The Women Who Raised Consciousness (Clara Bingham)

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“So one night, late night, I was working in February and I printed out the PDF of this and it went alphabetically. And the fourth name was Joan Bingham, who's my mother. And she had died about a year and a half before I was writing this chapter and had neglected to tell me that she had put her name on this iconic list, which is now taught in a lot of women's studies classes. And suddenly this story, which was really about that generation, suddenly became part of my life.”

So says Clara Bingham, an award-winning journalist and author who has spent most of her career writing about women's and social justice issues, often as oral histories. The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 is her newest and fourth book, and it's a subject of our conversation today. It's an oral history, meaning that she pulls and interviews the women who were participants in that incredible period of time and uses their voices to tell the story and then pulls archival footage and documents from those who are no longer living to create what's really a different type of history. She also wrote Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, along with Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, which was made into the 2005 feature film North Country starring Charlize Theron and Francis McDormand. What's really fun about this conversation, which traces this decade of feminism and its eruption into the world is that it traces different stories that were happening simultaneously, whether in sports or education or law. And the other fun part is that we did this conversation live as part of Live Talk LA. So if the audio sounds slightly different, that's why. They do incredible events all around the LA area for anyone who is interested.

MORE FROM CLARA BINGHAM:

The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law

Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress

Clara’s Website

Follow Clara on Instagram

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I thought I would start by landing us exactly where we are in time, and I'm going to read just the first paragraph of the book. “In 1963, a 20-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 woman turning 20 in 1973 faced a future of possibilities that no generation before had ever experienced.” In terms of the structure of the book, why did you choose, I know you had done one oral history, but why did you choose that?

CLARA:

I fell in love with oral histories, with writing them. I think it's a great way, tell history. I had made a documentary and that is what that experience made me love, the power of first person voice.

And after having been a journalist for most of my career and always being the narrator to the story, I suddenly realized the power of taking yourself out of that story, which people often do with documentaries. And so I wrote my last book Witness as my first book. I'd written some articles that were oral histories. It's sort of try it out, and I just loved the whole process. I interviewed a hundred people then it was a book about the sixties, and there were chapters where it makes you feel like you're in the room. It's a more visceral, emotional experience, I think for readers. It's also not as dense. It's more accessible, I think.

ELISE:

No, I loved this and it was so fun to hear from the women directly, both posthumously and then you obviously interviewed whoever you could.

CLARA:

Yeah, yeah. No, and also this move in particular, it was all about personal change. The personal is political is one of the big slogans of the movement. So I definitely didn't need to be in the way of these women, and each one of them had such completely different stories, and so it just felt much more authentic to let them tell their stories

ELISE:

And then to referential, bring in the press articles and the clippings and the statements from courtrooms to fill in the blanks instead of just quoting or referring people out. So it's really fun. I'm going to read one more paragraph from the introduction to set us up for the meat of the book. So you write: “50 years later, second wave feminism's reputation hasn't aged terribly well. Conventional wisdom boils the movement down to a glamorous, glorious Steinem, a bitchy Betty Friedan and an amorphous mass of white middle class bra burners. For at least a generation historians largely ignored the critical role of women of color in the movement. And were slow to capture the contributions of lesbian, native American Chicana and Asian feminists inflicting wounds that have shaped for decades and specifically.” And you do an excellent job of capturing these voices, but the failure to see black women as progenitors of contemporary feminism. So you start the book with Betty, and in some ways end the book with Gloria. There are two of the most visible feminists of that time period, both writers. So I understand the affinity, but why do you think it was important to start where you did.

CLARA:

Well, as much as Betty Friedan is now very controversial, the fact is she wrote the book, The Feminine Mystique that came out in 1963, sold 3 million copies and really lit the flame that then brought on this movement. And she had gone to Smith and it was her 15th reunion. She was class of 42. And so she was part of a cohort of post-war women who rushed out of urban areas and moved to the suburbs. There were so much new money and Madison Avenue was focused on getting women to buy as much as they could. And GM had moved from making bombs to washing machines, and there was a new cult of the domestic goddess. And Betty went around. And the other statistics that she learned is in the fifties, 60% of women dropped out of college to get married, and the average age of getting married then was 20 and birth rates skyrocketed.

