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You are here: Home / Women / Liberation

Liberation

September 15th, 2019 by Sallie Bingham in Women Leave a Comment

Photo of feminist Mary Daly holding an axe

Mary Daly

A dear friend asked me recently what books I was reading in the early 1970s when I first woke up to the women’s movement.

First, two radical feminist thinkers:

Andrea Dworkin: A very large woman who always wore overalls. She developed the first systematic analysis of pornography, which she called a “religion,” and with the lawyer Catherine MacKimmon pushed for limits that raised Freedom of Speech issues and were unsuccessful in legislative terms. But they began the conversation.

Mary Daly: so far the only Church woman to announce herself as a “radical lesbian feminist.” She taught at a Jesuit college for thirty-three years, then ran afoul of the authorities when she forbid men to take her advanced class in Women’s Studies at Boston College. Also the only writer to take on the necessary reform of language.

It's hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s

Both these were important, and so far, unique.

Also, of great importance to me in the early 1970s as well as to other women as we woke up:

Silences, by Tillie Olsen: known mainly as a New York short story writer about working-class women, Olsen also wrote the first book about “silenced women.” She is particularly strong on the unresolvable problems of women writers who are raising children. She quotes me on pp.209-210, from my short story collection, The Way It Is Now, adding the note, “1972—and no book since.”

Photo of Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and her On Lies, Secrets and Silences, Selected Prose, 1966-1978 were probably for me the most important books, as well as her poetry, especially Diving into the Wreck.

Adrienne broke the mold for poets of that generation. She didn’t kill herself; her husband did. We shied away from both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton because their suicides seemed a warning we didn’t want to hear. But Sexton’s A Self Portrait in Letters is worth looking at because it is such an indictment of the difficulty of that period for women.

It may be hard to believe now, but the women poets of that time were most important to feminists finding our way; they were enlisted in our cause and could give it a more eloquent expression than most prose writers. Anne Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones (in spite of the disclaimer above), Maxine Kumin’s House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Adrienne Rich’s Poems, Selected and New 1950-1974, which contain her Harvard-inspired conventional verses, changing into the overt feminism of When We Dead Awaken, all deserve reading.

And finally, Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness was a wake-up call for many of us after decades of Freud-influenced therapy.

It’s hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s. It was a freeing of our thought, our language, our behavior, and our looks we had never expected during the buttoned-up decades that we had known. Later, of course, there were repercussions and some disillusionment as the Feminist Movement experienced the attacks, and the internal rifts, inevitable for all radical efforts.

But for a few brief moments, it was the sunlight of a new dawn.

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In Women Adrienne Rich Andrea Dworkin Mary Daly Phyllis Chesler

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

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