E-mail a friendGail Collins
airdate November 16, 2009
In '01, Gail Collins became the first female editor of The New York Times' editorial page. She joined the paper in '95 as a member of the editorial board and later became an Op-Ed columnist. She's also written several books, including When Everything Changed. Collins previously reported for Newsday, the New York Daily News and UPI. She began her journalism career in Connecticut, where she founded a state news bureau—which became the largest news service of its kind in the U.S.—and hosted a program for local public television.
When Everything Changed author talks about the impact of the pill for women. (:56)
Full Interview (14:16)
Gail Collins
Tavis: Gail Collins is a widely read columnist for "The New York Times" who in 2001 became the first woman appointed editor of the paper's editorial page. Her critically acclaimed new book is called "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present."
She joins us tonight from where else? New York. Gail, nice to have you on the program.
Gail Collins: Good to be here.
Tavis: This book - pardon the pun - there are two interesting bookends to your book. It starts with pants; it ends, basically, with pants. I'll let you take it from there. Why pants as the bookends to this book?
Collins: Well, it starts with the story of a woman named Lois Rabinowitz who in 1960 went to traffic court in Manhattan to pay a traffic ticket and was ejected and became the big feature story of the day in New York because the judge ejected her for wearing slacks. He said she was ruining the dignity of the traffic court. (Laughter)
Of course now, women wear pants everywhere. You campaign for president wearing pants suits. But at the end of the book we had a story of a young woman who was a bus driver in the city who was fired from her job as a bus driver because she refused to wear slacks. Her religion forbad it and the city said it was unsafe to drive a bus while not wearing slacks. Never can we pick a time when everybody's happy.
Tavis: To your latter example about the woman being fired for not wearing pants as a bus driver, does that story represent for you progress or regress where women are concerned?
Collins: Neither one. It just represents to me that the story of what's happened to women over the last 50 years in this country is just an extraordinary story of change, of theories about what women were and what they could do that had existed since the beginning of Western civilization, being smashed in this one brief period.
To me, it's just a wonderful story but it's never going to be a story about how everybody becomes happy, because every solution creates a new problem somewhere along the line.
Tavis: You referenced earlier, Gail, that women nowadays run for president in pants suits. I want to ask you, then, about two women on the campaign trail last year, both of whom in the news today as we speak. Let me start first with Hillary Clinton, who did, of course, campaign in pants suits for president last year.
What in retrospect now to you is the significance of her campaign where women are concerned, specifically?
Collins: I think people will see it, looking back, as an incredible leap for women. At the time, of course, when she lost, the women who had been waiting for this moment, for a woman in the White House, since 1960, were heartbroken and I think angry for a while, but they've gotten over that. When you look back on it what you'll see is that Hillary Clinton made the country comfortable with the idea of a woman as commander-in-chief, as a woman as president, and that's enormous. That's just huge.
Tavis: And as if we don't know, because she's on "Oprah" earlier today and just about everywhere else, Sarah Palin, of course, campaigned for vice president in pants suits. Her impact as a Republican that high up on the ticket, the first woman on the Republican ticket - Hillary, of course, not the first woman to run for president on the Democratic side, but Sarah Palin, of course, the first woman on the ticket. What's her impact, as you look back?
Collins: We don't know what her impact is completely yet, and one of the things I've found kind of comforting about Sarah Palin was that it did feel like we'd gotten to the point where if a woman did something really stupid or said something really stupid, you didn't feel like the entire sex was guilty. You could just take it one person at a time.
Tavis: But is that - and again, I'm not casting aspersion on her. Whether one likes or loathes Hillary Clinton, nobody questions her intellect and her accomplishments. There was a whole lot of questioning of the intellect of Sarah Palin. When a woman gets placed on the ticket and gets exposed in the way that she was, by her own admission, in her book she acknowledges the Katie Couric interview initially was a disaster.
There are other moments in the campaign where she did not, in the minds of many, measure up intellectually. Is that a setback for women?
Collins: No. That's the good thing about Sarah Palin, is that whatever Sarah Palin does, Sarah Palin does and I think we've hit the point now where there's enough women, where there's enough mass at least near the top that everything that everybody does is not taken as something that represents the entire sex.
Tavis: You talk about two - it's a dense text - a good text, but a dense one - but there are two issues I want to raise now that you talk about in detail in the book as perhaps the two big issues where the advancement of women are concerned from 1960 until now. I'll take them in this order. First, the role of women in the workplace - unpack that for me.
Collins: Well, what makes me happy about doing these books, the history books on women I've done, is that if you look back you get completely away from this idea that women were weak and they didn't try hard and then we came and liberated them all in 1968.
Women have always risen to whatever the occasion is and they've always done everything that the country and their families have asked them to do, they've always tried to live as fully as they can. The economy changed so much after World War II that participation by women became not a theory, it became something that the economy needed and as our middle class aspirations grew, that families needed.
We're at a situation now where for most families, nobody can get along on one person's income. There's very few families, statistically speaking, who can afford to live on one salary, and that's huge. Every young woman now grows up knowing that she's going to be responsible for participating in the work force, for earning her bread, for supporting her family with her husband, and that's the biggest change there could be.
