Book of the week: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

(Little, Brown, 471 pages, $27.99)

Author Gail Collins has journeyed to another planet, said Judith Newman in People. America in 1960 was a place where a woman could be thrown out of New York City’s traffic court for wearing slacks or tossed out of the bar at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton because she dared to grab a drink alone. Every page of Collins’ “remarkable” survey of American women’s social and political progress over the past half-century is enlivened by similar “‘Are you kidding me?’ moments.” The New York Times columnist is “such a delicious writer” that you can sometimes lose sight of how ambitious her project is. The Feminine Mystique, the pill, The Mary Tyler Moore Show—every signpost of the shift in ­women’s fortunes gets a fresh look.

When Everything Changed is particularly good at explaining why everything changed, said Margaret Talbot in Slate.com. Collins’ “clear-headed, conversational style” shines when illuminating broad trends. Adding up a handful of ­factors—birth control advances, the ­“soaring” material expectations of middle-class families, and the civil-rights movement’s effect on women’s awareness of themselves as a group—she convinces the reader that it’s only natural women would begin pouring into professions previously considered off-limits.

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The author reserves her “finest writing” for addressing why such gains have failed to transport women into a perfect state of bliss, said Amy Bloom in The New York Times. “No social movement,” Collins writes, “can bring permanent happiness to the people it touches. We grow old; we lose loved ones. We fail to live up to our own most optimistic visions of our own character.” The good news, for Collins, is that the women of recent decades created a world that no generation before could even imagine, and they did it while reserving their right to wear “silly, impractical shoes.” Yet Collins’ book suggests that the movement has run its course, said Phyllis Schlafly in Townhall.com. Recent polls show that American women are more unhappy now than their counterparts were 40 years ago. That proves one thing: “Attitude is the problem.” Women have won the broader opportunities they craved. Now all they have to do is abandon the outdated notion that they are “victims of an oppressive patriarchy.”