When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
By Gail Collins
Little, Brown & Company

Review by Nina Boutsikaris

If you were there during the time frame covered by When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present,  you’ll relish reliving every battle. But Gail Collins’ new book, which picks up where The New York Times’ columnist’s acclaimed study America’s Women left off, is also fascinating to those of us under 30. We’re the ones for whom the feminist movement has managed to, as Collins puts it, so “shatter the ancient traditions that deprived [women] of independence and power and the right to have adventures on [our] own,” that we have no real concept of how different things were.

With anecdotes garnered from interviews with hundreds of women across the country, including several well-known feminists and politicians, When Everything Changed turns the focus on individuals whose private struggles became woven into a public movement. Do the following tales sound familiar?

--Joanna Rife, who married after college graduation and quickly became a mother of three, recalls feeling so trapped and disoriented in her domestic lifestyle that she would sob while doing laundry.

--Essayist Jane O’Reilly admits that, even decades after her 1950s childhood, she still couldn’t shake the feeling that if she picked up the phone and called a man for a date her hand would “grow warts.”

--Lorena Weeks was told by the head of her union told her she wouldn’t get a promotion because “the man is the breadwinner in the family and women just don’t need this kind of job.”

--Kathryn Kirschbaum, the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, couldn’t get a credit card in 1974 unless it was in the name of her husband—an unemployed law student at the time.

Like her beloved column, Collins’ unfussy account of these and other womens’ lives is both witty and accessible, making even the most potentially dry political scenes entertaining. She relates the grievances of farmers’ wives in the 1950s, the identity crises of 1960s working women and the exhausting “superwoman” feats of high-powered working mothers in the 1980s. Shifting with and against politics, fashion and culture, these women were both determined and awakened to new possibilities, their struggles helping land us where we are today, when a woman could come tantalizing close to being elected president.

Yet while the sentiment of the book is mostly positive, Collins—a groundbreaker herself, as the first woman to serve as editor of the Times’ editorial page—concludes on a more somber note. Although women in the 21st century can argue before the Supreme Court, perform heart surgery and fly into space, but they still have not been able to fully “resolve the tensions of trying to raise children and hold down a job.” And they’re not getting much public help in doing so. Women have created a world their ancestors could not have imagined, Collins says, but they still wear “silly, impractical shoes.” Much more work needs to be done.