Quotes from Gail Collins

But the Puritan women had crossed a large ocean in very small ships to get to America, and many of them were not feeling particularly deferential. When the residents of Chebacco, a town near Gloucester, decided they wanted to build their own meetinghouse, the men went off to Boston to petition the local authorities for permission. While they were gone, the women built the meetinghouse themselves.

In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.

Tanned skin was also unacceptable, particularly in the South. "Remember…not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much," wrote Thomas Jefferson, demonstrating once again that he could always find just the wrong thing to say to a devoted daughter.

And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn't yet become either prestigious or profitable—whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.

The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it. I

It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the contradictions of nineteenth-century womanhood than the workaholic editor continually reminding her readers how lucky they were to be presiding over the hearth rather than engaging in "the silly struggle for honor and preferment" in the outside world.

But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.

Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, "What Every Girl Should Know," for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: "What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.

Truth was one of the few public women of her day who did not pick favorites when it came to the claims of race and sex. "If colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before," she said. Not all black women agreed with her.

When I was young if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll. —Susan B. Anthony A

smart woman can do very well in this country. —A young woman in nineteenth-century California

Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice—many female abolition societies refused to allow black members.

What naturally you want to do if you were a prominent person in the public light and you are disgraced, you want to make a comeback, and normally that begins with somebody saying, 'I want to do something to help people. I want to do something to help the lepers in the Third World. I want to do something to help abandoned wives in India.'

The one big, humongous, immense thing that we didn't change, that we didn't figure out how to deal with is, if men and women are both going to work throughout their lives, who's going to take care of the kids?

Until Eleanor Roosevelt, there was only one or two First Ladies in all of American history who made an impact, who people could even have recognized or identified. And it's really only been since Jackie Kennedy that there's been this idea that the family life of the president is such a central thing.

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything.

One line I'd draw would be on raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It sounds fair, since people are living longer. But it isn't. Lower income workers are the ones who find it hardest to keep working after 65. And they'll get penalized with lower benefits.

Texas is a great place to be rich and a terrible place to be poor. It's got the highest percentage of people without health insurance in the country. If you get injured on the job, good luck getting workers' comp. And God help you if you're poor and mentally ill.

Now my poor hometown is being castigated as the center of an IRS scandal. Humble workers at the Cincinnati office targeted Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny when those groups applied for tax-exempt status. There's no conceivable excuse for that. It was deeply, deeply wrong.

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.

The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.

To be honest, I haven't seen much serious budget planning since the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections and grabbed onto the Senate filibuster. It's not the White House's fault that John Boehner couldn't deliver on a bigger deal.

I just really like Houston despite its craziness. There is a sense of energy and a kind of excitement, 'We're going places and God knows what'll happen next.' It's very interesting. It's very exciting.

For the undocumented immigrants, the big priority is just to get out from the shadows, be able to get a driver's license, buy an airplane ticket and stop worrying about sudden deportation. But for the country as a whole, it's crucial that everybody have a citizen's stake in the nation's welfare.