Tavis: I guess the question behind that, Gail, is whether or not, that said, we can celebrate yet the role of women in the workplace when women still earn but 77 cents on the dollar for what men make.
Collins: Yeah, the big, humungous thing that you look back and you think wow, how could this not be resolved, is the whole issue of families and childcare. That you could get to a point where half the work force is female and not have dealt as a nation with the question of who takes care of the kids is just extraordinary, and that laps over into everything else.
That's one of the things I think it laps over into most - one of the main reasons women don't make as much as men is because so many women are dragged in and out of the work force by the demands of family.
Tavis: The other issue that you raise in the text, Gail, about the role of women and how that has changed over the years is the birth control pill. I raise that again because one, you talk about it in the text, but also because here again in the news of late, the big healthcare debate, and the big debate about abortion.
Talk to me about how the birth control pill changed the journey of women in this country.
Collins: That was so huge. Until the birth control pill came along, although women were good at using birth control to limit the size of their families it's very hard if you don't have the birth control pill to find something that will guarantee that you're not going to get pregnant, period.
Once the birth control pill came along, once it became available to young, unmarried women in particular, you can just see the applications by women to law school, to medical school, to programs that take a long commitment just leaping. It's just huge. It's the biggest, possibly, thing of all.
Tavis: In the book, you talk about the difference between how White women have navigated this period from 1960 until now and African-American women have navigated the journey from 1960 until now. In your mind - again, there's a whole book about this - but the difference is primarily what?
Collins: Well, I did a book before this about the history of American women up until 1960 and when you look back on most of our history you can't even talk about White women and Black women in the same context, because their experiences were so different.
For Black women, the question of whether to work or not was never really a big issue for most of them. Almost everybody worked. Even if you were middle class you worked, usually as a teacher.
Then when the civil rights movement came along there were enormous questions for many Black women about whether you wanted to move into the women's movement stuff or whether your commitment to your community was so great that that was your priority, it got complicated for a while.
But I have to say that right now when I look at this country the big division in life, in potential, in everything that I see is not racial, it's class. The difference between the expectations of a child born into a poor family, Black or White, are just so much different than the expectations of a girl child born into a middle class family.
Tavis: Do you mean to suggest that it's either-or or suggest that it's both-and?
Collins: It's both-and, but the big one - as we got toward today I found more and more when I was writing, I was writing about stuff that was an experience of both Black and White women. But then when you talked about poor women you really had to go back and start all over because their experience was so different.
Tavis: Never mind their color, although on this point Black women were not as unhappy as White women are, but the recent "Time" magazine story that talked about the fact that women are more powerful but less happy. Again, Black women in that poll, as I recall, not as unhappy as White women but nonetheless more powerful across the board, less happy across the board. How did you read that article and its findings?
Collins: When I read it I remember it so well, a column I'm almost sure was Ellen Goodman, the great Ellen Goodman, wrote back in the '80s when she said, "All the men I know are unhappy and all the women are happy," and I think it's because all the men grew up thinking they wanted to be president of the United States but they're teaching college. (Laughter) And the women grew up thinking they were going to be a part-time receptionist but they're teaching college, so they're really happy, the men aren't.
It's partly a matter of expectation, of what you expect when you start out. If the sky's the limit and everybody's telling you that, if you don't get the sky, maybe you're a little unhappy, but I think in general women aren't unhappy as you would describe it in terms of being depressed or sad or miserable. They're stressed and they're tired and often you see - I've seen surveys that show that women who have children say they're less happy.
Now, they don't want the children, they're thrilled with the children, but they're so tired and they do so many things that they feel stress every day. It's a different thing than the kind of quantitative happiness we normally talk about.
Tavis: Two other quick questions and I'll let you go here. First, the book has some levity in it. It's not all serious stuff. I found quite funny the role that you argue The Twist, that would be Chubby Checker, and The Twist, the role it played in this journey of women. Tell me more.
Collins: There's all kinds of little things like that that just tickle me. The Twist was one of the very few times that you had a dance that women could do and the men didn't lead. You didn't have to have the man lead. Men are almost always worse dancers than young women are. From The Twist, you kind of evolve to a point now where women don't need men at all to dance; they just get up and dance if they want to.
Tavis: Top line for me, what it is that you find yourself most often sharing when asked about how you became, the journey that you were on to become the first woman to be the editor of the editorial pages of "The New York Times."
Collins: It's often an invitation for me to tell about my suffering and the great challenges that I met, and what I love to tell people was that it was not a great suffering, horrible climb up a mountain for me because women who were about two seconds older, two seconds ahead of me, opened the door, opened the window by filing suits, by protesting, and mainly they didn't get the rewards - people like me got the rewards. I'm always so proud to tell people that I stand on their shoulders.
Tavis: For a whole lot of us, including yours truly, Gail Collins is must-read copy in "The New York Times."
Collins: (Laughs) Thank you.
Tavis: Her new book is called "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present." Gail, an honor to have you on the program. Thanks for sharing your insights.
Collins: Great to be here.
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