An Interview with Gail Collins

Q: You follow the lives of many poor women, and we get to learn what happened to them. The story of Pat Lorance, who filed a landmark suit against AT&T, was so heartbreaking—how she ended up so poor and crippled after being so badly mistreated and working so hard.

Collins: I’ve got to tell you, she is one of the most cheerful women I have ever talked to in my life. She does not complain. And in a way, it was great that she shared that story, because there is this tendency to focus on the people who won something. You say, “And then everyone lived happily ever after.” Not only is that not the story of women, it’s not the story of life. Everything doesn’t work out for everybody.

When I go out and talk about the book, people will ask me to tell my story, and I try, but there isn’t really much to tell. That’s because women about one second older than I was and one second earlier in the job market were the ones who filed the suits and did the demonstrations and staged the protests and forced newspapers to start hiring women and promoting them. And they didn’t get the rewards. People like me did. The thing that knocks me out is I know so many of these women and they’re not bitter. I mean, they’re angry at the companies, but they’re really happy about all the things that the younger women have achieved. And to me that kind of big-heartedness is the thing you want to celebrate in a book like this.

Q: Talk about Hillary Clinton a little bit. You spent a lot of time watching her during the last Presidential campaign, and she seems like a lightning rod for this transformative era you describe in your book.

Collins: She’s sort of the perfect representative for that era. Even though she’s not like anybody else in the world, she is also exactly like all of these other women.

Q: Have you talked to her recently?

Collins: Not since the election. I did follow her closely during the election. I don’t know, for instance, whether she’s really, really happy or really not happy. But I think she’s definitely come to peace with the fact that she did something really terrific and spectacular during that campaign. Every woman who runs for a big, huge, humongous office in the future is going to be in her debt.

What she did was make people used to the idea that women are going to be commander in chief. Women are actually going to run the country. That’s huge. That’s enormous.

Ruth Conniff's whole interview appears on page 33 of the March 2010 issue. Subscribe to The Progressive for just $14.97 by clicking here for immediate access.