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“So one night, late night, I was working in February and I printed out the PDF of this and it went alphabetically. And the fourth name was Joan Bingham, who's my mother. And she had died about a year and a half before I was writing this chapter and had neglected to tell me that she had put her name on this iconic list, which is now taught in a lot of women's studies classes. And suddenly this story, which was really about that generation, suddenly became part of my life.”
So says Clara Bingham, an award-winning journalist and author who has spent most of her career writing about women's and social justice issues, often as oral histories. The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 is her newest and fourth book, and it's a subject of our conversation today. It's an oral history, meaning that she pulls and interviews the women who were participants in that incredible period of time and uses their voices to tell the story and then pulls archival footage and documents from those who are no longer living to create what's really a different type of history. She also wrote Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, along with Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, which was made into the 2005 feature film North Country starring Charlize Theron and Francis McDormand. What's really fun about this conversation, which traces this decade of feminism and its eruption into the world is that it traces different stories that were happening simultaneously, whether in sports or education or law. And the other fun part is that we did this conversation live as part of Live Talk LA. So if the audio sounds slightly different, that's why. They do incredible events all around the LA area for anyone who is interested.
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