New York Times Columnist Gail Collins Looks At Women And Aging in America
Gail Collins has had an adventurous career as a writer.
She’s been writing her column in The New York Times since 1995, and she was the first woman to serve as the paper’s editorial page editor. Plus, she’s penned seven books, most recently “No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History” — which traces the history of women aging in America.
Collins says she had the idea for the book when she was writing one of her previous books on women’s history and stumbled across a letter from an early male colonist.
He was writing back to England, desperately looking for a wife because there were no women in the settlement to marry. He had two qualifications for eligible brides: a woman who was civil and under 50 years of age.
She realized how much the definition of a “young woman” has changed over the years.
“In the late 1800s, in the cities, if you were 22 and you weren’t married, people worried about you,” she says. “So it’s gone up and down, and in and out.”
The reason for the drastic change in women’s role in American society comes down to economics, Collins says.
Early American housewives were valuable because families relied on women to make food and candles, and raise chickens. But once folks started gravitating toward cities, men lost interest in any woman beyond childbearing age.
“They had a huge economy going on that really supported their families,” she says. “And then when people moved to the cities, there was really nothing much for women to do in the house except have babies.”
Then in post-war America, middle-class suburban families became the norm. Once the 1970s hit, the economy couldn’t support this standard of living on one income.
The idea of women working even if the were married transformed everything once again. Now, if a woman is a good earner, she can hold the same status as a man when it comes to age, Collins says.
In the ’70s, women had to petition to be allowed to wear slacks to work instead of skirts or dresses. Not long after, she says, the federal government allowed women to wear slacks so they would stay warm during an energy crisis.
“So things do move along, I have to say,” she says.
Fashion aside, beauty products like makeup and skincare are a $532 billion industry today. But during the Colonial era, bills that would make it illegal for women to dye their hair or wear makeup were proposed to prevent a woman from tricking a man into marrying her under the guise that she was younger.
Hair dye was a revolutionary invention for women, she says. Before it hit the market, women would cover their hair with caps to cover their gray hair.
By letting women to color their grays, she says, hair dye allowed women to mask their age and do more for longer.
Throughout her book, Collins points out that even when times were tough for elderly white women, elderly African American men and women had it worse.
African American