So women basically were backsliding from any advances they had made before the war. And so she documented this and interviewed many of her white middle class classmates, and she called it a problem that has no name. And she just, when the book came out, it really struck a chord with so many white middle class women all over the country, and it really got things rolling. It was of course criticized and I interviewed a lot of women who didn't relate to it because they were black or they were class and their mothers had always worked and they'd worked the double day as they called it. And so Betty, of course, it comes out 63, the height of the Civil Rights movement, and she's oblivious to class and race issues in the book. So that has sort of made her legacy a little tainted. But she also, in context, she was writing about her people and it had a big impact.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it's interesting to watch her pop in various moments throughout the book because to give her credit mean 3 million copies as we know, as people who write books

CLARA:

Sold at least that

ELISE:

Oh, yeah, definitely. As a writer, you're lucky to sell 3,000 copies. So to sell 3 million copies at a time when we weren't also swimming and other media is just stunning. And she was clearly, as we learn in the pages of your book, an incredible marketer. So she throughout sort of now as existence, knew how to ignite moments.

CLARA:

Absolutely. Yeah. She was quite brilliant, and she was a really good writer. She was a writer and speaker, and she could really get a crowd going. And she was a very good organizer.

ELISE:

And she was relatively famous or quite famous,

CLARA:

Really. She was the first famous

ELISE:

Feminist. First famous feminist. So just worth stating, I understand the complexity and then also it takes all kinds, but as you mentioned, historians have framed it as really the Betty Layup, right? The period of Betty. And these historians have typically been white men, right?

CLARA:

One of the sayings that Betty and her cohort and her group of emerging feminists were fighting was job discrimination, which was very extreme. Basically, women had won the vote in 1920, and then they went to sleep. They were exhausted. It took 80 years to get there. No other laws had happened that had helped with women's liberation in any way since 1920 until 1964 when the Great Civil Rights Act was passed, which ended Jim Crow, but Title vii, which was the section of that bill that was about employment discrimination, was written originally that you could not discriminate against anyone in the case of race or a creed or nationality. But sex and gender was never mentioned until last minute, just before it was up for a vote. A segregationist southerner named Howard Smith from Virginia added the word sex to that list, and it blew it up.

Everyone started laughing. And that day of debate was called Ladies Day, and of course, he didn't want the Civil Rights Act to pass, so we thought this would scuttle the bill, and it did pass, and he didn't vote for the bill in the end, but it also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which started in 65, and they expected that only to be complaints about race discrimination, which was extreme in all different sectors of the employment. A third of the complaints came from women. So at that time, women couldn't be bartenders in Michigan or California unless your father or your husband owned the bar. They couldn't lift more than 30 pounds in most factories. They weren't forced to serve on juries, and in some states weren't allowed to serve on juries. The classified ads had help wanted, they were segregated, help wanted men, help wanted women, and the jobs available to women were mostly clerks, typists, nurse teacher, and everyone was expected, of course, to leave their jobs in these white collar jobs, at least when they got married.

So fast forward to the mid sixties when all of the seven sister, brilliant women like Nora Ephron, who had gone to Wellesley and Lynn Povich, who had gone to Smith, they get the hot job in New York, which is working at Newsweek, which was a liberal news magazine, unlike time where the women had to wear white gloves and skirts, and it was very prim and proper. So Zu was cooler, and they were very proc civil rights. And women could only have a few jobs, though. They could be male girls, they could be researchers and they could be secretaries. But all the other jobs of starting with writer and editor were for men. In fact, Nora Ephron went and applied in, I think 1965 when she was editor of her paper at Wellesley, and the guy interviewing her said, what do you want to do here? And she said, well, I want to be a writer.

