Feminist Book Club: On Centering Women’s Voices in History

An Interview with Clara Bingham
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Oprah Daily: Empowering Reads About Women Who Lead

“Braiding together the first-person accounts of hundreds of second-wave feminist icons, this is an oral history of epic proportions and intimate detail.”
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Woman’s World: 10 Long Books That Will Keep You Entertained for Hours (or Days!)

“This page-turning book tells the inside story of women who were at the forefront of the feminist wave and how they demanded freedom for who they wanted to be. Bingham weaves together narratives of various women and brings this revolution to life.”
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Financial Times: ‘I am speaking’: On Kamala Harris and Women’s Voices

“A striking collection of women’s voices… there are so many extraordinary (and funny, and heartbreaking) stories of courage here from women of every stripe that it’s impossible to pick out just a few.”
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The Guardian: Tracing the Inspiring Figures of Second-wave Feminism

“Books like The Movement remain important and impressive achievements.”
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The New York Times Review

“Rollicking good fun… downright exhilarating.”
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Washington Monthly: A New Look at the Feminist Earthquake

“Clara Bingham’s masterful The Movement shows how women’s liberation transformed America and why our understanding of 1963-1973 needs to include more voices.”
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Parade: The 26 Best New Book Releases This Week

“The Movement is a fascinating oral history of the women’s movement from 1963 to 1973, a decade when so much progress was made and so much more seemed just beyond the horizon.”
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Los Angeles Times: 10 Books to Add to your Reading List in July

“You don’t have to, like me, remember sitting on the living room floor as a child to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at tennis in order to understand that the years Bingham (Witness to the Revolution) covers were crucial to the women’s movement. From the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique to the 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, this decade involved personal, political and cultural forces that changed many lives.”
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Kirkus Review

“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.'”
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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, [an] American woman could not… becom[e] a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer… get a prescription for birth control, [and] almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm’).”
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The Movement is essential reading for anyone who aims to learn firsthand from a diverse group of leaders, believers, trailblazers of the feminist movement, but more importantly shows the lessons we must retain to keep fighting for gender equality, now more than ever.”
–Mini Timmaraju, President and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All

In this meticulously researched, beautifully assembled oral history, Clara Bingham offers us the first truly comprehensive account of the women’s movement, underscoring its inextricable links to the Civil Rights cause and the vital role played by activists of color. In so doing, The Movement restores voices often lost to history, and gives center stage to the unsung “sheroes” and “heroes” of the fight for gender equality. White and Black, Latin-X and Asian, straight and queer are all included in this spellbinding portrait of a revolutionary time and a quintessentially American struggle. The Movement is a vital book and necessary corrective in our own era of national fracture, historic amnesia and outright erasure.”
–Susan Fales-Hill, Executive Producer, And Just Like That and author of Always Wear Joy

Read this book! Bingham gives us the gift of private conversations with the extraordinary women who forged our own path to power.”
–Katty Kay, New York Times bestselling author of The Confidence Code

‘How do you describe a period in history when the consciousness of millions of people fundamentally changed?’ Clara Bingham asks in The Movement. As a reporter who covered that movement, I expected Bingham’s sweeping oral history to be as illuminating and inspiring as it certainly is—but I did not expect it to plunge me into paroxysms of grief and rage or leave me with such a powerful mixture of heartbreak and renewed resolve. Through the voices of political, social, legal, and cultural leaders from a wide range of backgrounds, Bingham delivers an indispensable record of the visionaries who fought so hard to win basic human rights, as well as a chilling reminder of how fierce the resistance was—and still is. With many of those rights once again imperiled, The Movement provides an electrifying blueprint for how determined women can, and do, change the entire world.”
–Leslie Bennetts, author of Last Girl Before Freeway

The old adage about being condemned to repeat the history that we don’t know could not ring more true than it does right now. The Movement feels like just the recalling and reclaiming needed in this precarious moment for women’s rights. It reminds us that we have had our backs up against higher and harder walls before and the collective strength, will and tenacity of women pulled us over those obstacles and through those times. I’m excited for this generation to have a roadmap with real stories of trials and triumph for guidance.”
–Tarana Burke, Activist, Author, and Founder of the ‘me too.’ Movement

Nobody burned a bra and it wasn’t just White feminism. Having lived and covered the modern Women’s Movement, I welcome Clara Bingham’s compelling book, an enlightening record for new generations. And a chilling reminder of rights still under attack today. This is invaluable living history.”
–Lynn Sherr, journalist, author, feminist historian

The Movement gives us such fascinating personal revelations, the unvarnished views of how the women’s movement got started in the actual voices of the women (and men) who began it all. There is so much insight and explanation here, from the historic Presidential campaign of black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, to how Title IX got slipped into an education bill to the feuds among the ‘purists’ versus the pragmatists that sheds light on why women today still have a long way to go to achieve real equality.”
–Maureen Orth, Special Correspondent, Vanity Fair

With her journalist’s ear and historian’s eye, Clara Bingham has collected the voices of diverse change agents, who narrate the story of seismic change in America, in the early years of the modern women’s movement. Her book is an engaging read and an important primary source.”
–Elisabeth Griffith, PhD, author of Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 and Substack’s “Pink Threads”