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| WPCNJ Book Club Meeting |
| March 12 Friday 7:00-9:00 p.m. |
| From the Publisher: Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women’s lives over the past fifty years with her usual “sly and unfussy style” (People). When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most women had to get their husbands’ permission to apply for a credit card. It ends with Hillary Clinton’s historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Collins's keen research-covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work- When Everything Changed is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of “Help Wanted-Male” and “Help Wanted-Female” ads, and the lifting of admissions quotas for women applying to medical and law schools. Gail Collins Describes what has happened in every realm of women’s lives, partly through testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way. Picking up where her highly lauded book America’s Women left off, When Everything Changed is the dynamic story, told with the down-to- earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved columnist is known. Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were-Father Knows Best and My Little Margie on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston Marathon, in combat zones, or in the [police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams-some dashed and others realized beyond anyone’s imagining. The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers' cigars on the men-only 'Executive Flight' from New York to Chicago. We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960--and the rare setbacks. "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, "they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren't." In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn't approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in-school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by Congress). What happened during the past fifty years--a period that led to the first woman's winning a presidential primary--and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born to tell. |
| The WPCNJ Book Club is an exclusive membership benefit. Join WPCNJ Today! For registration and location details RSVP to info@wpcnj.org |
| Note of Interest... Gail Collins will be at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University for a lecture and book-signing this spring. |