The Movement

Prompted by a friend, I’ve been wondering why there is so little rejoicing here and possibly elsewhere for the elevation of the Vice-President to be the Democratic nominee for president, although I think most people would agree that Kamala Harris is not just our only hope but our best hope for preventing Donald Trump from winning. It seems that a thick fog of negativity has settled over many of us, like the thick cloud of smoke from Canadian wildfires that has settled into my beloved Rio Grande Valley. Under that fog and thickening it, is probably the profound distrust of powerful women that capitalism inevitably breeds.

I should add here that I was saddened by President Biden’s noble withdrawal from the race. Many Native American tribes are not as prejudiced against old age as we are, readier to admit that the wisdom and experience our elders have acquired make it possible to tolerate and compensate for the inevitable physical weakness of age. But we are far from such reasoning here.

Now I find fresh reasons for hope in Clara Bingham’s just published The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 (One Signal Publishers). It is of no real consequence although I mention it proudly that Clara is my niece.

I am especially grateful for this, her most recent book, made up of interviews with women who were actively shaping and promoting the Movement at a time when I became, to my saving, involved. It is a decade that seems to me to be largely neglected in our eagerness to obscure the accomplishments of those who came before but it was crucial for me and for many other women and what we achieved does endure although constantly under threat.

I might never have found the Women’s Movement if I had not found it during this decade when I was living in New York and able to participate in the crucial consciousness-raising women’s groups my friends were establishing and joining. My friends were young wives with large broods of children; many of us had abandoned careers or had never even started. And so our first discussions were personal and perhaps we underestimated their impact until Gloria Steinem convinced us that the personal is political.

What may seem trivial now was crucial then. We had all grown up in the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s, and although all of us had made it to college, we lacked role models or encouragement to use our education to do more than instruct our husbands in the cultural niceties as Adlai Stevenson famously recommended in his graduation speech at Smith College. Only two of the eight were working in the usual sense of the word, although all of us were laboring at maintaining the high degree of perfectionism we expected of ourselves as mothers and housewives; husbands supplied crucial income but little else. All of us divorced in the next five years.

And so as Clara’s book reminds me, deciding not to wear bras was as crucial to our development as feminists as trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment—presented each year since to the U.S. Congress but never yet passed. The courage we mustered to divorce “nice” husbands and labor for years as single mothers to raise our children was and is the same courage that now impels us to support Kamala Harris when many of our relatives and some of our friends are, to say the least, lukewarm.

I moved away from New York shortly after this decade ended, taking my newfound wisdom to largely unsympathetic friends and family in Kentucky and now to largely more supportive women in Santa Fe, but the strengths I learned during that crucial decade have defined my life ever since.

I’m sure the same thing is true for many of the readers of this post and I look forward to your responses.

In Women Feminism