While Women’s History Month is every March, the impact of women’s voices and their stories widely surpasses the boundaries of a single calendar month. The Colgate University Center for Women’s Studies hosted Clara Bingham, an award-winning journalist and author on Tuesday, March 24. Her most recent work, “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973,” served as the centerpiece for the conversation, analyzing the dynamics of strength in numbers as grassroots movements build and collective action is taken.
“The Movement” serves as the first oral history of the second-wave feminist movement. This style of writing allowed Bingham to interview over 100 women who spanned wide and far in their identities as women, from athletes to lawyers to midwives.
“[The feminist movement] was a complete tidal wave that took over America. It was the first time that women were able to change the consciousness of the nation,” Bingham said.
Bingham contextualized the decade by looking at the 1950s, when the cult of domesticity was embraced. In this time, the average age to get married was 20, and women turned to getting their “Mrs.” degree. If a woman wanted to work, options were largely limited to assistance-based roles, such as a secretary or flight attendant.
“Flight attendants were weighed in every day before work and could not be older than 32,” Bingham said. “Airlines were, essentially, selling sex.”
However, the situation began to change in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s famous book “The Feminine Mystique.” Bingham explained how, after Friedan polled her Smith College classmates at their 15-year reunion, she realized that these women were not happy in their roles as housewives.
“[“The Feminine Mystique”] sparked a movement that was ready to go,” Bingham said.
The following year, in 1964, came the Civil Rights Act, whose shocks to the normative social order created a lot of tension in American society. Bingham spoke about Congressman Howard Smith’s (D-VA) intentions to hinder the passage of the act through the addition of the word “sex.”
“He’d add the word sex to Title VII, which was the part of the bill that covered employment, and that would require employers not to discriminate against race, religion, color, national origin or sex. This was considered a joke, and everyone laughed about it. He was trying to sabotage the act,” Bingham said.
Smith did not get his way, and Title VII was passed, establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Bingham’s work breaks down this history and expands upon how women came together with their own identities to work toward the collective action that the decade ushered in.
One person Bingham had the opportunity to feature was Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist who would be considered transgender today. She was radicalized by the discrimination she experienced at Howard Law School, where she graduated first in her class and co-founded the National Organization for Women.
“She was an incredible brain, and I consider her the legal architect behind the second-wave women’s movement,” Bingham said.
In the field of athletics, Bingham explored how Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon, had a monumental effect on the perception of what women could achieve. Gibb trained in nurse shoes as they were the only ones that came close enough in comfort to running shoes, which did not exist for women at the time. During the race, she hid behind bushes and wore a hoodie to conceal her gender. This was a watershed moment in challenging the rigid constraints placed on what women could and couldn’t do.
In her discussion on the importance of equal representation, Bingham referenced conversations with activists such as Frances Beal, author of one of the first pieces on intersectionality: “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.”
The movement was also significant for women coming forward to support each other through abortion.
“One million women a year risked their lives getting illegal abortions in America before 1973,” Bingham said.
Help came in the form of underground abortion services, offered by The Jane Collective, a grassroots collective — known formally as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation — spearheaded by civil rights activist Heather Booth. Although the services were busted in 1972, over 11,000 total abortions were completed safely for women.
The power to protest was able to skyrocket the movement into everyone’s eyes, and no one could shy away any longer as the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 drew thousands of crowds in different cities.
“I interviewed everyone I talked to. I asked, I asked two things, one, did you have an abortion? It was always yes, how many, and then it was like, were you at the women’s strike? Because women participated all over the country, and they were in small cities, big cities, everywhere,” Bingham said. “It was this moment when I think the movement went viral, and it went from being niche and small to mainstream.”
Junior Ashley Shanahan recognized the importance of organizing people who care about a cause through protesting.
“Even on a small campus, protests can be really empowering,” Shanahan said. “For example, I attended a campus protest last spring when funding for scientific research was initially being cut, and being with students and faculty that care as deeply as you do about those issues is really helpful in holding onto hope and motivation to keep fighting for issues you are passionate about.”
This passion for accountability and storytelling also inspired student leaders, including senior Bobby Patch, to reflect on the importance of using writing to create change in their day-to-day lives.
“Clara Bingham stressed the importance of writing at least a little every day. This work ethic was inspiring and relevant not only to journalistic endeavors, but everyday campus life,” Patch said.
Bingham concluded her discussion by comparing past circumstances with contemporary contexts regarding women’s representation in politics. For context on how far things have come, when Shirley Chisolm became the first Black woman to run for a presidential nomination, she received 2.7% of the popular vote. This is a stark contrast to the 2024 election, where Kamala Harris earned over 48% of the popular vote.
“As much as Donald Trump, Samuel Alito and the Heritage Foundation want to turn back the clock, it’s just too late to put women back into their 1950s box,” Bingham said.
