Description

---

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 Chisolm’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.

About the Author

---

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. 

Praise For…

---

"Clara Bingham has given the world an indispensable new book that belongs on the shelf of every American woman—part history, part encyclopedia of a time, and an absolute page-turning drama, all in one."  
—Sally Jenkins, Washington Post sports columnist and author of The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life and The Real All Americans

“Clara Bingham’s 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”