No Stopping Us Now: A History of Older Women in America
A lively, fascinating, eye-opening look at women and aging in America, by the beloved New York Times columnist.
"You're not getting older, you're getting better," or so promised the famous 1970's ad--for women's hair dye. Americans have always had a complicated relationship with aging: embrace it, deny it, defer it--and women have been on the front lines of the battle, willingly or not.
In her lively social history of American women and aging, acclaimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries. From Plymouth Rock (when a woman was considered marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age"), to a few generations later, when they were quietly retired to elderdom once they had passed the optimum age for reproduction, to recent decades when freedom from striving in the workplace and caretaking at home is often celebrated, to the first female nominee for president, American attitudes towards age have been a moving target. Gail Collins gives women reason to expect the best of their golden years.
ALSO BY GAIL COLLINS
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins, New York Times columnist
and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's
lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style"
(People).
When Everything Changed begins in 1960,
when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply
for a credit card. It ends in 2008 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 Gail Collins's keen research--covering politics, fashion,
popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work--When Everything Changed
is the definitive book on 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 quotas for women in admission to medical and law
schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of
women's lives, partly through the 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 a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times 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.
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