This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973, a nonfiction oral history by Clara Bingham.
As someone born in the 1990s who also grew up in the Midwest, I had a certain picture painted for me of Women’s Liberation and Feminism’s Second Wave. My young consciousness lumped the entire movement somewhere within School House Rock’s Sufferin' Till Suffrage song until I grew old enough to unpack and reanalyze my childhood perceptions against a more contextually-sound background of facts and history. The Movement is one of the many books that have helped me with this process of relearning our American history from a more mature, nuanced, and holistic perspective.
While I don’t think there is one single book that can magically help Millennials like myself fully understand our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I do think Clara Bingham has given Millennial and Gen Z readers a choir of influential voices in this book from which we can learn more about what was happening in America during the decades immediately preceding the Millennial baby boom. We weren’t born into a vacuum, and reading The Movement helped me to better understand some of the torches we’ve been passed.
Yes, The Movement is about Second Wave Feminism during one specifically tumultuous mid-Century decade, but readers will come away with a rather breathtaking portrait of the entire 20th Century as seen through one of its core crucibles. We are living in the ripples that continue to radiate from these events, and Bingham is brilliant for presenting this as an oral history.
Check out The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973 by Clara Bingham at the Sioux City Public Library today!
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