How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973
Starred review from July 29, 2024
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, American woman could not... becom a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer... get a prescription for birth control, almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm”). Drawing on voices from across the “political and cultural spectrum”—from the “socially conservative women who started the National Organization for Women” to the radical younger generation of “women’s liberationists” and the Black, Native American, Chicana, and Asian activists fighting for women’s rights within their own social justice movements—Bingham emphasizes the “complexity” of the movement and “the huge upheaval in the social order” it ignited. What emerges most powerfully from the first-person accounts is the speakers’ ironclad conviction that change was not only possible, but imminent. Many speak movingly about “consciousness raising,” a ’60s political concept which today has an outmoded air but in Bingham’s compilation pulses with vitality (“We saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change,” wrote the authors of a guidebook to women’s anatomy). Readers will be electrified.
