Women and the Great Changes of the Last 50 years with Gail Collins

On Wednesday, November 25, 2009, at 12:00 Noon, I will be hosting my show The Advocates on WVOX- 14 My guest is Gail Collins, columnist and former editorial page editor of the New York Times. Our subject is her just published book, When Everything Changed, the Amazing Journey of American Women, and her views on today’s women and their challenges.

Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times’ editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her new book: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Before joining The Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains. Besides When Everything Changed, which was published in October of 2009 by Little, Brown, Ms. Collins is the author of America's Women, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.

Ms. Collins ran the newspaper at her all-girls Catholic school and even published a book of comic monologues at the age of 15. She earned a journalism degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1967 and a master's in government from the University of Massachusetts in 1971. In graduate school, she met and married her husband, Dan Collins, now an editor at CBS News. After graduation they moved to Connecticut.

In her early 20s, Collins took a job covering the state legislature in Hartford for The Fair Press, a small weekly in Fairfield County, outside of New York City. When the paper could no longer afford to keep her on, Collins, rather than look for another job, started her own news service called the Connecticut State News Bureau in 1972. After five years and with about 35 subscribers, Collins sold the news service in 1979.