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Jane Fonda. Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Nancy Pelosi. Elizabeth Warren. Maxine Waters. Are "older" women taking over? By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18. And by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Listen to my conversation with Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and the author of the new book, “No Stopping Us Now. The Adventures of Older Women in American History” We explore how attitudes toward older women have shifted in America over the centuries – from the Plymouth Colony view that women were marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age," to quiet dismissal of post-reproductive females, to women’s role as perpetual caretaker (even when she might need caretaking herself), to the first female nominee for president.
Lauren spoke with Gail on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in October of 2019.
TRANSCRIPT: We do our best, please let us know any errors!
Gail Collins: My first book about women, was about women in American history. And we could not think of a title for it. Finally we called it America's Women, but that was so pathetic. The subtitle was 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, which is a desperate attempt to make America's Women sound like a better title. And while I was doing that one, when I just came across a bunch of stuff that I wanted to go back and look at again. And one that sometime at some point along the way I came across was this letter from one of the very early colonists when they were first here, they were all guys. And so they're writing back to England saying, please send us some women. Please, please, please. And they wrote down their description of an ideal wife, who was a woman who was civil and under 50 years of age.
Gail Collins: So I thought, wow. And then I was wondering through some other point, I guess when I was doing, When Everything Changed and I ran across that famous hair coloring is from the early, the early seventies that said, you're not getting older, you're getting better. And I looked at it and the copy within that said, these days any woman over 25 is old. And I thought, holy moly. Wow. And you look right now and there's Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the gym and then running the Supreme Court, and everybody's applauding. I thought, wow, what makes all this stuff go up and down like this? And it seemed like a fun thing to look into.
Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller, and that is Gail Collins, New York times columnist and author of a new book called No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History. We spoke on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, in October of 2019. By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18, and by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Well, look at Jane Fonda. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Look at Nancy Pelosi. My goodness, these women over 25, they're everywhere. And they're all in the book. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up.
Lauren Schiller: Gail's book covers American women from the 1600s to today, which is a lot of history to cover. So I started our conversation with a challenge. I asked Gail to give us the 60 second recap from the 1600s to today.
Gail Collins: May take two minutes, however.
Lauren Schiller: Okay, you get two minutes.
Gail Collins: There were two things. One was scarcity, as we've just seen. If you were the only women coming into some town in the wild west, really you could be 95 and they would be throwing themselves at you, and make no difference whatsoever. But the other thing that seemed to me such a big pattern, once I looked at it, was whether they had an economic role. Women who have an economic role are judged the way men are judged, and women who are seen as only mothers are pretty much out to pasture once their children are grown. And that was the great, great cosmic difference that I saw. And it came and went and came and went. And I won't tell you any more right now, because that's my two minutes, but we'll get back to it.
Lauren Schiller: No, you've got more time. Keep going. You talk about that with World War II, how everything really shifted.
Gail Collins: It shifted. You start look... Two seconds to the colonies. In the colonies wives were all farm wives, and they're growing vegetables, making candles, making... One woman, I just wove 33,000 balls of yarn this year. Just went on and on, the stuff that they could do, creating wealth. And everybody knew that the housewife was creating all this wealth, and young women wanted to come and hang out with them so they could learn how to do it. So at that period, it was a great period for being an older woman, then when everybody moved to the cities. And middle-class women had a much shrunken role that had nothing to do with economics. That was suddenly when, if your kids are gone, why are you still here? But it was very cruel and mean.
Gail Collins: And then as you go back and forth in history, whenever there's an economic call for older women, then they become very popular. And during World War II was the absolute perfect example. You had all the guys are gone and young women with children really resisted the idea of going to work. So there was everybody, a clarion call, and every all eyes turned older women. Here they are, Oh my God. And you suddenly, not just had Rosie the Riveter stories, but you had these stories about Josephine the 80 year old riveter. My God, is she great. And I remember reading one in a magazine at the time that was going around during the war saying, we were so touched today, we went to a restaurant and saw a 65 year old woman carrying a tray of dishes with a gleam of happiness in her blue eyes. I'm not sure about the glass, but that was the moment when women, older women, nobody complained about them at all. They were the heroines because they were doing all the work.
Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, with stories of how women rise up. I'll be right back with Gail Collins, who shares how economy shapes what men look for in a woman.
Lauren Schiller: Well, you tell a story in the book is about some guys you're interviewing in Connecticut about what they were looking for in a woman.
