Gail Collins looooves the CT State Legislature.

Gail Collins
Oct. 2, 5:30 p.m., Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006, realartways.org

So, did you hear about the Slut List? The girl-on-girl hazing at Millburn High School in New Jersey? For initiation, the older girls circulated a “slut list” of freshman girls, but it turns out that, for these girls, being on the list is considered a status-upper. The New York Times wrote that there’s the disturbing perception that “allegations of promiscuity … are a badge of honor, a way into the cool group, and not a cause for shame.” Do these bitches know they’re setting back, like, an entire movement?

Speaking of The New York Times, Gail Collins, who is an author and a political/current-events columnist for the NYT, as well as a former writer for the Hartford Advocate (in the more-awesomer ’70s), just wrote a book about ladies of the past few decades — When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present — and she and I gabbed about it by phone last week. She’s coming to talk about her book at Real Art Ways this Friday.

Collins talked to over 100 women from all over the country in researching her book. One woman, who worked in the 1960s at an ad agency in a relatively high position, said there was a whole separate department where women worked. They used separate dining rooms and there was a nurse there who’d put sleepy women to bed, where they could just “lay around for a while,” Collins said. An airline stewardess was required to bend over when lighting cigars for passengers on men-only flights. Golf courses were closed to chicks on the weekends, giving precedent to the dudes, since they were all tired and stuff from their busy workweeks.

“[The book] starts in 1960 and tries to talk about what things were like then,” Collins said. “People didn’t think of things as being all that bad. Women tended to compare themselves with other women,” and few women had female neighbors, friends or acquaintances who were setting out to be CEOs. The ceiling was kept pretty low.

Collins began her career in journalism in the ’70s, when the female headcount was significantly lower in the industry than it is now. But despite any gender roadblocks, Collins, along with Trish Hall, who is also a writer for the NYT, founded the Connecticut State News Bureau (CTSNB), which generated copy for more than 30 different newspapers throughout the state before it closed in 1977. And she was the first female editor of the NYT editorial page.

Collins has a distinct and clever voice, and her approach to (arguably) snoozer subjects, like local politics, is smart and often very funny. She began to hone this style when she was running the CTSNB.

“It’s so hard to make people interested in any way about the state legislature. We were always saying, ‘What can we do, how can we get people to pay attention to this stuff?’” she said. “We tried quizzes, songs, everything. A long time later, somebody asked me if the reason I was trying to write funny was because I was a woman,” she said. They thought she was trying to compete with the boys. She was really more interested in getting people into their local state reps.

“The great thing about [local politicians] is they’re all sort of stuck there, so you can get at them. They don’t go wandering away like the police and everybody else,” she said.

When Everything Changed is Collins’s fourth book, and she’s working on another, a biography of William Henry Harrison. Pretty impressive for a girl who didn’t even make it onto the Millburn High School slut list.