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When Everything Changed

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, by Gail Collins, hardcover, 471 pages, Little, Brown and Co., list price: $27.99

Sexism isn't dead. New York Times columnist Gail Collins knows that. But it has diminished greatly in just 50 years. The shift within airlines from pretty young stewardesses to flight attendants who cross age ranges, body types and gender is an example of progress used lucidly by Collins. Women now sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, run multinational corporations and feel comfortable working outside the house in less visible occupations — or feel comfortable staying at home with the children. Collins' penetrating social history charts the progress of women by combining the "public drama of the era" — from bra burnings to class-action lawsuits — "with the memories of regular women who lived through it all." Those regular women include a three-generation Wyoming trio — grandmother, mother, daughter — whose individual stories capture the rise of female independence across the United States as vividly as any longitudinal, scientific study.

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