Gail Collins: Yeah. This was the humongous discovery that I made, somewhere along the way. My greatest thought was about the economic participation of women, and during... After World War II, the economy exploded, and everybody thought they could become middle-class. Everybody's going to the suburbs, they're getting their own houses, their kids are going to go to college, we're going to go on vacations. It was a humongous explosion of expectation for family life. And then the '70s came and all that... The oil... You remember a lot of you, I'm sure the oil boycott, the awful, awful economy of the '70s, and suddenly many, many, many families could no longer support the life they thought they needed to live with one income.
Gail Collins: And that was really the absolute change, because suddenly all the women who had been consigned to the role of mom and nothing else, were drawn back into the workforce. And younger women started thinking about what their role would be. And my favorite story about that period is it was actually later, in the late seventies or the '80s, but I was at a college in New Britain, Connecticut. And for some reason I'm talking to an entire room full of guys, and I do not know how exactly I got there, I was doing a woman's book tour, but they were lovely guys. And I said to them, what do you look for in a wife? And nobody was going to say to me, a really hot woman who I... So they all said, a really good personality.
Gail Collins: And I said, oh, that's nice. And then one kid in the back said, and a good earner. And they all said yes, oh my God, yes, and a good earner. Got to be a good earner. And I thought then, wow, this is a whole new vision. Guys really need their wives to be good earners, and women are being integrated into the economy in the same way. And they're going to get old in a totally different way.
Lauren Schiller: What's so interesting to me about that is that, why does the gender wage gap still exist?
Gail Collins: Very, very, very good question. It goes on forever too. One of the great things, after the invention of the birth control pill, suddenly the number of women in graduate school, law school, medical school skyrocketed because you could suddenly control and make sure you were not going to be getting pregnant and having a baby while you were doing your preparation for your career. Stupendous numbers. Now there are more women in law school and medical school than there are men. And the income and average of doctors and lawyers has dropped. What does this mean? It's a pattern that goes on and on and on and on and on. I believe we will overcome it at some point.
Gail Collins: Another problem is that women often like to go into the helping professions, which instantly, when you hear the word helping, you know they're not going to be making very much money. It's just... And because of that, they want to teach, they want to go and do work. They want to help out in different ways. And those are their income from those professions are not as high, and good for them. So a little bit of booth going on there.
Lauren Schiller: And then, right. And then when there is a male profession professionally teaching that women started to take over, it just, it happens over and over again. I just think it's bizarre that they want good earners, but they only want them to make, I don't know, 72 cents for every dollar they make.
Gail Collins: Not the husbands. I do not know anybody who believes more in equality of pay opportunity than the husbands of working wives. They are really for it, 100% yeah.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. So, older women do better when they can generate more money. That's one of the things that you told us. And women's power seems to fluctuate depending on what's happening with the economy overall, how much we're needed, but also who's got political power. Are those the two main drivers of where a women do or do not have power, is who's who is in charge politically, and how much are they needed economically?
Gail Collins: And the political part is very interesting, because you can't quite figure out where it goes with women. Women got the vote in 1920, and they had a vision of a new society that would be created with the women's vote, in which there'd be clinics for poor women and their children, there'd be all of these things happening to make society better, kinder, more woman-like in orientation. And none of it happened at all. Women voted like their husbands. Warren Harding was elected president instantly, and we got prohibition. That was about it. And so, voting by itself is not nearly enough to make a difference. You have to be an aggressive voter, which we're seeing more and more among women, that the women are inclined to vote differently from their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, everybody else. Much more than they were, say 10, 20, 30 years ago. And that's a real lever of power, and we'll see where that takes everybody.
Lauren Schiller: So can we talk about prohibition, since you brought that up?
Gail Collins: Nobody has said, can you talk about prohibition for a long time? I really love this. Thank you.
Lauren Schiller: Who here wants to talk about prohibition? Show of hands? Okay, we got one. We got one person who, okay, so we're going to talk about for you. But you talk in the book about how prohibition, while it was pushed by older women, was actually really bad for all the women, because of what it meant is that their husbands were not going to these elicit nightclubs and hanging out with the flappers, who are generally in their 20s. I had a bad backlash.
Gail Collins: The whole liquor thing was very weird, because it really did separate men from women. Before prohibition, one of the reasons women were so antagonistic to it, well one was that, truly, important neighborhoods, the saloons desperately tried to drag men in on pay day and take away all their money. So it was a legitimate, legitimate crusade. But beyond that, middle-class women didn't drink. And after dinner, and sometimes on weekends and whatever, their husbands and the men would go away places and drink and leave them behind. And it was a real division between the sexes, and women resented it and thought it was bad. And so, that propelled the way to, right along the way.
