You know Gail, a lot of people's lives - including women's - were not, in fact, simple before WWII. A lot of them were, in fact, fucking hard. A lot of the women who were first brought to this country were little more than sex slaves sold to the highest bidder as "indentured servants". Things improved a bit for white women with westward expansion as their labor became necessary and they got more freedom moving away from east coast "civilization". But, of course, that did nothing for female slaves and was disastrous for native American women. Even for the white women, life remained tough. For lower class women stuck in the cities, it was even tougher in those "simple" times of the 1800s. The term spinster, after all, didn't start out meaning some old unmarried woman, they were young women who worked brutal hours spinning yarn for virtually no pay in unsafe working conditions. And the women who were better off, which means presumably married white women, still had little or no rights, their income belonged to their husbands and so did their bodies.

During WWII, as during the expansion west, women's labor became valuable again and so they gained a bit of freedom. That idyllic post-WWII boom Collins describes was accompanied by aggressive efforts to recast American women as servants to their men, to take back the work place for men. This is reflected in the culture of the time. Look at the roles for women in the movies in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g. Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy) and the 1950s (Doris Day) for a glimpse at how the patriarchy was reasserting itself. And, of course, for women who weren't married (or who didn't want to be, gay or straight) or who couldn't afford to stay home, the push back inevitably resulted in lower wages and less opportunity.

And the women's movement was not just born of some sort of economic need of the 1970s. It was started almost as soon as those indentured servants got off that boat and found themselves in hell. It joined in important ways with the abolition movement (many women rights advocates were also abolitionists). After the Civil War, it continued through the spinster strikes in the 1800s and on to the suffrage movement of the last century and then, as with other civil rights movements, continued to grow in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yes, the economic need of a second salary probably helped fuel it, but lets not pretend this was all about getting a second paycheck or that the move towards gaining women access to the work place (and ownership of their wages) began after WWII. It didn't. It was the result of the work of many of generations of all kinds of women and it continues today and, while the money part is important, it's ultimately about being treated and valued as a human being. Just like every fight for equality has been.

Geesh.

I heard this too yesterday morning, and didn't know where to start. But you've delievered the 1-2 punch on both the obfuscation of economic and political history on the one hand, and the ignorance of women's history on the other. "We" are not all middle-class or upper-middle class college educated white women--and yet Collins's understanding of American women's history and the women's movement appears to be yet another pop culture revisionist interpretation that once again places white middle-class women at the center, as if their experiences are normative and all others irrelevant.

because she vaguely recalls the ERA wasn't just a baseball term.

The anger of the second wave came from all those women displaced from their Depression and WWII jobs, forced out of great-paying jobs and the ability to see to their families' futures. It came from their daughters, who knew something horrible had happened to their mothers, and they sure as hell didn't want it to happen to them. The fact that Collins can blithely overlook that is an insult to that Greatest Generation of women who kept this country going during the mobilization.

Why Does Gail Collins Hate Veterans?

Why Does She Hate America?