Read When Everything Changed Online
Authors: Gail Collins
Tags: #History, #General, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #World, #HIS000000
Women protesting the Miss America pageant at the breakthrough demonstration in 1968.
(AP Images)
Gloria Steinem.
(AP Images)
Phyllis Schlafly, head of the “Stop ERA” movement, with a young fan.
(AP Images)
Anita Bryant, leader of the gay rights opposition movement.
(AP Images)
Betty Friedan reacts to an Equal Rights Amendment defeat in 1977.
(AP Images)
Television’s willingness to show women doing something besides housework began to evolve with Marlo Thomas’s
That Girl
in 1966. Thomas portrayed an unmarried woman who lived on her own while pursuing an acting career, but her worried parents were never far away.
(© American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.)
In 1970 Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards arrived and became a real grown-up whose claim to happiness was much more about work and friends than finding the right man. Moore is shown here with Valerie Harper, who played her best friend, Rhoda.
(CBS / Landov)
Billie Jean King is carried onto the court for her “Battle of the Sexes” with Bobby Riggs in 1973.
(© Bettmann / Corbis)
Bella Abzug first began wearing her trademark hats because her mother told her it would send people the message that she was not a secretary. Abzug marches here at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1978. Billie Jean King is on the left, and Betty Friedan is on the right. (
Teresa Zabala /
New York Times)
Women at the
Houston Chronicle
broadcast their demands for equal pay in 1970.
(© Bettmann / Corbis)
Phylicia Rashad and Bill Cosby played the Huxtable parents in the ’80s hit
The Cosby Show.
Clair Huxtable seemed to manage a law career, a large family, and a home with effortless grace, and American women hoped that they could Have It All—just like Clair did.
(NBC Universal Photo Bank)
Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to be inseminated with the sperm of a childless biochemist whose wife had health problems. But when the child was born, Whitehead wanted to keep the infant, sparking national debate and a long court suit. (
Fred R. Conrad
/ New York Times)