Gail Collins Quotes
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The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.
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Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can't see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off.
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There are lots of reasons for that gap between men's and women's wages but to me, the big one is the work-family issue. Trying to juggle children and a job is tough under any circumstances, but especially if you're shooting for the kind of career that involves long hours at work and being on call 24-7.
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Back in the '70s when my friends in California were at Berkeley, in-state tuition was around $700 a year.
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If immigration reform passes, it'll be a big victory for sanity - nobody really believes it's healthy for a country to have millions and millions of undocumented noncitizens living in the shadows. But it'll also be a sign that the Republican Party has gotten tired of letting the Tea Party push it around.
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The high point was that the people are really nice - despite the crazy politics - and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy.
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When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.
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Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.
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In college, the guys aren't worrying about whether they'll be able to pursue their career dreams and still have kids.
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Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.
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I have always believed the iron rule of politics was that women don't vote for men who yell.
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Elections have to have at least a little meaning. Obama ran on income tax hikes for the wealthy. People knew they were voting for that. They 'want' that. And it's good policy.
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You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I'm interested in. I can't imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as 'Words With Friends' and 'Doom.'
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When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.
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The work-family divide is the biggest issue for American women. But in some ways it's amazing how adjusted society has become to it. In the 1970s, as women began to take more jobs, society was reeling.
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I used to have a sort of soft spot for Huckabee. He seemed to have a genuinely saintly streak, which caused him to defend illegal immigrants and give pardons to criminals who were perhaps a little less rehabilitated than he had imagined.
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During the Obama years, the Republicans have done an unprecedented amount of stonewalling on cabinet-and-below appointees. I would also argue that their war on judicial nominees has been way beyond what went before. Really, if the president nominated God to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Mitch McConnell would threaten a filibuster.
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Sarah Palin is an heir to the women's movement. She has not been constrained by gender. At no point in her life has she thought, 'I can't do that because I'm a woman.'
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Can I say that I think it should be against the law for one state to use taxpayer money to try to bribe businesses in another state to move? Which then causes the target state to use taxpayer dollars to try to bribe the businesses to stay.
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For a border state, I would argue that Texas is less lunatic on the subject of immigration issues than other places around it, like Arizona. They're much more comfortable with their long-term identity as a place with a very large Hispanic population.
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The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you'd have an uprising.
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It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.
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Women in America will have to find an answer for the pressures of work and family, but if you really care about women's issues you have to think about women in the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
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The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy.