On "When Everything Changed"

When Everything Changed is a book I actually started to write about ten years ago. That was when the millennium was rolling around and the New York Times Magazine asked me to write an introduction to their special issue on women over the last thousand years. This was the first time it really hit home to me that the western world had held ideas about women’s limited capacities and rights for all of recorded history — and they were broken down in my lifetime. Even now, I get a little shiver when I type those words.

I wanted to tell the story of how that big change happened, and so I wrote America’s Women, which began when the first colonial woman set off for the New World in 1587 and went forward. Like many, many people attempting to write a long history, I discovered that I was running out of time and space before I got to the end. So the last 50 years became a quick summary at the tail end.

And that was the part that had gotten me going in the first place — the historical moment in my own lifetime when everything changed.

I knew all along that I’d pick up the story again. My new book weaves the big story (the civil rights movement, NOW, women’s liberation, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin …) with interviews with the women who were there. Some of them (Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Michelle Obama) saw the story from the top, where the headline-making events were happening. But one of the great joys of the project for me was hearing the reminiscences of average women, some in their 80s, some still in their 20s, who talked about everything from to hair styles to child care to dating and sex. 

I was surprised by how much I was surprised all along the way — by everything from why a bill creating a national entitlement to quality early childhood education was vetoed by Richard Nixon to how little girls played with the first generations of Barbie.

Way more sex with Ken than I expected.