The Movement
How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
A comprehensive and engaging oral history of the decade that defined the feminist movement, including interviews with living icons and unsung heroes—from former Newsweek reporter and author of the “powerful and moving” (The New York Times) Witness to the Revolution.
For lovers of both Barbie and Gloria Steinem, The Movement is the first oral history of the decade that built the modern feminist movement. Through the captivating individual voices of the people who lived it, The Movement tells the intimate inside story of what it felt like to be at the forefront of the modern feminist crusade, when women rejected thousands of years of custom and demanded the freedom to be who they wanted and needed to be.
This engaging history traces women’s awakening, organizing, and agitating between the years of 1963 and 1973, when a decentralized collection of people and events coalesced to create a spontaneous combustion. From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, to the underground abortion network the Janes, to Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign and Billie Jean King’s 1973 battle of the sexes, Bingham artfully weaves together the fragments of that explosion person by person, bringing to life the emotions of this personal, cultural, and political revolution. Artists and politicians, athletes and lawyers, Black and white, The Movement brings readers into the rooms where these women insisted on being treated as first class citizens, and in the process, changed the fabric of American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Bingham follows up Witness to the Revolution, an oral history of the end of the 1960s, with an equally stunning oral history of the era's women's rights movement. Bingham compiles recollections—some archival, but many gleaned through original interviews—of more than a hundred women who played a part in the radical change brought about between 1963 and 1973 ("In 1963, American woman could not... becom a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer... get a prescription for birth control, almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm"). Drawing on voices from across the "political and cultural spectrum"—from the "socially conservative women who started the National Organization for Women" to the radical younger generation of "women's liberationists" and the Black, Native American, Chicana, and Asian activists fighting for women's rights within their own social justice movements—Bingham emphasizes the "complexity" of the movement and "the huge upheaval in the social order" it ignited. What emerges most powerfully from the first-person accounts is the speakers' ironclad conviction that change was not only possible, but imminent. Many speak movingly about "consciousness raising," a '60s political concept which today has an outmoded air but in Bingham's compilation pulses with vitality ("We saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change," wrote the authors of a guidebook to women's anatomy). Readers will be electrified.
