Gail Collins.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

New York Times columnist Gail Collins is the author of two volumes of American women's history, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines and, recently, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present .

Collins made history herself, as the first woman ever to edit the New York Times editorial page, from 2001 to 2007. Currently, her wry wit and humane sensibility enliven the paper's op-ed page twice a week.

She spoke with me by phone from New York for about an hour recently, about her new book, why she is an optimist, and how she views the transformative power of the women's movement.

Q: What moved you to write the entire history of women in the United States?

Gail Collins: The whole saga of the books began when we had the millennium coming up, and the Times Magazine asked me to do the introduction to this special issue on women over the last 1,000 years. I must admit that I hadn't really thought that much about the fact that the way the world viewed women and women's place went back thousands of years, and that all the stereotypes about what women could do and their place in the world had dissolved in my lifetime.

That just really knocked me out, and I wanted to write about it.

I'm the sort of person who, if I hear about the signing of the Magna Carta, I want to know what kind of shoes they wore and where people went to the bathroom. I wanted to write a book about what happened to women in America that both had all the big moments and also showed you what it looked like from the ground if you were a woman at a given time.

I had a bunch of researchers who went out and interviewed women and asked what their lives were like--what they played with as kids and how they did their hair and what they wore and how they dated and about sex and how they worked and regarded their futures and everything. And I tried to incorporate that into the book so you could again see it from the top and the bottom.

Q: The book is optimistic, and you see this forward trajectory. But I wonder what you think of Susan Faludi's idea that progress is not linear, that there's backlash. When I was reading the Betty Friedan-era section, I thought of writers like Judith Warner at the Times documenting a similar middle class angst--women who are on what you describe in the book as the Mommy Track and struggling to balance work and family.

Collins: Yeah that's the real, big, humongous unresolved problem--that tension. It was just so clear in the book that the women's stories were all about that issue and trying to balance things, so that became the central theme of the book once you got into the seventies.

I spend my whole life writing about all that we need to do and the problems we need to address. But it does seem to me that once in a while, while acknowledging all of that, it's actually helpful to look back and say, "Wow."

I mean, it makes you feel more optimistic about the possibility of future progress when you look back and say, "God damn! That was one big, huge leap, and it happened in my lifetime!" Or, if you're younger, "It happened as the platform for my lifetime and it changed just in time for me." I think it's not bad once in a while to take a minute and celebrate the good things that happened.

Q: It came across how much fun you had, and it reminded me of how much fun people like Gloria Steinem had in her Playboy Bunny exposé. It's kind of lost in the stereotype of feminists as angry and humorless. But you describe some stuff that was so...