How Women’s Liberation Transformed America

SCPL Virtual Author Talk with Clara Bingham and discussion led by Professor Bettina Aptheker

In celebration of Women's History Month, join us as we view the recording of our SCPL Virtual Author Talk with Clara Bingham and join the discussion led by UC Presidential Co-Chair and Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Professor Bettina Aptheker. Light refreshments will be provided. Registration is recommended and drop-ins are welcome.

Clara Bingham's new book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973 is a comprehensive and engaging oral history of the decade that defined the feminist movement, including interviews with living icons and unsung heroes. 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 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 Chisholm’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.

About the Author:

Clara Bingham is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Movement, Witness to the Revolution, Women on the Hill, and the co-writer of Class Action. A former Washington, DC, correspondent for Newsweek, her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About Professor Aptheker:

Bettina Aptheker is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Feminist Studies Department at UCSC. She held a UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (2012-2015, with Karen Tei Yamashita), and was the first holder of the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation Endowed Presidential Chair for Feminist Studies (2017-2021). A scholar-activist Bettina co-led the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley 1964-65, was a leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and co-led the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (1970-1972) that organized a transnational movement for her freedom. Bettina graduated with a master’s degree in Communication Studies from San Jose State University in 1976, and entered UCSC’s History of Consciousness department in 1979, receiving her doctorate in 1983. She began teaching in the Women’s Studies program in 1981, and helped to build it into one of the leading Feminist Studies departments in the country. Her most popular course at UCSC was Introduction to Feminisms which she taught for 30 years. In 2009 Bettina launched a new course, Feminism & Social Justice. And ten years later that class was launched on the Coursera platform in four lectures and released on line. As of now over 113,000 people have taken the course across the globe. Bettina’s many books include, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1976; second edition, 1999); Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989); Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech & Became a Feminist Rebel (2006). Her most recent book released in September 2022 is, Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s. She lives in Santa Cruz with her wife, Kate Miller.