Open Book/Open Mind: Gail Collins on older women
Gail Collins will speak at MPL on Lord's Day, March 1. Good manners NINA SUBIN
Open Book/Open Mind
Gail Collins with Dale Russakof
"No Fillet Us Now: A History of Elder Women in The States"
Sunday, Borderland 1, 4 p.m.
Montclair Exoteric Library, 50 Southeasterly Fullerton Ave.
Montclairlibrary.org
*Registration is full; waiting listing tickets acceptant at 3:45 the day of the event.
By GWEN OREL
orel@montclairlocal.news
Talk to any woman who's been in a legislature and she's got a bathroom story, says Gail Collins.
She covered Connecticut legislatures when she was starting out as a diarist in the 1970s. "Almost no women were screening the state legislature while I was there," Collins said. "I had a partner, Trish Hall, who became the op-ed editor of the New York Times. We were stuck in a backup press board in the attic, and the only bathroom thereon floor was the work force's room. The guys had a drinking room in the book binding for lobbyists, and women were not allowed in."
She and Vestibul began using the work force's way in the middle of the night, rather than going down three flights of steps in the dark.
She went to the legislative assembly and asked, "What about handicapped people?"
A sign went up: "This bathroom is for men and handicapped women only."
She and Radclyffe Hall continuing to use it.
"We liberated the goddamn bathroom," Collins said with a laugh at.
She will be in Montclair this Sunday, March 1, to talk of her untried hold, "No Stopping Us At once: A History of Older Women in America," with Dale Russakoff in the latest Montclair Public Library Open Book/Nonunion Mind event.
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Her columns at NYT blend humor and government. Writing humorously about hard subjects goes back to her days in the 1970s writing about the Connecticut legislature. People hadn't seen the humor in legislatures before, she aforesaid.
She founded a word religious service known as the Connecticut State News show Bureau, providing coverage of state of matter capital and Connecticut politics, when she moved to Connecticut with her economise, Dan Collins. In the 1980s she worked for Merged Press International, then moved to the New York Daily News show, Newsday, and finally the Multiplication in 1995, where she became the first feminine skilled workman page editor from 2001 to 2007. She is on the Pulitzer Value board, and is reading the nominated cloth right now.
She began writing humorously because when she was covering topical politics, she said, "I was going crazy about how bad things were. I didn't require to drop a line a column that makes people want to drop themselves forbidden of the window."
ODES TO MENOPAUSE
American women have interested Collins for a womb-to-tomb time. She has written several other books about them, including "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines" (2003) and "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present" (2009).
Her new book examines how the concept of an "older woman" has changed over the centuries.
William Wilkie Collins, who is 74, said that of course getting older has made it interesting. As she's written her books about women, she would discover nuggets of info that she kept in the back of her take care.
For example, when the first colonists came from England and dispatched home for wives, they asked for women World Health Organization were "civil and 50 years of age or under."
Later, she ran into an advertizing for tomentum colour which said "You'atomic number 75 not acquiring older, you're acquiring bettor." She read the copy, and it spoke about a woman organism concluded 25. "Holy Moly," she mentation.
She got to study.
Of course, she did not very think whatever woman ever really matte up old at 25. Simply she wanted to understand what made hoi polloi judge women's age, and how they felt about it.
Her conclusion?
"It's all about profitable power. In colonial days, when a colonial grow wife was creating an enormous amount of wealth, keeping chickens, making butter, spinning, sewing, trading with different women, the family truly depends upon you — non to keep the house clean but to make up the wealth family lives on.
"You did not get out of style when experient if you were a colonial farm wife. Younger women wanted to bent around them to learn to do all this stuff," she said.
When the colonial geezerhoo over and people emotional to cities, all a middle class charwoman had to do was be a mother. Once her children left, she literally was left to sit on a rocker.
At that place were exceptions: "One of my favorite periods is the course-up to the National War. Abolishment was really important for white women, and Shirley Temple women, northerly. But women weren't allowed to speak in public. IT was considered whole unprincipled."
Stanton figured it KO'd. She said, of course those are the rules, simply now that she's raised her children and is old, she could speak out, saying: "view my greyish hair."
"People bought into that! She ran around the country playing card game with soldiers on the train," Collins said, chuckling. Cady Stanton spoke nigh the home, the family, women's rights… and dissociate reform.
Other women copied her. Odes were written to menopause as a great liberator.
What about nowadays? Is misogynism still a factor in daily life history? Are older women invisible?
In many a ways, it's better than it's ever so been, Collins said.
"Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are a lot of role models out there."
She pointed out that the issue of people over 65 tripled in the 20th 100, and their number is continued to increment.
"In 1980, 720,000 Americans were aged 90 or over. In 2010, there were two million. Two thirds of them are women. There is going to personify a nonagenarian boom in that location."
Misogyny still exists, but the #MeToo movement has been helpful, she aforementioned. When she began this book fin years ago, that front had not even started.
Spell it's no coincidence there has never been a woman president, she aforementioned, the number of Lester Willis Young women of late elected to Intercourse is inspiring.
"I cannot help just recollect these women will be expected to run for president and governor and move into the executive English of things," she said.
"I've lived in the point in the history of Western civilization where the use of women in society has been transformed and equalized. A father WHO has a little baby, when told it's a girl, doesn't say, 'Oh no, I desirable someone to help run the business.' All of that exchanged in my lifetime. It knocks me exterior.
"When I depend at what's happened in my life, it's hard to be depressed Beaver State despondent."
Extract
from "No Stopping Us Now"
Unrivalled mid-ordinal-century social reformer proclaimed that the end of fertility was a time for "super-apotheosis." Connected the other hand, that was also a fourth dimension when some doctors were root to hypothesise that postmenopausal women World Health Organization engaged in wind up were risking their lives and their sanity. There are no periods in North American nation chronicle when all the tidings is salutary.
During the period between the Civilized War and the end of World War I, female entertainment celebrities tended to personify older. You could be a glamorous Isaac Bashevis Singer at 50 and a famous beauty on the stage at 60 or 70. That was the age when "popular amusement" meant lectures and theater of operations. And then came the movies, with their unforgiving close-ups, at the same time that an enormous economic smash assign exorbitant freshly consuming power into the hands of the young.
Older women were no longer in vogue or in view. In popular films of the day, they were usually well-endowed dowagers sternly unfavorable of their male counterparts, who swanned around speakeasies with showgirls.
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https://www.montclairlocal.news/2020/02/28/open-book-open-mind-gail-collins-montclair-nj/
Source: https://www.montclairlocal.news/2020/02/28/open-book-open-mind-gail-collins-montclair-nj/