Gail Collins: And then there we were, and nobody liked it once it came. It really did not work out well at all. And it's true that then men off... Women, middle aged women, housewives, mothers, are not going to be going off to the speakeasy used to be hanging out and drinking. So if the men go, they are going to be meeting a whole new group of young women who are hanging out there. And women got very paranoid, housewives at the time. What the hell is going on? Where are these men going? And even if they weren't going anywhere, they were still looking at their husbands, is this going to happen? What's happening here? So it didn't work out nearly the way people thought it would.
Lauren Schiller: Well, there were, eventually, some good things that came out of women getting the vote, and women actually getting political power.
Gail Collins: I do not want to say this was not a good thing to do, by the way. But yeah, go ahead.
Lauren Schiller: That it was not a good thing to do-
Gail Collins: To give women the vote. No, it was really, really, really good idea.
Lauren Schiller: It was just a slow cook, right?
Gail Collins: It wasn't nearly the revolutionary moment that women thought it was going to be.
Lauren Schiller: But eventually, out of having women in power, we got social security, we got better labor laws.
Gail Collins: The New Deal. Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh my God.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. Let's talk about Eleanor Roosevelt.
Gail Collins: Eleanor Roosevelt I think had the greatest middle age of any woman in American history, by far. God help us, she's all over the place. She is visiting places that nobody else at the top of government has ever gone to, ever. To see poor black families, to see Appalachian families. She's going to see the troops overseas. She's driving around by herself. It was driving the Secret Service, so crazy that they taught her how to use a revolver. So there she's in her car with her revolver for going to see people in Appalachian. I just, Oh my God, what a woman. And because of her influence, and because of people who are hanging out with her and because of people who had begun to move into positions of power locally anyway, you got the New Deal women, like Francis Perkins, who was the person you most remember as being responsible for social security. So no badness at all in that development, I would say.
Lauren Schiller: I'd love to talk about the parallels in that moment in time, to the moment in time that we're experiencing now.
Gail Collins: Wow, okay.
Lauren Schiller: Well, just in terms of-
Gail Collins: There's Franklin Roosevelt.
Lauren Schiller: Okay. Not those guys. The women. We have a historic number of women in Congress now, and they're in positions to make a lot of change. And I think we all tend to get frustrated. Clearly we've got an issue in the White House that is preventing a lot of things from happening, but that we get frustrated with the pace of change. That why does it take so... Now we've got all these women, so how can we see more things happen more quickly, around education and health care and the so called more feminine interests.
Gail Collins: You really wonder if we had a different president, what this last election would have brought forward. But things are so crazy now that, just the ability to get up in the morning is about everything they can accomplish. And I find Nancy Pelosi very interesting. People complain constantly. Why isn't she doing more? Why isn't she doing more? But she is handling this thing that's happening now. I can't imagine anybody else doing, any guy up there that I've watched doing it, cannot conceive of them doing it anywhere better. You see the committee chairman, the guys, it's just not, they were not going to do any better than Nancy Pelosi. She's really controlled this thing, handled Donald Trump as well as a human being possibly could. And I like to think that's part of the future.
Gail Collins: And once we get past this time, will be very interesting to see what these very large number of women moving into Congress, although still a minority, and hardly any women governors, there's still a long, long way to go. Still, see what happens next. It's going to be great.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah, and they are, we were talking about this earlier, they are, the majority of women, are Democrats. There's very few female, Republicans.
Gail Collins: Very few. It's amazing how they could even manage to avoid having more women. It's just incredible. Gosh, darn.
Lauren Schiller: Imagine what could get done though if there were more women, Republican politicians?
Gail Collins: They do work until this recent unpleasantness of the last couple of years, the women in Congress worked together very well. They had their regular things they would do, they would do softball games together. They would go out to dinner together. They had their own special place where they would hang out, and they were capable of behaving in a much more bipartisan manner than the guys were. And if things had, I think the place where they did, I'd probably still, if they still get to do it, the place that they hung out was the Strom Thurmond Room. Which I just find so... The idea that Strom Thurmond gave his name to this, tickles me so. But once this passes, we'll see what happens. It's going to be a whole new thing for sure.
Lauren Schiller: I like the affirmative way that you just said, once this passes. All things must pass. Well actually, let's talk about you for a minute. You're a woman with power. You write this... You look at you, you're sitting on this stage in front of all these people.
Gail Collins: Thank you.
Lauren Schiller: I feel the glow of you right here. And you write your column every week for the New York Times, and you have the opportunity to sway a lot of public opinion. And do you, this is such a weird question to ask, but do you think in those terms, if I write this, and this happens? I have this power and how must I use it?
