183 Quotes by Gail Collins

I’m being driven crazy by people who are obsessed with limiting the scope of government, but feel perfectly free to demand that government get involved in women’s most personal choices.

For years I’ve been hearing 20-somethings say they don’t expect Social Security to be around when they hit 65. Eventually, I came to realize that they really mean that they just don’t expect to be 65. Or 40. Neither did I, when I was 22.

But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.

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.

In 1838, Connecticut paid $14.50 a month to male teachers and $5.75 a month to women.

The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.

My all-time favorite program in my entire life was ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’

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.

The term “tomboy,” one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, “was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.