Clara Bingham — The Movement - with Elisabeth Griffith

Watch author Clara Bingham's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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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.

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.

Bingham is in conversation with Elisabeth Griffith. Historian Elisabeth Griffith is an author, activist, and expert on American women’s history. Her biography of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, IN HER OWN RIGHT was hailed by both Oprah and the Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best books on women’s history.” It was the basis of Ken Burns’ documentary on Stanton and Anthony, NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE, his only film about women’s history. Betsy’s new book, FORMIDABLE: AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY, 1920-2020, is an “engaging, relevant, sweeping chronicle,” according to the New York Times, “a multiracial, inclusive timeline of the struggles and triumphs of both Black and white women. A profoundly illuminating tour de force.” A graduate of Wellesley College with a doctorate from American University, Betsy worked to expand women’s rights and elect women candidates with the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Campaign Fund. She has been teaching women’s history for forty years. Her twenty-two-year tenure as head of the Madeira School for girls, in McLean, Virginia, earned the Washington Post’s Distinguished Educational Leadership Award. A member of the Society of American Historians and Veteran Feminists of America, she has been a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard and a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia. Recently Betsy has been posting essays online about women’s lives past and present, called PINK THREADS, on Substack.com.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.