A world turned upside down

Clara Bingham's The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 just might be the most delicious achievement in oral history I've ever encountered. The author has assembled a huge, wide collection of voices from the period which catches viscerally the experience which is my lived-history alongside so many others. This is not just the political activists, though they are there. It is not just the white women; Black and other women of color also were about remaking their world and this author found them. The artists, the athletes, the educators -- all contributed to inventing a completely new culture, a zeitgeist that radically affirmed women in all our varieties. 

In the wake of this cultural breach, we still live and struggle against vicious enemies who would like to wipe out feminism's achievements -- yes, I'm talking about you Mr. Vance. 

From Bingham's introduction:

In 1963, a twenty-year-old American woman could not expect to run a marathon, or play varsity sports in college. She could only dream of becoming a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer, labor leader, factory foreman, college professor, or elected official. She couldn't get a prescription for birth control, have a legal abortion, come out as a lesbian, or prosecute her rapist. She almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm or women's history. She could not get a credit card, let alone a mortgage, without the imprimatur of her husband or father. By 1973, the doors to these options and opportunities had cracked open, and a women turning twenty in 1973 faced a future of possibilities that no generation before had ever experienced.

...  This generation of women, as one feminist wrote, found "an opening in history." ... The women in this history [in The Movement] speak in their own words and tell their own stories.

Bingham has done a remarkably coherent job in twenty-one short chapters of organizing these testimonies into an understandable narrative of struggle and accomplishment. I read the book on audio and found this performance sensitively done and perfect for the subject matter. 

(If, like me, you actually know some of the women quoted, it can be a little jarring to hear the voices of actors instead of the women themselves, but go with the flow. On balance, it works.)

• • •

I think The Movement generation of feminists should be encouraged by the fire that still burns among many young women today even if their life experiences have been so very different. Jessica Grose writes a column for the New York Times that focuses on the travails of the 20-30 set; that focus in itself is a breach from the before-the-feminist-revolution times. Of the youngest women, she describes the gender gap in politics:

What’s changed is that young women have more of a voice. According to Deckman’s research, Gen Z women are more politically active than their male counterparts — a major historical shift, as men have heretofore been more politically active than women.

The reason that the gender gap in voting seems so pronounced is not because young men have become dramatically more conservative. It’s because of the political galvanization of the young women who came of age during the #MeToo movement, watching Donald Trump remain the leader of the Republican Party despite numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, and witnessing the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“For Gen Z women, women’s equality has become a defining issue of what they care about and how they perceive politics,” Deckman, who is also the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. She quotes a female student from the University of Maryland who told her in a focus group that “Trump winning just kind of scared us all to our cores.” The woman added: “My rights are being threatened and just walking down the street I am being threatened, and I need to do something.”

Petula Dvorak is even more emphatic in the Washington Post. "The 2016 election crushed the girls. Now women, they’re revenge voting." [Gift article.]

Somehow, I don't think the effort among conservatives to sell young Christians on Queen Esther is likely to successfully compete. But they are sure trying.