And he laughed at her and said, well, women don't write here. They can't write here. So that was just the rule. And eventually these women, as the women's movement started to pick up steam by the late sixties, they started realizing maybe this is actually illegal. And they were really frustrated, and a few of them went to the A CLU and met with Eleanor Holmes Norton, who had graduated from Yale Law School and had spent the summer of 64 Mississippi working for S NCC as a lawyer where she had helped get Fannie Lou Ham out of jail after she had been badly beaten. And she had been on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement and was a civil rights lawyer, and they showed Eleanor the masthead of Newsweek, and the first names were all men, and then there was practically a line, and all the rest of the names were all women.

And so Eleanor was just thrilled because it was such an cut and dry civil rights case. But she had to explain to a lot of these white privileged women that you have been discriminated against, and this is illegal. There is something called Title vii, and it's not allowed. And so because she had her experience as a civil rights lawyer, she understood and an activist what discrimination really was, whereas so many privileged white women never thought they had really been discriminated against. So they were just kind of waking up to this. And that's to the point of so many black women like Eleanor Holmes Norton really were the leaders of this movement, and partly because they had started organizing and becoming activists in the Civil Rights movement. So they were way ahead of a lot of the white women in that case. So these women had to secretly meet in bathrooms and gather a class.

Eleanor said, we have to have as many women as possible who will join. And eventually 46 of them did. It was very risky for them. They were afraid they'd get fired. They were friends with everyone they worked with. They felt badly, but they figured out the best day to announce this class action lawsuit, which was the first class action for sex discrimination in a white collar working environment company. And so it was a really big deal and was Eleanor was starting from scratch. I mean, she was making arguments that no one had made before legally, but Newsweek had, by 1970, figured out that the women's movement was actually kind of a big deal. So they thought, let's do a cover story on the Women's liberation movement. But lo and behold, there were no women writers on staff, and so they had to hire someone from outside to write it.

And on the day that that article, that magazine dropped Eleanor and the 46 women had their press conference announcing the lawsuit, and it blew everyone away. They had to sue Kay Graham, who owned the company, was a woman, but was not hip to feminism yet. Took her a while, she caught on eventually, but it also changed the workplace ultimately for many, many, many women in many different sectors. And it took a few years to settle it, but it made a huge difference. They were forced to hire women as writers immediately and train them. And then fast forward to my experience, I graduated from college in 1985, and by 1989, I'd managed to get myself a job at Newsweek and the Washington Bureau, and I was a reporter. I eventually got to be a White House reporter, and I would file stories every week up to New York to a woman named Lucy Howard, who was the editor of the front of the book.

And I had absolute new idea that Lucy Howard was one of the main plaintiffs in this lawsuit. And in fact, the whole time that I was at Newsweek for five years, I had no idea that these women, less than 20 years before me had opened the door and rolled out the red carpet for me and my whole generation. And not until I started researching this book did I learn about this case. So it only made me feel better about doing the book because I was supposed to know about these things and I didn't. And I figured if I didn't, a lot of people probably didn't

ELISE:

Either. Yeah. Well, I mean, thank you for pointing that out because as I read this book, I read a lot, and still, I felt largely ignorant about this period in time. And there were a lot of names. I did not know many that I did, but even those were presented to me in really fresh and interesting ways, partly because they're contextualized only by the period and the story and not by other people. One of the things that it's also very striking to read is that it feels in some ways, like you could be reading about 2020 or 2021 in terms of some of the what Florence Kennedy called horizontal hostility, which for people who don't know that term, she says horizontal hostility. I mean, it could be amongst siblings, et cetera, but it is misdirected anger that rightly should be focused on the external causes of oppression. But instead, whether it was that Betty or eventually Gloria, et cetera, there was just a lot of misre. Yeah, the Kate Millett story, can you tell that story? That was stunning and devastating.