Gail Collins: Not exactly. My thing has been, I've been a columnist for a really long time, before the Times I was at the New York News Day and then the Daily News before that, and somewhere along the line in the Daily News period, I was writing a local column is about local government. And at that point, New York local government was so bad. Oh my God, it was terrible. And I'd write these columns every couple of days saying, oh my God, look what they did now. Oh my Lord, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And I would go on and on like that, trying to rile up indignation and fury.
Gail Collins: But after a while, I was thinking, oh my God, basically I'm causing people to get up and want to throw themselves out the window. There's got to be a different way to do this, where I can tell people what's happening, without depressing them mortally. So at that point, I tried to make the columns more fun to read. So that my goal has been, for a long time now, to just get people to know about stuff in a way that doesn't make them suicidal.
Lauren Schiller: It seems... So far so good. I chuckle every time I read one of your columns, even though what you're conveying is just so horrible underneath.
Gail Collins: We're getting the votes in now, we have a contest now named the worst cabinet member. Many, many votes are coming in, I've got to tell you.
Lauren Schiller: Well, let's talk about what it means to be old. This is a question that's in question, right? This, a certain age-
Gail Collins: And not argue about your age, now. Lie about it, now that we have Wikipedia. You're just stuck. Whatever age you are, you really are for sure.
Lauren Schiller: I feel like there's no good answer to the question, how old are you? Or you look younger than I thought you were, or you look older than I thought you were. That used to be a compliment, but now not so much.
Gail Collins: No, I'm 73 by the way. The story of it.
Lauren Schiller: Well, okay, so one of the things that you... That I found in the book is that in the 1950s only about 3% of the population was over 65.
Gail Collins: Very tiny bit. And then the amount has just, I trust your numbers because I've completely gone blank on them.
Lauren Schiller: I got them from somewhere.
Gail Collins: But it was tiny. And it's exploded. And one of the reasons I think it's so important to talk about women maintaining careers, and men too, in their later years, is because there's going to be so many of us very soon. This world is not going to be able to support us, unless we do more earning on the side to try to keep things going a bit because it's just... And the number of people over 90 is skyrocketing. Most of them are women. And it's going to get more and more and more so because thank you, the medical profession.
Gail Collins: Which by way, doing history, I have to say, teeth. I think back about history, oh my God, there were no teeth. Nobody had any teeth. They found the body of a woman at Jamestown just a few years ago when they were digging around, and she was about 30 years old, and she had five teeth. That was all. So when I think about history, I do wonder off, and I'm sorry, I just changed the subject completely. Every once in a while I think, my God, teeth. Oh my Lord in heaven. This is so amazing. We've all got our teeth.
Lauren Schiller: Well there's been a lot of medical advancements since-
Gail Collins: Even more profound than that, but I just-
Lauren Schiller: We'll get to plastic surgery, and all the other stuff in a few minutes. Hair dye. I know that's not a medical procedure, but. So is retirement passe now? Is that not a thing anymore? If people... If 65 was the retirement age-
Gail Collins: Well many people do retire at 65. And to be fair, many, many people look forward to retiring at 65. It's not like the entire world is out there saying, let me stay in this job for another 10 years, this is what I really want to do. But the vision that when you stop doing, if you stop doing what you were doing when you turn 65 or whenever, that you're then going to go home and sit around is, I think, really passe. There were just so many things people are doing now. There's so many people who are working as volunteers. There's so many people doing community service. There's so many people who are just going out and doing things they always wanted to do, take a boat around the world or whatever, that they couldn't do otherwise. But that's the vision. The thing is that you don't have that sense of, okay, we're done now, we're going to go home and it's all over.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah, because you get to be sticking around for another 30, 40 years.
Gail Collins: Damn straight.
Lauren Schiller: We've got to come up with a good routine. It's also in this time, it seems like a great opportunity to get involved in, say, some activism. Right? And thinking about women throughout history who have been involved in activism, and bridging that gap between the younger activists and the older activists, how those two worldviews might come together or push apart. And that's something that you talk about.
Gail Collins: Can I tell my Elizabeth Cady Stanton story?
Lauren Schiller: Yes.
Gail Collins: This is one of my favorite stories. This is before the civil war, and women in the North were the ones who were very, very conscious of the evils of slavery, I think, more than the men were there. They were very into the idea that it was a woman's issue, because you're talking about families being broken up, and young girls being at the mercy of slave owners, and became a very passionate issue. But you couldn't go out and talk about it in public, because the idea of women speaking out in public was just not accepted. They would throw stones at you, they would burn down your auditorium, they would call... They thought that you were all promiscuous if you were to speak out in public, you were a harlot. That was the thought that was going around, and so nobody did it. You really did not have any women getting out. Even African American women who wanted to speak out against slavery were really discouraged by their communities in many parts of the North.
