Their concerns are my concerns, and then some. But I find that, everywhere I go, I run into these incredible younger women who just knock me out. That was a particular moment when people focused on those particular women.

Who do you think is this generation's Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown? It's not that women suddenly became better or braver. If you look at the vast changes in history, they are driven by events on the outside. They exemplify something you see a lot of in history-everyone is just going along and, suddenly, someone just says 'no.' And you think, 'Where do they get that from?' What made Clara Barton decide to put all of those supplies in a wagon and go take care of wounded soldiers?ĭo you believe that it's the external forces that drive change, not the internal ones? It's stories like those of Lilly Ledbetter and Lorena Weeks. Is there a moment or a part of that history that you hope young women pay particular attention to? It's just great to let other people carry the narrative. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. I feel really happy not inserting myself. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. It's not like writing about colonial women who you know won't come back and yell at you.Īs an editorial writer, was there a specific reason you kept your opinions to yourself in this book?Īny time you write history, you insert your opinion. When Everything Changed, though, was the hardest one to write because everyone is still alive, so there's a lot more trepidation.

I keep getting letters from women telling me they had forgotten about the orange juice cans they used as hair rollers.

You mine a whole new world every time you go through the history. All the books I've done before (including America's Women and Scorpion Tongues) have been histories, and I just get such a charge out of them.

'It liberates women from this sense that there was this one noble generation in 1970s and after that it was just people schlepping along.'Ĭollins recently sat down with ForbesWoman to talk about what's changed, what hasn't and how it's hard to find a good husband.įorbes: In the age of polemic and memoir, why did you choose to tackle this subject as a history? We don't want them here' is relegated to history's trash heap: Female students now claim 50% of the spots in medical schools.įor Collins, the past 50 years of women's history appeal to her journalistic sensibilities. A 1961 medical school dean who says, 'We do keep women out, when we can. A postwar survey that finds fewer than 10% of those interviewed believe an unmarried woman could be happy evolves into the era of Sex and the City, which sculpted single women into enviable icons. In the course of the five decades that Collins charts, Nora Ephron applies to a job at Newsweek, is told that 'women don't become writers here' and becomes, well, Nora Ephron.

America's Women by Gail Collins