CLARA:

Yeah, really upsetting. Kate Millett was a radical feminist, and she was also an academic and brilliant and was getting her PhD and Columbia and English literature and wrote as her thesis, this incredible takedown on the canon of American white male fiction writers, Sheever mailer, et cetera. And she analyzed their work and exposed how almost every single one of them was extremely sexist. And she published this book in 1970, and it was a huge big deal. And she was on the cover of Time Magazine. Alice Neal painted her portrait, and she was the first feminist to be on the cover of a magazine. And that was the kiss of death for her because her consciousness raising group, who she had been talking to about her book forever, didn't want her to put her name on it because they didn't believe in hierarchy, which was just part of the lefty radical ecosystem at that time.

And it was sort of Maoist that no one, it was a little bit and also very strictly anti hierarchical because that's the way men acted. So they thought she shouldn't put her name on it, which of course she did. And the radical lesbian group had decided that she needed to be outed because she was bisexual, and they thought that was a way to punish her for becoming famous. And so a speech she was giving at Columbia, one of her comrades stood up and exclaimed, are you bisexual? Are you a lesbian? And she admitted and she said yes. And that was the end of her career. She lost her teaching job, the book, which was selling really well, stopped selling. She had a nervous breakdown and moved to upstate New York and had a Christmas tree farm that she lived on for the next several decades. She was kind of destroyed by her own people.

ELISE:

And was that officially Rita Mae Brown? She denies it.

CLARA:

Rita Mae Brown does not. I actually, Rita Mae Brown, I don't know if anyone knows who she is, but she's now a bestselling author, ironically, and she writes mysteries about cats mostly, and they all sell very well, but she was very much against Kate Millett putting her name on the book, and she was a very out lesbian, so she also didn't like it when people were closeted. That was part of her mission, but it was said that she was the person who spearheaded that.

ELISE:

This is still a pattern in our culture today, specifically for women. It's very hard to, we were talking about this backstage, you rarely see a man being forced to take accountability even for egregious bad action. P'S streams are up 20%, and yet for women endures the ability to sort of knock that tall poppy down and the poppy field through reputational harm. And I know that we're somewhat aware of it, we're somewhat conscious of it in our culture, but yet we just watch and sometimes celebrate as other women are put in their place. And I really wish we could stop that. It's really sad.

CLARA:

Yeah, no, lot of, I ended the book in 73 and before the movement just started to eat itself alive and there was a lot of infighting among all the different factions. It was really, really tough.

ELISE:

I was thinking about this quote from john a. powell, who I think he runs the Institute for Othering, and it's such an amazing quote, but essentially, I'm going to paraphrase it, that he wishes that we could learn how to be soft on people and hard and critical in structures. And that too often the opposite is how we function in the world where we are so very hard on people and far too soft on structures. And that's a great quote. Oh, man. I mean the complexity, we'll never escape. We were talking earlier, we'll never escape sort of the complexity of these issues when you start stacking class, race, gender, and then determining who gets priority amongst those. And this is really sort of, that's like the metathesis of this book

Is watching different people try and steer the movement for pragmatism or efficiency, or you watch people like Betty essentially sidestep. She was quite homophobic. No, yeah. For example, in this effort to try and advance and make some movement in other areas, but it is not pleasant, which one of the ways that I love the structure of the book, which is it's not a chapter in politics, a chapter in sports. It's all sort of concurrent happening all the time, but it gives the reader a bit of a break from the sausage making. And you tell some of the stories of women who singularly or sometimes collectively, but through, for example, athletic achievement changed the consciousness of the country just by doing something that women weren't supposed to be able to do. So can you tell the story of Bobby Gibbs?

CLARA:

Bobby Gibb, she is this amazing woman who I interviewed back in 2019 before Covid, and she lives in Gloucester Mass.

Of course. She's now a sculptor. She was just a natural born runner. She loved running. She would run with her in the hill. She lived outside of Boston, and her father took her to watch the Boston Marathon, which at the time in the sixties was the only marathon in America. And she saw these men running and realized she just had to do that. But doctors were telling women at the time that if you ran long distances, your uterus could fall out. It was dangerous.

