Clara Bingham is a journalist and author whose work has focused on social justice and women’s issues. Her latest book, “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973,” is a retrospective on the early years of second-wave feminism. Using an oral history narrative style, Bingham weaves stories from women on the forefront of the fight for liberation to tell the intimate inside story of what it was like to be there. The book covers many areas of the movement: “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan, the underground abortion network known as The Janes, Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for president, Billie Jean King’s 1973 battle of the sexes. Bingham’s previous work includes “Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul,” “Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law” and “Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress.” “The Movement” came out July 30, and Bingham speaks Monday at the Cambridge Main Library. She will be in conversation with Judy Norsigian, Joan Ditzion, Jane Pincus and Norma Swenson, authors of the groundbreaking book “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” We interviewed Bingham on Wednesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
All your books have been about women’s rights in some way; what inspired this deep dive into second-wave feminism?
Well, in my last book, “Witness to the Revolution,” I covered the school year of 1969-1970, one of the more explosive moments of change, violence and disruption in America. I showed the birth of a lot of different movements for social change that took place during the late ’60s, and even though I did have a chapter on feminism, it was only one small part of the larger book. Plus, I had fallen into the trap of interviewing mostly men for that book, because they were running all the big organizations at the time, so they were the names that I had heard of. There were so many women organizing, but they hadn’t been prominently placed in the historical record.
When I was promoting the book in San Francisco, I met Judy Gumbo, who was a Yippie, and she said, “Clara, what about the women?” It was embarrassing, because I realized she was right. One chapter wasn’t nearly enough. When my publisher asked what I wanted to do next, I suggested that the obvious sequel would be feminism, and she said, “Oh, we can’t sell feminism.” That was in 2016, and one year later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement began. All of a sudden there was much more interest in women and their stories, so I was able to get my book contract. I had an urgency because, as I realized with my last book, this was the time to catch these people before they died. I interviewed about 120 women whose ages range from 77 to 97, and I’m so glad I was able to get to them. Many of them were retired, and they were donating their papers and photos to archives. They were really at a point in their lives where they wanted to reflect on their youth and the fascinating moment of history they were part of.
In “Witness to the Revolution” and “The Movement,” you’ve used an oral history narrative style. What do you like about this format, and how does it help you tell stories?
I love telling stories through oral history narratives because it allows me to weave together interviews into an arc rather than just sharing one at a time. It’s a more accessible way of reading history, because it’s not as dense. Reading personal stories is so powerful when they’re coming straight from the people who lived them, from the people who were on the streets and in the rooms making change happen; it’s so much more powerful than hearing it from historians or writers. And since this was a personal revolution, in a way, I thought the power of first-person voice was even more important for readers to hear. It puts you in the fray, puts you in the story in a more immediate, visceral way than if I, the writer-narrator, were to just tell you what happened.
You mentioned you interviewed 120 women – how did you decide who to talk to in a movement that was so vast?
It was a long process. I figured out the main events I wanted to highlight and who the main characters were in those events; basically a wish list of everyone I would talk to if I could. And then I did a lot of cold calling. It was just classic gumshoe reporting: Who are they? How do I find them? Who knows them that I might know? In general, I found that one interview would lead to another. Often when I interviewed someone there would be at least five other people they recommended I talk to. There were some people that were very hard to find, so that network and the community really helped.
For instance, I’d gone to San Francisco to interview a bunch of people, and there was someone I had wanted to speak to while I was there who I hadn’t been able to get in touch with. Her name is Frances Beal, and she worked at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, otherwise known as SNCC, in New York in the ’60s. She wrote a very famous manifesto called “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” considered one of the first writings about intersectionality, and she started what was later called the Third World Women’s Alliance. I was interviewing a woman named Linda Burnham who was part of that Alliance, and I told her I had been emailing and writing letters to Frances but hadn’t heard back. I asked her if she knew how I could find Frances, and she literally picked up her phone and called her. Frances had just moved to an elderly living community in Oakland, and Linda said to her, “Fran, you’ve got to talk to Clara.” So I got in my car, drove to Oakland, and met her at her old folks’ home. She had all of her marbles, and she was delighted to talk to me about her life. That was one of the super exciting moments – finding a person I really needed who wasn’t initially easy to find – and that was thanks to asking Linda about her.
What was it like speaking with people about their experiences five decades later?
There was an initial frustration with memory loss, because I was asking people to remember things that happened 50 years ago, which can be a very tall order. But I did find that for most of the people I talked to, this was such a formative moment in their lives that they remembered it well. So many women who were involved in the movement changed so radically: They went from being 1950s housewives to being radical lesbians, from living in the suburbs and working in secretarial jobs they hated to getting divorced and joining women’s liberation groups. Many of them had what was later called a click moment, a moment where they saw their lives in a different light and realized they wanted to change them. Because these click moments many of them had were so dramatic, most of them remembered all the stories and wanted to tell them. It was really gratifying and utterly fascinating. I was born in 1963, so I didn’t experience what they did, but I lived in New York City as a kid and I remember idolizing the New York congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug. Now being able to hear these stories of what it was like for them, how extreme the sexism was, how brave they were, it was so exciting for me. In the interview process, I often had goosebumps. I was always just amazed, and there was almost never a dull moment.
Did you learn anything for today’s continued fight for women’s rights?
Absolutely. It’s imperative, as we’ve been losing rights and backsliding with reproductive freedom especially, to look back at what women did back then: How they organized, how they attacked laws, how they made change. In New York City, for example, Florence Kennedy and a few amazing feminist lawyers put together this huge class action where they got more than 100 women to come forward and tell their abortion stories to judges. They were in the middle of going through a very important legal case that would have legalized abortion when the state legislature happened to legalize it anyway, but I still think it’s a very good example of getting stories out, organizing, working both legislatively and legally and protesting. The women’s movement was so huge and diverse, and it changed so many different parts about the status of women, so watching and learning about how women did it is incredibly important now. I see it like a blueprint; it’s so imperative to know your history as you move forward.
Clara Bingham of “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973” holds a panel discussion with Judy Norsigian, Joan Ditzion, Jane Pincus and Norma Swenson of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” at 6 p.m. Monday at the Cambridge Main Library, 449 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge in a Harvard Book Store event. Free, or $35 with a copy of the book. Information is here.
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