As with any hugely valuable, yet also problematic, historical movement, the history of second-wave feminism is still being fully understood to this day. Shows like Mrs America are establishing popular renditions of the second wave, while public intellectuals such as Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxane Gay critique its legacy.
Clara Bingham’s The Movement arrives as an attempt to tell the story of roughly the second wave’s first half through the first-person narratives of women who participated in the struggle. Although voices such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan are included here, so are numerous accounts from lesser well-known participants who were also instrumental in making the second wave happen.
The issue of abortion is a key component of The Movement, and rightfully so, as reproductive rights were a central issue for women’s liberation in this period, and are also one of the battles from the second wave that remain most relevant today. In an interview that Bingham conducted with tennis great Billie Jean King, the latter speaks to the dehumanizing circumstances of the few options for legal abortions available before Roe v Wade. She recounted to Bingham how she had to plead her case before a medical committee in California, concluding that, 50 years later, “[it] remains one of the most denigrating experiences of my life”. She also noted the further indignity that her husband had to sign to authorize the procedure, something that many women today are perilously close to being subject to again.
Shockingly, Bingham said that nearly every single one of the 100-plus women she spoke to for this book received an illegal abortion during this period. “Virtually everyone I spoke to had a terrifying illegal abortion,” she said, “and they did not forget any details from those life-threatening moments. That was one of my regular interview questions, and I would have to work pretty hard to find any who hadn’t.”
The frequency of these abortions was partly due to the fact that, although contraceptive pills were considered protected constitutionally from 1965 onward, it was only in 1972 that single women would also have the right to make use of birth control pills. In that time it was not uncommon for women to wear fake wedding rings to doctor appointments.
“It was also a very early version of the pill, which had really high hormone levels and horrible side effects,” Bingham added. “These women felt like guinea pigs.”
Bingham also recounts another episode in the battles for abortion rights, namely when feminist publication Ms magazine published a fold-out list of 53 signatories who boldly declared themselves as having had abortions. King herself was on the list, albeit nonconsensually, turning into a PR nightmare that led to hate mail and invasive press coverage, and even detracted from her tennis performance. The incident aptly illustrates the enormous social stigma around receiving an abortion.
While researching this episode of The Movement, Bingham received a shock. “I looked down the list and my mother’s name was on it,” she told me.
Bingham’s mother had disclosed the abortion to her roughly a year prior, shortly before she passed, and for the journalist it was a revelation. “I remember thinking: ‘Oh, boy, I would have loved to have had a sibling,’” she told me, “but she was a single mother living in New York and there was no way she could have had another.”
Discovering her mother’s name on a significant piece of feminist history was a powerful way of experiencing the events that she chronicled as a journalist, and also a vivid reminder of what is now, once again, at stake. It was also emblematic of the endless revelations that Bingham had while working on The Movement.
Beyond reproductive rights, there are many valuable parts to this book. Bingham’s account of Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 run for president is one of them, both for its own sake and because it arrives as Kamala Harris appears all but certain to be the Democratic nominee to campaign for the White House. Representative Barbara Lee recalled to Bingham that Chisholm was “an unbelievable candidate”, as well as one that spoke Spanish, advocated for immigrant rights and was deeply tied to Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly Naral, at a time when the Democratic party avoided the issue of abortion. “Black feminists were in so many ways the progenitors of the second wave,” Bingham told me.
Lee is not the only current politician who feels deeply indebted to Chisholm. “Kamala talks about her a lot,” Bingham said, “and how important it is to recognize the women who came before her. Chisholm was such an iconically important woman in American politics.” Before running for president, Chisholm served in Congress as the first Black woman elected to that body, and she had to endure what Binghom termed “a wall of misogyny and racism”. This included one congressman spitting into his handkerchief whenever he saw her, and another muttering “42-5” under his breath whenever he passed her, an allusion to the fact that they both made the same $42,500 salary. “He was horrified that a Black woman made as much as he did,” Bingham said.
It is wonderful to see inclusions such as Chisholm, as second-wave feminism is often critiqued as a movement overly associated with the values of relatively privileged white women. The Movement addresses this to an extent, as it does a good job of uplifting Black voices of the era, and it also includes some women who identified as lesbians during the second wave. For instance, a brief chapter titled We Are One recounts the episode in which feminist writer Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, was swiftly discredited when she was outed as bisexual. The latter-day outrage that Bingham records is welcome, but it also eschews the tricky tensions that existed between the fight for gay rights and the larger second wave, when many feminists chose to not back their queer sisters.
Nor does Bingham speak to transgender women, which is another women’s rights issue that complicated second-wave feminism and which is now experiencing a mainstream resurgence. Bingham spends much time with Billie Jean King but does not mention King’s advocacy for 70s transgender tennis icon Renée Richards. Another potentially fascinating inclusion would have been trans woman Sandy Stone, who was a member of the 70s feminist record label Olivia Records, and who participated to a great degree in feminism’s second wave.
These omissions are perhaps notable because Bingham shared with me that The Movement was born out of phenomena associated with fourth-wave feminism – a movement that takes a very different stance to queer inclusion – and might not have seen the light of day otherwise. After struggling to find a publisher for a book about women’s liberation in the early 2010s, her project took on new life in the wake of the enormous expansion of the #MeToo movement in 2016 and the fall of Harvey Weinstein. “Hundreds of women came out of the closet with their terrible stories about sexual harassment, and suddenly a book about women’s liberation didn’t seem so far-fetched,” Bingham told me.
The episode demonstrates how feminism’s waves are not so completely distinct, but rather build upon one another and intermix in complicated ways. This is precisely why books such as The Movement are necessary, as many of the battles of the second wave are no longer as antiquated as they may have seemed just a few years ago – or, as Bingham punchily put it: “I like to say that the original tradwife was Phyllis Schlafly.” Both to combat the historical amnesia that makes things like the tradwife possible, as well as to further complicate and expand upon the history of feminism’s second wave, books like The Movement remain important and impressive achievements.
The Movement is out now