ELISE:

I tell myself that, that's my reason for not running.

CLARA:

Yeah, exactly. Watch out, Elise,

But you are a champion skier, so nice try. She realized that that was bullshit, and because she had already been running long distances on her own in secret, and so she tried to get into the marathon using her name, they rejected her because she was a woman, so she just hid in a bush near the starting line. She had a hoodie on, and she had trained in nurse shoes, which were the only kinds of shoes that she felt were comfortable because they were wide enough and enough cushion. And she jumped out of the bushes at the starting line and started running. And halfway through, she got kind of hot. She took off her hoodie, people figured out she was a woman. Luckily no one was hostile to her on the trail, but the word got out and was on the radio. And by the time she got to Wellesley, which is a sort of epic part of the marathon, about halfway through the Wellesley, students had heard that a woman was running in the marathon, and they went crazy. And they usually, they do a tunnel for the runners, and they were dancing and singing Abe Maria and screaming. And all of a sudden Bobby realized that she wasn't just doing this for herself, she was doing this for all of womankind, and that women were deemed weak and feeble and stupid and incompetent, and she needed to prove that women were strong. And she did that. And it became news all over the world that she had done this

ELISE:

Such a beautiful story too, because didn't the men, they realized

CLARA:

They protected, they protected her and sort of

ELISE:

Created a little bit of a cocoon for her when they realized that they were running with a woman. I love that story. I want to read a bit from her. She tells you it was like a pivotal moment where people saw things in a different way. And to me, that is the key thing, and that's what I've been trying to do my whole life is change people's consciousness. Once the consciousness is changed and one person, then two people, 10 people, then a million people, it becomes a social movement. And then you can get the laws changed, and then you can get the social system changed and so forth. But it has to start with that change of consciousness

CLARA:

First. But her description of changing the consciousness is basically what happened one by one all the way through with thousands of women. And they were changing consciousness in terms of health, in terms of art, in terms of politics, law, and every part of society. They were becoming who they needed to be. And the strictures of the fifties had limited them, as Bobby said, that we were just supposed to live in a box.

And she had to break out of that box. And so the box had been laid out for women. And this was a moment where really for the first time in human history, women demanded to be first class citizens. And essentially, of course, we're not there yet completely, certainly not now, but a managed to achieve that for the first time ever. And that's the other reason why I feel that it's so important to go back and learn about what happened then, because it was absolutely monumental, the change in consciousness, the change in women basically being raised in the fifties, to think they could only do a limited amount of things to suddenly having the world open to them.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too, when you think about some of the most impactful pieces of legislation for women in the context of sports, it's Title IX too, which nobody realized they were doing.

CLARA:

The sports part was it was slipped in secretly

ELISE:

And nobody really understood, even at that time the implications of that, right? Yeah.

CLARA:

And interested. Now, 200 million is spent on a year on athletic scholarships. So I mean, the athletic part for Title IX is really important because it allowed women who were athletes to get educations. I mean, I interviewed Donna Varona, who was a gold medalist in the Olympics swimming, and in 60 and 64. But when she went to college, she had to do side jobs to pay for her tuition and her living expenses where the guys on the swim team, there was no female swim team, of course, had

ELISE:

Scholarships.

CLARA:

Billie Jean King had to do the same thing side jobs. And so women just didn't have, their colleges did not have many teams at all. They were mostly just intermural and women played half court basketball, so they didn't have to run the whole way. And they're basically, women's sports barely existed. And now look at women. Were the majority of the Olympics for the first time this summer.

ELISE:

I want to make sure that we get to the second personal story in the book. She really doesn't write herself into her books the way that I seem to, the way I know you're much braver than I am. You're wise. So you obviously write about the beginnings of MS Magazine, another sort of stratospheric successful. I mean, what was that? 3 million millions of copies of circulation copies,

CLARA:

And everyone thought it was just going to be a complete dud, and they were terrified.

