In NO STOPPING US NOW, New York Times columnist Gail Collins focuses special attention on American women who aged but maintained their prominence in a variety of fields --- from activism to acting to health to hard-won roles in the world that once belonged almost solely to men.

Previewing her decade-by-decade exploration of older women from the 1920s to the present, Collins surveys the expectations and accomplishments of women from the country’s founding. Dolley Madison covered her graying hair with a turban that sprouted black locks, while Martha Washington followed George to Valley Forge and knitted socks for the troops. British actress Fanny Kemble wrote with sympathy of the plight of slaves on her husband’s Georgia plantation, and Harriet Beecher Stowe created a sensation with her bestselling novel that cast enslaved blacks in a favorable, if still mildly racist, light. Harriet Tubman spoke loud and clear for the plight of her race well into old age.

"NO STOPPING US NOW will bring new hope and promise of even wider perspectives to Collins’ female readers, whatever their age."

An odd couple, perennially admired and respected, emerged in the suffragist era in the partnership of plump but bold and eloquent public speaker Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend, Susan B. Anthony --- stern, bony, organized --- but a less-than-gripping orator. Mother Jones, who advocated for the right of coal miners to unionize, shined so brightly as a grandmotherly sort that she happily exaggerated her age, and Jane Addams was a legendary reformer whose activism spanned two centuries.

The Roaring Twenties brought short skirts and defiance of all authority, as educated women were discovering that they could support themselves quite well without a man to care for. But it was not until the ’40s and World War II that mainstream females went to work in factories and learned that they were just as capable as men to toil in hard industry, and just as eligible to receive the new benefit called Social Security. In the current era, older women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Meryl Streep, Cher, Diane Sawyer and, of course, Hillary Clinton have broken nearly every barrier once faced by females over 40.

Collins has written previously on the achievements of women in a constantly changing culture that increasingly welcomes them --- because they have forced the doors open. Here she concentrates on the greater vistas available to all of us as we age. Menopause, once considered the end of a woman’s creative life, has become a new starting point. Trends in makeup, hair dye and radical clothing fashions, once necessarily forbidden or at best barely tolerated by the male masters of style and propriety, have adapted to a virtual “anything goes” panorama of permissiveness. And, as Collins optimistically observes, “the deadlines keep getting pushed back.” Middle age comes later; you can make your own decisions at every stage of life without cultural norms to hold you back; and, she suggests, “you might even find yourself wearing a park ranger uniform at 97.”

NO STOPPING US NOW will bring new hope and promise of even wider perspectives to Collins’ female readers, whatever their age.