Clinton, Palin, Steinem, Friedan: The Amazing Journey of Women In Our Lifetime

There are historical turning points that you recognize as you're living through them, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and then there are world-changing moments that only emerge in hindsight. Take the day Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia proposed that women as well as minorities should be protected against job discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He likely meant it as a joke, Gail Collins writes in her new book, never dreaming it would be adopted or enforced. But it was, and oh my, where it has led us.

Millions of women of a certain age have memory banks of moments from that time. The personal really was the political back then. Even small actions -- when I protested a rule against girls wearing pants at my high school, for instance -- fed into a stream of change, which became a river, which then became a flood. Collins sweepingly chronicles this transformative half-century in When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.

Collins herself was a pioneer: In 2001 she became the first woman to head the editorial page of The New York Times. She's now a columnist, and readers familiar with her work will recognize her eye for ironic detail in this wry, insightful and comprehensive book.

The more than 100 women interviewed by Collins and her assistants have great stories to tell, of failures and triumphs in lawsuits, marriages and the workplace. All the boldfaced names are here, too: Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem (Friedan resented Steinem but the movement needed both of them, Collins says; Friedan to annoy and mobilize, Steinem to charm and reach out). Marlo Thomas (dependent on TV parents) and Mary Tyler Moore (first true TV career woman). Shirley Chisholm, Gerry Ferraro and Pat Schroeder (pioneer politicians). Sandra Day O'Connor (who served up salmon mousse and well-prepared answers in a Supreme Court interview at her home, just after she'd had a hysterectomy). Sarah Palin ("a heady package -- vice presidential candidate as action figure"). Hillary Clinton (by the end of the 2008 primaries, "the nation had gotten used to the idea of a woman as a presidential candidate – of a woman as president").

Practically every page of the book jumps with familiar phrases and book titles – vivid reminders of a past era and the present-day controversies that are its legacy. Sex and the Single Girl. The Feminine Mystique. Our Bodies, Our Selves. Human Sexual Response. The Woman's Dress for Success Book. The Harrad Experiment. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Against Our Will. Welfare queens. The sexual revolution. Roe v. Wade. The mommy track.

But there are also many less familiar parts of the journey that needed to be excavated or re-examined, and Collins has found them. In one memorable example, she describes bewildered black clerical workers at the brand new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, their typewriters still in boxes, wondering what two white women were doing in their office. They were flight attendants and they were to there to file a job discrimination complaint -- the very first handled by the new agency. Thanks to Howard Smith's joke.

There are many wonderful, triumphal moments in this book. But in some ways it is painful, in the same way that watching Mad Men is painful. Collins wants us to remember how bad things were in 1960, and she succeeds.

Millions of women were working at that point -- as many as at the peak of World War II, Collins writes, including more than 30 percent of married women. Yet they were hobbled, infantilized and patronized in most areas of life, deprived of choices and respect whether they worked outside the home or not.

Laws in various states barred women from going into business, getting loans, serving on juries, even controlling their own property or earnings. They couldn't buy a house, rent an apartment or get a credit card on their own. Help wanted ads were separated into male and female. Women who did the same work as men were paid less. Flight attendants were fired if they got married or gained weight. Medical and law schools banned or sharply limited women. There was, Collins writes, a de facto national consensus that "women could not be airplane pilots, firefighters, television news anchors, carpenters, movie directors, or CEOs."

Or journalists. The New York Times suggested to Madeleine Kunin, future governor of Vermont, that she try for a job as a waitress in the paper's cafeteria. Women of the Times eventually filed a successful class-action suit that led to better opportunities for women in journalism. Nan Robertson chronicled the lawsuit in The Girls in the Balcony: Men, Women and The New York Times. I learned of her death at 83 as I wrote this essay.

It is still unbelievable to read some of the things men were saying about women and girls in those days. A NASA spokesman said "talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach." A congressman asked stewardesses objecting to weight requirements to "stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem." A Dubuque school principal said girls couldn't be on safety patrol because it was too cold outside and girls were busy with other jobs: "They wipe the tables after lunch and take care of the kindergarten children once in a while."

Then suddenly everything changed, Collins writes. And in the context of history, it really was quick. "Thousands of years of presumption" of what women were and could be came to an end "in our lifetime," as Collins put it in an interview. And while she gives plenty of credit in her book to individual women, in her view it was the times that made their success possible.

"The world around us changed and created conditions that made it possible for women to stand up and say 'this is not going to go on any longer.' None of the women earlier had these options," Collins told me. And she's an authority on that, having written an earlier book called America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines.

What was new? For one thing, the postwar consumer economy, which encouraged families to spend – and want -- more money. Another was the birth control pill, which allowed women to commit to education and careers without fear of becoming pregnant. The third springboard, Collins says, was the civil rights movement. It showed the nation that rules could be unjust and authorities could be in the wrong. It made women themselves aware of and determined to change their own second-class status.

One of Collins' seminal insights is that two enterprises considered failures actually were vital to the sea change. The first was President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women. Like many commissions, it was created to make sure not much happened. But the group, and the state-level commissions it spawned, gave women a rare opportunity to talk about the problems they had and the constraints they faced. They weren't the type to make waves, but many eventually came to realize that "inwardly, they had been seething all along," Collins writes.

She draws a vivid scene of a pivotal moment. It came during a meeting of state commissions in 1966, at a boring lunch. Friedan and a dozen other women at the front tables talked and passed notes among themselves, dashing back and forth from table to table. Right then, right there, Collins writes, they created an "NAACP for women" and called it the National Organization for Women. They each kicked in $5 to get it going.

Similarly, the Equal Rights Amendment was another "failure" that turned out to be critically important, in Collins' view. That's because the drive to get it through Congress and state legislatures produced cadres of activists nationwide.

One of the reasons the ERA failed, Collins posits, is that women were making so much progress in courts, legislatures and Congress. There is no denying that progress. And yet it's also true that the work is unfinished. We saw that just in the past couple of years, as Lilly Ledbetter lost a Supreme Court fight for the right to sue for pay discrimination she hadn't discovered until she was about to retire.

Congress fixed the problem this year, decreeing that a 180-day statute of limitations began anew with every paycheck. But it might have gone unfixed if Republican John McCain had been elected president – he was against changing the law.

In her book, Collins notes that in 1971, Congress passed a bipartisan bill offering child care to every family that wanted or needed it -- but Richard Nixon vetoed it. With the rise of social conservatism and wedge politics, the opportunity never came again. "I'd forgive him Watergate before I'd forgive him this one," Collins said of Nixon.

The tension between work and family, in her view, is the one major piece of unfinished business. "Half the work force is female and a massive proportion of the new children are being born to single mothers, and you haven't dealt with the question of who takes care of the kids when everybody's at work. It's amazing to me that the country could change that much and presume that we would all work this out" by ourselves, she said.

One thing we have worked out here is the pants situation. I've already mentioned that I participated in a pants protest in high school. Collins starts her book with the tale of a young woman who tried to pay her boss's traffic ticket, only to be ordered out of the courtroom by a judge furious that she was wearing slacks. That was in 1960. The first thing I thought of when I read it was Lubna Husseni, the Sudanese journalist convicted recently of public indecency for wearing pants.

I won't argue that we've come a very long way. To me, the strangest thing about it is Howard Smith's role. Collins says he opposed the civil rights bill and, in a footnote in her book, concludes that he proposed job protection for women out of "ridicule and a desire to do mischief" to the bill. It was, she writes, "an extraordinary example of unintended consequences." Whether he meant it or not, I'd like to thank him. His mischief-making is a big reason why Collins and I are where we are today.