Gail Collins: So Elizabeth Cady Stanton is right there in this point and she's dying to go out and talk about this stuff. So she suddenly announces, well, I'm going to come out, because I am a grandmother, gray hair, looking dumpy, wearing frumpy clothes here. I am a grandmother. I'm going to come and talk to you about grandmother things, our boys and our home. And I'll throw in a little bit about slavery, maybe, and a little bit about women's rights. And I've got ideas about divorce for forum that I made. And she got away with it. And she went around the country giving speeches all the time, sleeping over night in railroad stations when she couldn't get a train. Playing cards with soldiers on her way from one town to the other. She got away with it all because she presented herself as a grandmother, and her friends saw this going on and suddenly they started writing odes to menopause. Oh happy day we get to go out. This is all great. And it was a great liberation, and it was liberation through gray hair, basically.
Lauren Schiller: So the menopause thing comes up a lot, for obvious reasons, but that it either is going to make you sex crazy, or sex neutral or completely be the beginning of the end. Can you talk about some of the things that you learned about the change?
Gail Collins: Doctors didn't discover a menopause until the 1800s. Did not occur, and they didn't care. When they did discover it, they instantly decided that it was terrible and it led to your death, or insanity or something. It was just, it was never a popular. And when doctors did start to think about it, they started to think about ways to avoid it. They started with chimpanzee glands, allegedly at least, injecting women with a chimpanzee glands to save them from menopause and keep going. And of course that didn't work, but you did, as time went on, get to what led to a hormone replacement therapy, which for 20 years, it was the absolute thing that was going on in this country. Tons and tons and tons of women were doing it. And that was all about eliminating the evils of menopause.
Gail Collins: And it took all that time, really until they realized that hormone replacement therapy was bad for you, and you can't do it anymore for a long periods of time, before people were really willing to sit down and talk about, well, hey, this is a normal part of life. You can just do that and move on, and everything is fine. It was a bad moment for the medical profession that went on for a long period of time. But I think it's pretty well over now. It's been a long time since I've heard anybody say, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, my life is over. It's been forever.
Lauren Schiller: I just hear, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, I'm sweating all the time.
Gail Collins: That one does still come up, I've got to say. That's true.
Lauren Schiller: Well, okay, so on that topic, the amount of work,
Gail Collins: I'm sorry, guys, whoever's out here, it's just-
Lauren Schiller: Hey, you know what? It's just, it's part of the package. There's also, I love all the stories about hair dye, and the reactions to women who dyed their hair, that the horrible dye that was actually available when it first came out. And even today, women of a certain age, or women who are going gray. Have to make this vital decision. It's a life, it's really a life altering decision. Am I going to dye my hair?
Gail Collins: Well my friend, Nora Ephron said, that the history of women superseding the limitations of age was not about feminism or about better life through exercise. It was all about hair dye. I was just totally into that idea, and I grabbed it. Because it really is in many ways true, that if you have the choice of deciding whether or not you're going to go gray, and either one is a perfectly logical choice. It does create an end to that whole idea that there's a particular point in life when all women go gray, and that's a marker, because clearly, two thirds of the women are not having that marker anymore.
Gail Collins: It was a 10 year period, I think it was from the beginning to the end of the '60s, but maybe the '70s, when the first time that women could, that was really easy to do hair coloring. You could do it at home. It was easy to go to a hair shop and get it done. 7% of women used hair coloring at the beginning of that decade, and by the end, they had to take hair color off American passports because you couldn't tell anymore. You had no idea what color people's hair really was. So it's just eliminated. It's a big thing.
Gail Collins: And in the early days, women, first of all was against the law in many States, allegedly, to dye your hair. Or at least they tried to pass a law. State legislatures will do anything, basically. And there was a long period of state legislatures talking about banning, or making it illegal to dye your hair, because the theory was, you could trick people into marrying you, trick men into marrying you by looking younger than you really were. A, the dyes were so terrible then that nobody would have been fooled anyway. And if you use them, your hair would fall out, or you get mercury poisoning. It just was not a reliable thing to do for anybody. But there was this paranoia on the part of state legislatures and people, guys in general, that somehow women would be able to trick you into thinking that they were much younger than they really were.
Lauren Schiller: There's got to be a politician who just had a terrible experience, and he was like, I am not letting this happen to any of my other male friends.
