Washington Monthly - September/October 2024 - 120

A New Look
at the Feminist
Earthquake
Clara Bingham's masterful new book,
The Movement, shows how women's
liberation transformed America and
why our understanding of 1963-1973
needs to include more voices.
By Sara Bhatia
The Movement: How Women's
Liberation Transformed
America, 1963-1973
by Clara Bingham
Simon & Schuster, 576 pp.
O
n August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, an estimated 50,000
women marched down New York City's Fifth Avenue as part of a daylong general
strike. Betty Friedan, the author of the seminal work The Feminine Mystique, which
had sparked the so-called second wave of feminism, had called for the strike as a way to
cast media attention on the nascent women's movement. She declared the day " a resistance
both passive and active, of all women in America against the concrete conditions
of their oppression. " Never one to shirk the spotlight, Friedan led the brigade, flanked by
a gaggle of former suffragists, veterans of feminism's first wave now in their 70s and 80s.
Women chanted, held signs, and cheered, " Liberté, égalité, sororité, " " Don't iron while
the strike is hot, " and " Uppity women unite. "
The city permit restricted the march to a single lane of traffic, but the teeming
crowd soon flooded the street. Friedan instructed protesters to " Lock arms, sidewalk
to sidewalk! " " I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you
couldn't see the end, " she recalled. " There were so many of us they couldn't stop us;
they didn't even try. "
Friedan's group, the National Organization of Women, had coordinated the strike, but
dozens of disparate organizations gathered under NOW's tattered umbrella, including
the radical Redstockings, the Professional Women's Caucus, the National Coalition of
American Nuns, Black Women's Liberation, the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, and
the League of Women Voters. Friedan had originally conceived of NOW as a civil rights
organization, essentially an " NAACP for women, " working incrementally within existing
legal and governmental structures to expand women's access to jobs, equal pay, financial
tools like mortgages and credit cards, and access to single-sex institutions. But in
recent years, younger, more radical women had joined the movement. Many were alumnae
of the civil rights, antiwar, and youth movements who brought with them new, more
confrontational tactics including guerilla actions and a broader vision for feminism, one
that critiqued traditional families and gender hierarchies and embraced sexual freedom.
But on the day of the strike, such differences were cast aside. Time magazine-which
featured the event on its cover-described the movement as " diffuse, divided, but grimly
determined. " Nearly everyone involved viewed it as a watershed event. Mary Jean Collins,
the president of Chicago NOW, recalled, " It was the best idea ever in the history of
the world, because it doubled the size of the women's movement. " Friedan boasted, " On
120 September/October 2024

Washington Monthly - September/October 2024

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