The fantasy I’ve always had is that somehow I could move back in time. I would like to be there when Susan B. Anthony was dying, or someone like that. I would say to her, ‘You won’t believe what’s going to happen.’ And then I would tell her. Gail Collins Read Quote
Women in America will have to find an answer for the pressures of work and family, but if you really care about women’s issues you have to think about women in the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Gail Collins Read Quote
For a border state, I would argue that Texas is less lunatic on the subject of immigration issues than other places around it, like Arizona. They’re much more comfortable with their long-term identity as a place with a very large Hispanic population. Gail Collins Read Quote
Hillary Clinton almost got to be president. The reasons why she didn’t become president had to do with bad judgments about how to handle the early caucus states, which is not a gender-specific trait. Gail Collins Read Quote
Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative. Gail Collins Read Quote
In the 1960s, you had this booming economy, and you didn’t really have enough men around to fill all the jobs. So there was this sudden demand that women come back and perform a lot of the white-collar and pink-collar roles that men had done before or that hadn’t existed before. Gail Collins Read Quote
The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I’ve always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women’s story – that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy. Gail Collins Read Quote
When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it. Gail Collins Read Quote
When I started giving talks about women’s history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, ‘Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.’ It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point. Gail Collins Read Quote
The high point was that the people are really nice – despite the crazy politics – and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy. Gail Collins Read Quote