Gail Collins: State Senator, Fred. And he told everybody about it, it was horrible.
Lauren Schiller: I was also thinking about, I can't remember if this is in your book or not, but the quality of mirrors used to be not that good.
Gail Collins: Right.
Lauren Schiller: And if you've ever stayed in an old house or whatever, and you try and do your makeup, pluck your eyebrows, forget about it. So, but as the quality of mirrors got better, I'm guessing, that also intersected with the proliferation of magazines, and all of these different ways that you could beautify yourself, and all the makeup that was available to do it with.
Gail Collins: It's absolutely true and it was very fast, that suddenly this all turned over, and women went, hey, this could happen, that could happen. And then once it became possible, every magazine in the entire universe was warning you, if you don't use that, or that or blah, you are going to look like such a hag. You will never be able to go outside again. There was one ad I really loved. It was from I think the '40s maybe the '50s, in which a young girl is saying to her mother, mom, you're looking so young these days, because of blah, blah. And mom looked really young because she had exactly the same face as her daughter in the ad.
Lauren Schiller: In addition to the epiphany around the mirror. I was also just thinking about how much, these magazines, many of them, especially as the years went on, were run by women, and women perpetuating these beauty standards, which were, are, impossible for most real people who don't have Photoshop or a stylist and to make a person and a fitness trainer and yada, yada, yada to actually live up to. And that it has caused... And you can see I'm wearing lipstick, I get my hair cut just the other day, but that it has caused us women to spend so much time and money worrying about these things, and also being judged by them, and that it has been perpetuated, in a sense, by other women, women who had the possibility to change the way we think about ourselves.
Gail Collins: It's a great business. And I worry about cosmetic surgery, that the places at which it goes to. Crazy lengths, and you just see poor women cutting themselves up every year to try to look more and more young, and I find that very disturbing. But I have to say I've gotten used to the cosmetic thing. And I see a lot of guys who I just think, well, if you had the opportunity [crosstalk 00:32:21]. It's not my biggest worry, anyway, in the cosmic scheme of things.
Lauren Schiller: Coming up, Gail Collins tells us her adventure to becoming the first woman editor of the editorial page of the New York Times.
Lauren Schiller: Join our supporters by making a tax deductible donation at inflectionpoint.org, and clicking the support button.
Lauren Schiller: We're moving away from hair dye and makeup, and all of that, into the civil rights movement.
Gail Collins: Fantastic.
Lauren Schiller: Where women did, when they went to march, dress quite beautifully, and wear their hat and their lipstick and you even have a story about lipstick and suits.
Gail Collins: The Women's March for Peace, in particular. That was the first really anti war anti nuclear proliferation movement, that was created by middle-class housewives. And their idea was, that if you marched around wearing a shirtwaist dress, and maybe even a mink coat and high heels picketing the White House, that you would confuse people, and then they cause them to think, maybe mothers really do care about these issues, and it's not really the three crazy people down the street. And it worked, to some extent. And for a long time, younger women in the movement, were always being yelled at for not coming in with the right clothes on and stuff like that, because they thought that was a really important part of the story.
Gail Collins: Can I just tell one civil rights thing that-
Lauren Schiller: That proceeded, that was leading up to the civil rights... Yes, go.
Gail Collins: The thing about the civil rights movement that... I thought so much about the trajectory of African American women, which was different because they were working all the time, mostly as domestics. But when you got to the civil rights movement, when we think about the civil rights movement, we think about young people getting killed or risking their lives down South. And then we think about Martin Luther King, and all the other men who were leaders. But if you look at, say the beginning of the movement, the first person that most Americans heard about was Rosa Parks, who was a middle aged woman. And then that gave birth to, when she refused to go to the back of the bus, that gave birth to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was really the thing that caused America for the first time to think, what's going on? For the first time, really focus in on this.
Gail Collins: And the Montgomery bus boycott was organized by middle aged black women. They were the ones who had been out in the community forever doing social work, helping people, taking care of stuff that was going on, working on the schools, registering people to vote. And they were the ones that had those kinds of connections, who could go right in there and organize people very quickly. And nobody gave them any credit. And Andrew Young said that it was because it was, they were too much like their mothers, so they therefore it didn't want to do it. But nobody has celebrated the work of older black women in the civil rights movement nearly, nearly enough.
Lauren Schiller: And he specifically said that about Ella Baker.
Gail Collins: Yes. Ella Baker was my hero. Oh my God.
Lauren Schiller: Tell her story.
