THE MOVEMENT

Historical study of “when women…found the freedom to be who they needed and wanted to be.”

Journalist Bingham, author of Witness to the Revolution, draws on abundant interviews and oral history archives to create a brisk, firsthand account of the women’s movement, beginning with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, encompassing the founding of the National Organization of Women and Ms. magazine, and ending with the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973. Among those bearing witness to the crucial decade are Pauli Murray, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, Billie Jean King, and Gloria Steinem. All relate their frustration in confronting the legal, political, medical, and economic limitations on women’s lives. As Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon, put it, women repeatedly got one message: “You’re in this box. Here’s the box. Here are the bars. I’m sorry, that’s as far as you can go.” Several women bring up the confluence of the women’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-war movement. Others testify to the “anxiety-ridden secret lives” of women who had abortions—including Gornick, who found a medical resident who performed the abortion, gave her antibiotics, and checked in with her every day for the next week. “It was as good as it could be,” she recalls, “but it was illegal and it was frightening.” Nora Ephron, among others, recounts discrimination in employment. When she applied for a job at Newsweek, she was hired as a mail girl, while men with the same qualifications were hired as reporters. “It was a given in those days,” she said, “that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule.”

A vivid contribution to women’s history.