Gail Collins

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women

In this speech Collins champions American women. With a gift for story telling, Collins tells of the icons and the ordinary as she examines the struggles and successes women have achieved. From the time the first colonists arrived on our shores to the open sexism of the 1960’s “Mad Men” to Hillary Clinton’s historic run for President, Collins, with a clear eye and candid style, tells the story of all American Women in the battle for parity. Amazingly , for centuries this battle was incredibly unsuccessful until the last fifty years, when almost in a heartbeat all the established preconceptions of women as being inferior to men intellectually and physically came crashing down. How we got from there to here and why it happened, historically speaking, so fast is an enlightening and fascinating journey which resonates with all audiences.

Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Scandal and American Politics

In this speech Collins destroys the image we have that we are living in the most scandalous and screechiest era in American history. Going back to several other periods, Collins lays out the often outrageous and always colorful tempests that have surrounded certain major political figure and explains how telling and meaningful political gossip is and what it says about the anxieties of the age.

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’s editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her 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.

Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several other books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband Dan Collins.