Gail Collins: Ella Baker was a great organizer in the civil rights movement, and she started out, and she spent her most heroic years working with young people, black and white in the South, trying to give them a vision of community organizing that didn't involve just having a big strike and that everybody goes away. But organizing the whole community so that people are able to take up the cause themselves, and set their own goals. And it was hard to do, because of course the kids wanted to come in and...
Gail Collins: But she spent her great years working on that kind of organization, and she would spend all of her nights on trains going from town to town, sitting, listening all night long to young people talking, trying to help them by listening to them think about ways to move forward. They called her their Gandhi. She did this when she had terrible asthma, and all these kids smoked the whole night long. She would sit there with respirators, listening to them with an oxygen mask on, listening for hours and hours and hours and hours, patiently, to these kids talking in order to help them to move forward. I think she's the great unsung heroine, hero, of the civil rights movement forever.
Lauren Schiller: Ella Baker was a middle aged woman who went and hung out with young people, and helped them rise up. But sometimes, the young people don't necessarily want the old people around.
Gail Collins: Don't trust anyone over 30.
Lauren Schiller: Exactly.
Gail Collins: I must admit, I was in college for that. We actually did trust many people over 30, people who are professors, men and women, and our lawyers. But it was just so cool to say that, that you just did for a while there.
Lauren Schiller: We would say in high school all the time to our parents. You wrote in your book, it was about the 1950s. In the 1950s, the Population Reference Bureau was a research book that warned that the country could be taken over by elderly women, since their numbers were increasing so much faster than that of the men in terms of voting power, ownership of land and corporate equities. The US could be seen on the road toward a geronto-matriarchy, control by aging females.
Gail Collins: Ready to go. Okay.
Lauren Schiller: What happened?
Gail Collins: Worse things could happen in the world. I can name one right now really fast. And part of it is, went with women's suffrage, and why it didn't work out the way you expected, is that women's interests are so intermingled with their husbands, their sons, their brothers, that it's very seldom that you see for any prolonged period of time women separating themselves from men and saying, we're just going to do this on our own. It's just not going to ever happen. And that was part of it. And the whole women, older women, taking over the world thing, which I'm looking forward to, has clearly been a lot slower than some people might've expected. But I think that's just paranoia. There's just a ton of that out there. People being, statisticians and poll takers, becoming paranoid about stuff that they didn't need to become paranoid about.
Lauren Schiller: Remember the statistic about people over 65 being such a small percentage of the population. So apparently, by 2034, there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18.
Gail Collins: The population is just exploding all the way up. And as, I think I said before, the answer to that, one of the answers is that older people are not going to be able to drop out anyway, even if they want to. They're going to have to chip in there, do stuff to help keep the rest of the country going. It's our responsibility, for heaven's sake. You just can't let these things slide and say, I've done mine. I'm gone. This is all you. That's one of the reasons I just see this incredible change, and what's going to be happening.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. You'll probably tell me that it's always been this way, but there is a movement around activism for mothers, and often, mothers in their forties whose kids are old enough, they're at school and they have time available to push forward things around ending gun violence. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that... Okay, ending gun violence. Yes, thank you. I'm thinking specifically of Shannon Watts for Moms Demand Action, and then Moms Clean Air Force is a great environmental group, but Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that I have a memory of. And just thinking about these women who are old enough to have a skillset, and a focus and something that they want to see change, and not just go along with the status quo. That is such a huge asset to our country.
Gail Collins: It's always been this way No really. But there've been so many people like that who have talked about that throughout our history. Jane Adams was the famous leader of the first social work movement, really, among women in this country. And she worked until she really was almost ready to die, and wrote many articles as she got older about how older women were getting back in there and they were doing... It was all volunteer work, but it was very serious volunteer work in their communities. They were starting women's clubs that everybody thought were, oh my God, they're going to be writing papers about Julius Caesar and his wife's dresses or whatever, it's going to be really silly. And very fast, they went from, we're going to do study groups to, we are going to do prison reform. We're going to go and help working women in working class, working women. We're going to do stuff to pasteurized milk, for God's sake.
Gail Collins: So this, this has been a movement that comes and goes and comes and goes, but I think it's coming again now you. Do really see, although I talked to Anna Quinlan about that, who's been working for Planned Parenthood for a thousand years, just the rock of Planned Parenthood, and she said that she finds now that's so many older women are still working, that they're volunteers, more and more, tend to be younger women who are trying to get college credit for it or something like that. Which is a very weird and strange thought that never occurred to me before, but I'm just putting it out there. Because if Anna Quinlan says it, it's probably true.
