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THE MOVEMENT

Clara Bingham

How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973

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" (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. Clara Bingham is an award-winning journalist and the author of Witness to the Revolution, Women on the Hill, and the cowriter of Class Action. A former Washington, DC, correspondent for Newsweek, her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Published 2024-07-30 by Atria/One Signal Publishers

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"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.