Quotes from Gail Collins

Pandering candidates often promise that they can make the pain go away.

When public schools first began opening to girls, the curriculum was mainly based on memorization and beatings.

The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice - many female abolition societies refused to allow black members.

A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months "and so far see no signs of the opium habit.

One law prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court, and carefully defined "negro" as anyone who had one nonwhite grandparent.

The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing

That's pretty much our story: Melanie and Scarlett, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the soccer moms and the vampire slayers. All of them are more complicated than they let on.

It was a raw country, and the first generations of colonial women did things that their granddaughters would have found unthinkable.

Under slavery, African Americans led desperately constricted and frequently brutal existences. But ordinary life went on as well. For most, the average day was filled with couplings and quarreling, friendship and feuds, moments of silliness, acts of selfishness, and gestures of incredible kindness. They carved out their own worlds as best they could.

Next to the sale of their children or spouse, rape was perhaps the worst nightmare of slavery. We have no way of knowing how often it happened... We do know that white women were haunted by the fear that their husbands, fathers, or sons were having sex with their slaves. And we know that black mothers nervously watched their daughters to protect them from dangers they could not understand.

Sir William's critics claimed his much-younger spouse had tormented him with her sexual demands, forcing him to raise money to buy her luxuries to make up for his inadequacies in bed.

Throughout American history, the concept of the woman as a protected homebody went hand in hand with the reality that most women—poor women—were expected to work and were not given any special deference because of their sex. By going off to sling rivets or weld airplane wings, middle-class women lost their status and joined the other part of American womanhood that was expected to fend for itself.

The department stores also imposed a new, very American kind of democracy, in which everyone was equal as long as they had the money to pay. (Marshall Field instructed his clerks to call all customers "ladies," no matter what their dress or manners.) Even poor women enjoyed the stores' big, carefully decorated windows, with displays that changed regularly.

It's possible that a connection existed between the increasing independence of many women and the surgical assault on them. But it's even more likely that doctors started removing women's sexual organs simply because the arrival of anesthetics had made it safe to do so. Doctors had always regarded female reproductive organs as the source of all women's medical problems.

But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America's first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spirit. Not since Hannah Dustan scalped her Indian captors in 1697 had the country been so enamored with the idea of a woman warrior.

Americans love the story of the immigrant who comes through Ellis Island with no possessions but struggles to success and happiness. It is the story that most defines us, and we tell it to ourselves over and over. But for the real immigrants, each story was different, and the happiness of the ending changed with every telling.

The sense of solidarity among the poor was often—although certainly not always—strong. Housewives with very little still fed hungry tramps who came to their back doors. Pauline Kael, a teenager during the Depression who grew up to be a famous film critic, remembered her mother vowing: "I'll feed them till the food runs out.

The dissolution of the normal boundaries between women's work and men's allowed some women to operate with an independence the nation would never really see again until the twentieth century.

Just being female made women candidates for perpetual medical care, because doctors began treating all the normal passages of their lives—puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause—as illnesses.

The state's ability to rear, educate, and prepare all the little Texans to take their place in the national economy is going to be an excellent predictor of how well the whole country will be faring down the line. We will get into that later, but—spoiler alert—the

It's hard to imagine how women made the leap into professions for which they had no role models, no invitation, and very little encouragement.

The male view of why women had to be kept out of the public world was basically that they just weren't up to it.

Looking back, it's easy to see the clothes as a metaphor for everything else that happened to women in postwar America.

There were actually all sorts of New Women, but they shared an independent competence that some found rather terrifying.