A New Look at the Feminist Earthquake
On August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, an estimated 50,000 women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue as part of a daylong general strike. Betty Friedan, the author of the seminal work The Feminine Mystique, which had sparked the so-called second wave of feminism, had called for the strike as a way to cast media attention on the nascent women’s movement. She declared the day “a resistance both passive and active, of all women in America against the concrete conditions of their oppression.” Never one to shirk the spotlight, Friedan led the brigade, flanked by a gaggle of former suffragists, veterans of feminism’s first wave now in their 70s and 80s. Women chanted, held signs, and cheered, “Liberté, égalité, sororité,” “Don’t iron while the strike is hot,” and “Uppity women unite.”
The city permit restricted the march to a single lane of traffic, but the teeming crowd soon flooded the street. Friedan instructed protesters to “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” “I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end,” she recalled. “There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try.”
Friedan’s group, the National Organization of Women, had coordinated the strike, but dozens of disparate organizations gathered under NOW’s tattered umbrella, including the radical Redstockings, the Professional Women’s Caucus, the National Coalition of American Nuns, Black Women’s Liberation, the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and the League of Women Voters. Friedan had originally conceived of NOW as a civil rights organization, essentially an “NAACP for women,” working incrementally within existing legal and governmental structures to expand women’s access to jobs, equal pay, financial tools like mortgages and credit cards, and access to single-sex institutions. But in recent years, younger, more radical women had joined the movement. Many were alumnae of the civil rights, antiwar, and youth movements who brought with them new, more confrontational tactics including guerilla actions and a broader vision for feminism, one that critiqued traditional families and gender hierarchies and embraced sexual freedom.
But on the day of the strike, such differences were cast aside. Time magazine—which featured the event on its cover—described the movement as “diffuse, divided, but grimly determined.” Nearly everyone involved viewed it as a watershed event. Mary Jean Collins, the president of Chicago NOW, recalled, “It was the best idea ever in the history of the world, because it doubled the size of the women’s movement.” Friedan boasted, “On August 26, it suddenly became both political and glamorous to be a feminist.”
This watershed moment of unity is recounted at length in Clara Bingham’s The Movement, a compulsively readable oral history and a timely addition to the historical literature. The Movement spans the first 10 years of second-wave feminism, bookended by the publication of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.
Bingham’s title—The Movement—might more accurately include a pair of air quotes, because the singular women’s movement was, in fact, an amalgam of dozens of distinct factions with varied demographics, beliefs, and goals—a diversity vividly on display at the 1970 strike. Writing for The Village Voice, the journalist Vivian Gornick summarized the movement as “running the entire political spectrum from conservative reform to visionary radicalism, and powered by an emotional conviction rooted in undeniable experience, and fed by a determination that is irreversible.”
As is typical of oral histories, The Movement incorporates minimal expository or analytical text, relying instead on the voices of the interviewees and news clippings to create a narrative. Bingham places her subjects in conversation with each other, documentary style. The effect is utterly engrossing. It is easy to forget that Bingham’s subjects are women in their 70s and 80s recalling events from more than a half century ago. The most riveting interviews are those that divulge intimate, even womanly, details, like the political operative Esther Newberg’s recollection of her job interview with Bella Abzug while the New York congresswoman changed outfits, shimmying into an old-fashioned girdle. Or the vivid recollections of Judith Arcana, an unlicensed medical practitioner and young mother who expressed her own breast milk into a filthy jailhouse sink after her arrest for performing illegal abortions.
Not surprisingly, The Movement includes all the principal architects of second-wave feminism. Bingham intertwines her own interviews with celebrated leaders like Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller with archive-sourced commentary from deceased luminaries like Friedan, Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm. But delightfully, the great majority of Bingham’s 120 interviewees will be unfamiliar to the average reader. These interviews make The Movement sparkle, and include congressional staffers, flight attendants, artists, athletes, office workers, labor organizers, academics, plaintiffs in precedent-setting court cases, and the “Janes,” an underground network of women who trained one another to perform abortions.
Each speaker is introduced simply by name, with no title or description, although the reader can find short bios at the back of the book. More than just an editorial quirk, this democratization of voices serves as a metaphor for a movement that challenged traditional male power hierarchies and favored collective action and decision-making. Rita Mae Brown, an author and radical lesbian activist, once famously proclaimed, “We don’t need spokespeople and we don’t need leaders. All women can speak, and all women can write.” Indeed, in Bingham’s telling, all voices carry an equal weight. Bingham’s inclusion of lesser-known actors effectively evokes a largely grassroots movement that included thousands of activists in a vast array of professional fields, along with the millions fighting gender battles on the home front.
Mindful of the persistent critique that the most celebrated leaders of the women’s movement represented the interests of educated, straight, middle-class white women at the expense of working-class women, women of color, and lesbians—a refrain ever since Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique essentially ignored all questions of class, race, and sexual preference—Bingham has worked hard to rebalance the historical record. Bingham’s inclusion of a greater range of voices is not some dutiful box-ticking exercise in political correctness: She is offering up a richer, more accurate encapsulation of the movement than most prior histories.