Lauren Schiller: Yeah. And those interns should get paid. Well one of the things that I, the main thing that I explore on my show, is how women rise up. So since you've studied 400 years of women rising up, is there an answer out there? Could we just put a nail in it?
Gail Collins: There are many, but I can tell you one from your very own life. When people ask me a lot, how did you get to be the editorial page editor at the Times or whatever. And the answer is basically-
Lauren Schiller: First woman.
Gail Collins: First women, there were some before me, but they were all guys. There were many before me, but they were all guys. And I have to tell you this, as totally in passing, and I'm sorry I'm getting off the subject, but at the Times, there is a room where the editorial board meets and they do all their deliberations and discussions. And when I was around, there were pictures on the wall, it was in the old building, of Henry Raymond, who was the first editor and editorial page editor and a few of the other really famous editorial page editors. And of course they're all guys, and I used to, once in a while, if I was feeling really sassy, I just go in the middle of the day and I'd say, guys, I've got your job. It just knocked me out. I really just always enjoyed it, always enjoyed that.
Gail Collins: I wanted to tell a story that has, I was talking so much about how the economy changed what happened with women and everything else, but it was also the women who changed what happened with women. Women who filed lawsuits, and who went on strike for equal opportunity, and they were almost never the people who got the rewards. At the times, the women who, was before I got there, but the day that I think the publisher or the editor, it was while back, posted a thing saying we have three new openings for editors. Any guy that's interested should just come over here and apply or something like that. But whatever it was, it just drove the women crazy because they had all had desires. They had hopes and dreams of becoming, say foreign editor, or national editor or whatever. And they were all getting shunted away to assistant travel page editor or whatever.
Gail Collins: And they were so angry, and they fought, they started fighting and protesting and threatening lawsuits and terrifying the management, until all these changes were made. And I guarantee you right now, the New York times is the most diversity conscious place I have certainly ever worked. They're very, very conscious of that. But this change, when it happened, didn't help those women, because they had been spending so much of their lives fighting for this stuff that they were like... They'd been... She was the travel editor, or travel deputy for 15 years. What the hell? We're not. And they were older, and they'd gotten in everybody's face. So they were thought of as a pain. The people who got all the rewards for people like me, who walked in right after that. And we were the ones who got all of the opportunities.
Gail Collins: And I know so many of these women. And the thing about them that just knocks me out is that they weren't bitter about it. They were so happy that they had done something that had opened up these opportunities. When I got to be editorial page editor, they were thrilled. None of them ran around saying, I could have done that, for God's sake. I didn't have the chance. It's not fair. And that to me is the definition of a great heart. Somebody who takes joy in somebody else getting the thing they fought for that they didn't get. And that's what these women were like. And I never pass up a chance to talk them.
Lauren Schiller: That's it. That's the answer, right? We help each other step up.
Gail Collins: You help each other.
Lauren Schiller: So when I first got the book, I thought to myself, No Stopping Us Now, is that ironic or sincere? But I feel like by the end of reading the book and this conversation, I think it's our rallying cry.
Gail Collins: It is totally sincere. I just look at the history, and when I think that I got to live through the point in history that changed the entire way women survive in western civilization. That changed the role of women, the role of men relating to women that had gone on forever. It changed in my lifetime and I got to see it happen. How can you not be optimistic when you think about something like that?
Lauren Schiller: Could you feel it? Could you feel it as each change happened? Obviously as a little baby, you're maybe not feeling things, but as you as a tween, and then in your twenties thirties and so on?
Gail Collins: I was really completely out to lunch about it. I had gone mostly to all girls schools and so, and they were Catholic schools, so really the male thing did not enter the equation a whole lot at all as you were coming along. And then when I was in college, we were having the free speech movement, and it was a very open movement and I felt fine about that. So it really wasn't until I got to graduate school, and there were a lot of other women organizing around women's issues. And I had no idea, and there were, there were no women faculty members in the graduate school where I was at UMass at that time, but it had never occurred to me. I was so stupid, and so dumb and I'm just every day thankful that when I was there, I ran into all of these amazing women and on and on throughout my life. They were all always way ahead of me, and it was just a privilege to come up behind them and learn stuff from them.
Lauren Schiller: That was Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and author of No Stopping Us Now, speaking with me live on stage at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. I'll put a link to Gail's book on my website, inflectionpointradio.org, where you can also find future events by clicking on the events tab. I'm Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.
Lauren Schiller: Today's program was produced, in part, by the generous donation of Ellen Olsen in honor of her late mother-in-law, Margaret Nicholson, a woman Ellen says, was way ahead of her time.
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