - and what they wore: Shoulder pads! Miniskirts! And as Collins mentions, with no real reproach, impractical shoes. Women can now take responsibility for themselves, particularly for their economic well-Âbeing and reproductive rights, and that has changed everything.
