Gail Collins at the Tenement Museum

Excerted from the book (When Everything Changed) by Gail Collins. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

Ladies wearing pants in public was a radical concept as recently as 1960. Going to law school? Working after having a kid? As any Betty Draper knows, that was impossible. In her new book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, writer and New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins discusses these societal restrictions—and how they fell apart in a matter of years. Collins interviewed more than 100 subjects about how the women’s liberation movement altered their lives. “I love Lorena Weeks, who was told she couldn’t have a promotion because there was a law that women could not lift anything more than 30 pounds,” Collins says of the clerk who applied to become a switchman in telephone company Southern Bell’s central office. “She was lifting a 40-pound typewriter every day!” Collins says women today receive more encouragement in their careers than the Joan Holloways of old. But she’s not here to criticize the modern generation. “A lot of older women talk with great dismay that younger women don’t know this [feminist] history—I keep thinking, The poor younger women must think we’re yelling at them,” she says with a laugh. Instead, she wants women to focus on what still needs to change. “More than half of the labor force is made up of women,” says Collins. ”But many of the problems that they face—the glass ceiling, the gap in wages, the fact that there are so few women in the Senate—track back to the fact that women are divided between their children and their work for so much of their lives.”—Amy Plitt

HEAR HER ROAR! “When Everything Changed with Gail Collins”: The Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard St at Broome St (212-982-8420). Thu 19 at 6:30pm, free. R.S.V.P. to events@tenement.org.

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