To do so, Bingham places government bureaucrats committed to enforcement of Title VII side by side with counterculture hippies exploring the boundaries of sexual freedom and deftly explores Black women’s complicated relationship with the women’s movement. For many Black women, the concerns of the women’s movement felt less pressing than civil rights. Barbara Smith, a writer and early founder of Black women’s studies as an academic discipline, recalled of the movement’s early days: “I could not even wrap my mind around [women’s liberation] because, it’s like, white women? What do white women have to complain about?” Smith later became an early member of the National Black Feminist Organization, which spoke to issues of both racial and gender inequality. For others, misogyny in the Black Power movement awakened their feminism. “The men were having a revolution that was not going to include us except in a subsidiary, docile, baby-having way,” the cultural critic Michele Wallace recalled. “That’s when I became a feminist.”
With so many competing agendas and diverse voices, the women’s movement was famously quarrelsome. Bingham gamely wades into the messy brew of personal attacks, factionalism, and intra-movement politics. Marilyn Webb, the cofounder of the first women’s consciousness-raising group in Chicago, recalled the collective eye roll by her fellow younger activists over the relatively modest ambitions of Friedan’s generation. “The women in NOW essentially accepted the patriarchy,” she told Bingham. “We wanted to talk about how their roles are defined in marriage, family and social living, how women are treated as a colonized class.” NOW, comprised primarily of middle-aged, professional women, likewise labeled the theatrical tactics of younger, radical activists—like crowning a sheep “Miss America”—“a little nutsy.”
Indeed, at the 1970 “Congress to Unite Women”—which Brownmiller wryly dubbed “the Congress to Divide Women”—NOW nearly combusted over its public embrace of lesbians, who Friedan famously termed the “lavender menace.” Looking back, some interviewees saw the conflict as inevitable. “A certain amount of cannibalizing seems to go with the territory whenever activists gather to promote social change,” Brownmiller reflected. Bingham goes further, seemingly celebrating the competing interest groups as a sign of breadth, diversity, and ideological vigor in the movement. Gornick wrote cheekily in The Village Voice, “If five feminists fall out with six groups within half an hour they’ll all find each other … within 48 hours a new splinter faction will have announced its existence, and within two weeks the manifesto is being mailed out. It’s the mark of a true movement.”
Not surprisingly, for a movement that gave birth to the phrase “The personal is political,” many women were spurred to activism by events in their own lives. Bingham includes confessional stories of how interviewees’ personal journeys—an illegal abortion, a denied promotion, a rape —led them to the movement. Sally Roesch Wagner, who later founded one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs, recalled being forced to forego college as a pregnant teenager. “I was literally transferred from my father to my husband,” she told Bingham. “I wept because all my possibilities were gone.”
Some events, like the fight for the equal rights amendment, Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes,” and the founding of Ms. magazine, have been well documented elsewhere, although they are much enriched by Bingham’s oral history. But there are plenty of lesser-known stories, too, like that of Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, in 1966. After her registration form was rejected, Gibb ran anyway, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt. As she raced past onlookers at Wellesley, a woman’s college, she cast off the sweatshirt to applause and cheers. “They just went crazy. They were crying and leaping in the air and screaming. And one woman was going, ‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria,’” Gibbs recalled. “I really felt at that moment that the world would never be the same again.”
The Movement’s tone is triumphant, and Bingham’s interviewees understandably bask in the glow of victory. In 1973, the FBI officially closed its files on the women’s liberation movement, a remarkable admission that its essential principles, once perceived as radical and threatening, had become mainstream. It is a testament to the enduring success of the movement that it’s almost impossible for a young woman today to imagine a world in which whole career paths were inaccessible, women couldn’t apply for a mortgage or credit card without their husband or father’s signature, and an unmarried woman could not get a prescription for birth control. Today, women represent the majority of students receiving undergraduate, law, and medical degrees. The legalization of gay marriage and broad recognition of LGBTQ rights reflect a revolutionary transformation in the acceptance of nontraditional families. A quarter century after the passage of Title IX, women’s athletic scholarships now add up to more than $200 million, and for the first time this year, the NCAA women’s basketball championship game attracted more viewers than the men’s.
Yet it’s impossible to read this book today without reflecting on how one of the movement’s crowning achievements—the right to abortion access—was overturned in 2022 and on how Republican-led state governments have criminalized abortion care in the wake of the decision. Bingham and her interviewees mostly refrain from weighing in on our current state of affairs—this is a history book with a narrow focus on a particular decade. But one of the lessons of The Movement is that the tenets of feminism suffused and reconstituted American culture so completely that its right-wing opponents today are fighting a deeply unpopular battle. Conservatives paid a heavy political price in the 2022 midterms for attacking reproductive rights—though what happens to those and other rights after the November elections remains to be seen. The era that The Movement documents “was not just political or legal, social or cultural disruption—it was all that and more,” Bingham writes. “It was a bedroom and a boardroom and an assembly-line revolution—a restructuring of how women and men in America saw each other, a reinvention of roles and a fundamental identity shift.” That fundamental identity shift endures, and the weight of history may be against those who want to reverse it.
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