The Movement

May 15, 2024
Historical study of "when women...found the freedom to be who they needed and wanted to be." Journalist Bingham, author of Witness to the Revolution, draws on abundant interviews and oral history archives to create a brisk, firsthand account of the women's movement, beginning with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, encompassing the founding of the National Organization of Women and Ms. magazine, and ending with the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Among those bearing witness to the crucial decade are Pauli Murray, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, Billie Jean King, and Gloria Steinem. All relate their frustration in confronting the legal, political, medical, and economic limitations on women's lives. As Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon, put it, women repeatedly got one message: "You're in this box. Here's the box. Here are the bars. I'm sorry, that's as far as you can go." Several women bring up the confluence of the women's movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-war movement. Others testify to the "anxiety-ridden secret lives" of women who had abortions--including Gornick, who found a medical resident who performed the abortion, gave her antibiotics, and checked in with her every day for the next week. "It was as good as it could be," she recalls, "but it was illegal and it was frightening." Nora Ephron, among others, recounts discrimination in employment. When she applied for a job at Newsweek, she was hired as a mail girl, while men with the same qualifications were hired as reporters. "It was a given in those days," she said, "that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule." A vivid contribution to women's history.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2024
In her introduction, journalist Bingham calls this current offering a natural follow-up to her 2017 book Witness to the Revolution, a chronicle of social activism that rocked the nation from August 1969 to September 1970. This time around, Bingham considers the women's equality movement from 1963 to 1973. As before, Bingham assembles excerpts from interviews with major players and other primary source documents to create first-person records of political and social changes as they were happening. Bingham's judicious choices and editing result in a narrative both relevant and engaging, recalling scenarios that seem almost unbelievable today. Whether documenting typical misogynistic media coverage (headline from the New York Daily News, March 17, 1970: ""Newshens Sue Newsweek for 'Equal Rights'"") or seemingly ironic developments (Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand marketed exclusively to women, sponsoring a new major women's tennis circuit), Bingham celebrates the women who brought about change. Ranging across politics, health, employment, sports, and the arts, and including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ voices, this compilation effectively recreates a momentous decade.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 29, 2024
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.