Since the 1960s, women have made enormous strides. It’s amazing. They have unhappier marriages, more divorce, about half as many children if they’re college-educated, less free time, fatter children, dumber children, more psychologically disturbed children, lonelier lives, messier homes, and husbands who often earn less money than they do. Is this what Gail Collins means by amazing in her latest encomium to feminist progress, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present?

I don’t know anyone clinically sane who thinks life in America is actually better today, when nearly one fourth of college-educated women don’t have children at all, than it was in the 1960s. By every gauge of social welfare, things are dramatically worse. The percentage of babies born to unwed mothers has increased sevenfold. The proportion of children living in single-parent households has tripled. The divorce rate has doubled. More than a million new children every year are affected by parental divorce. The number of children who live apart from the biological fathers has doubled, increasing fom 17 percent to 34 percent.

Children who grow up in single-parent households or with divorced parents have significantly worse outcomes in life in every area. In fact, they have negative outcomes at two to three times the rate of children from two-parent married households.  But, even though at least half of these children are females, Collins actually thinks things have gotten better. According to this reviewer, things were “positively medieval” for women back in the 1960s. So medieval that women were barred from jury duty in some states so they could see to their domestic duties. Oh happy, happy day!

Collins must narrow her gaze on the few seize-the-day female careerists in her midst, women who are perfectly happy to not see or raise their children, if they indeed have any, and to divorce their husbands. She basks in ludicrous examples of female oppression. Reviewer Francine Prose states:

The early pages of Ms. Collins’s book are peppered with accounts of incidents so outrageous they almost seem like jokes. A draft of a Congressional bill to insure equal pay for women was discovered to have been filed “under B — for ‘broads.’ ” At a pregraduation party at Barnard, one woman remembers, students who were engaged to be married were handed corsages, while their classmates without engagement rings were presented with lemons.

Imagine that. Corsages for women. If that’s medieval, this must be the Stone Age.

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