Gail Collins, a columnist for the  NY Times, has written  WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present.  The NY Times review provides vignettes from the sixties that can see bizarre, even to those of who lived through that period:

 in 1960 … a secretary, Lois Rabinowitz, went to court to pay her boss’s speeding ticket …  Rabinowitz was rebuked by the judge for wearing slacks. … He sent her home to change her clothes, instructed her husband to use a tighter rein and told reporters that it upset him to see “women tearing themselves down from this pedestal.”

In a 1964 Congressional hearing, when airline executives testified that it was imperative for businessmen that attractive women light their cigars and fix drinks, Representative Martha Griffiths said, “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?” and the conversation began to change.

And what’s this have to do with philosophy?  Consider the following:

Or that glorious day in 1963 when a quarter of a million people gathered to hear Martin Luther King’s extraordinary