The cataclysmic changes in the lives of American women over the past fifty years—a story New York Times columnist Gail Collins was born to tell.

Picking up where her critically acclaimed 2003 book, America’s Women, left off, Gail Collins explores the enormous strides—and the rare setbacks—that women have experienced since 1960. “Hell yes, we have a quota [7 percent]” said a medical school dean in 1961. “We do keep women out, when we can.” At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, Collins reports, “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren’t.” 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. In 1960, two-thirds of women 18–60 surveyed by Gallup didn’t approve of the idea of a female president, and it wasn’t until 2008 that Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to win a presidential primary. 

Collins’s 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.

A comprehensive mix of oral history and keen research, When Everything Changed is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for.

Praise for When Everything Changed

“A wonderfully engaging history filled with tales of progress—and setbacks. I’d love to see this book become required reading, for both sexes, as we enter this new era of transformative change!”
—Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation

“An enormously entertaining cultural and social history. . . . Without preaching, Collins shows the sexism that women (and men) once accepted as the norm, and she backs up her often eye-opening stories with hard facts and solid statistics. . . . A revelatory book for readers of both sexes.”
—Kirkus Reviews