ELISE:

And then they were also somewhat shamed for their success, right? They're picked on within the movement.

CLARA:

Well, yeah, they weren't radical enough. They were a little too white.

ELISE:

So one of the things that they did was this, will you tell us a story about what you found?

CLARA:

So the first issue, Ms. Magazine was January of 1972. It was part of New York Magazine. Clay Falker, who was a pretty progressive editor at the time, gave them half of the magazine to just try it out, see if maybe someone might want to read this. And at the time, there were a lot of underground, lots of underground women's newspapers. Most cities had a few, but there was nothing mainstream. It was mostly McCall's and Vogue. And it was all very frustrating for these writers like Gloria Steinem and Letty Pilgrim men and so many others who had been trying to write about things they cared about, but couldn't get them into any of the other mainstream magazines. So they started Ms. And Boldly, the first issue had a centerfold with the headline. We have had abortions, and it was a petition, and 53 women had signed their names to admit that they had had abortions. So it was a year before Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal nationally. And I was particularly interested because I was writing about Billie Jean King at the time, along with Ms. And she had given her name to this list.

Fact, her husband had, and she didn't know. So it took her by surprise and the press eviscerated her for it all the, she was so famous at this time. She was the number one tennis player, woman tennis player. And so she got a lot of press attention, and she was accused of having abortion just so she could make more money. And also her parents were very Catholic, and they found out about it because the California papers had big stories about it. So it was a big deal for Billie Jean King. And I thought, well, I should see who else is on this list. I'd heard that Barbara Tuckman was on, which I thought was kind of, I don't know why I thought that was funny. But anyway, so I got one night, late night. I was working in February, and I printed out the PDF of this and went alphabetically.

And the fourth name was Joan Bingham, who's my mother. And she had had died about a year and a half before I was writing this chapter, and had neglected to tell me that she had put her name on this iconic list, which is now taught in a lot of women's studies classes. Suddenly this story, which was really about that generation, suddenly became part of my life. And she'd actually told me that she'd had abortion years before, and that she'd flown to London for it, which was something that privileged white women could do. And that was all, it was sort of a taboo subject, and she didn't want to talk about it. Of course, I was curious, but I didn't push her. And it was before I was writing this book. And then I start this book, and every woman I interviewed, I interviewed 120 women and asked each one of them, did you have an abortion? And almost everyone had had multiple illegal abortions, and each story was more horrifying and hair raising and scary than the next. And I realized here I am interviewing these perfect strangers and wanting to know all about this incredibly private experience. And I never even asked my mother,

ELISE:

Wow. It's really interesting how abortion is one of the primary red threads of this book and a unifying red thread in a similar way to how it is now amongst all these groups, more or less. I know some of them wanted to skirt it because it was potentially too scary to lead with it, but all of these women were.

CLARA:

NOW started, a national organization for women started in 1966. And in 67, they had their big sort of conference and decided where they were going to stand on issues. And there was a big debate about what they should do about abortion and the more conservative people, women, and especially the nuns that were lot of, there were several founders of now who were nuns and serious Catholics really were against it and also thought it would turn off more middle class suburban, conservative women from joining. But they lost. Betty was very much for, she understood that abortion rights were absolutely integral for women's rights, so that you could not have equality or liberty without having control over your body. And at the time, a million women a year were getting illegal abortions in America, and over a thousand were dying every year. And big city hospitals like Cook County and Harlem had their own wards for botched abortions.

And Cook County at one point was having a hundred women a week were going through that. So it was a healthcare crisis, essentially because there was a perfect storm of the sexual revolution. So people were having sex before marriage for the first time, and large numbers and birth control was really hard to come by. It wasn't legalized nationally until 1972, and it was only legalized nationally for, I mean that 72 for single people. So before 1972, if you wanted birth control in most states, you had to put a fake wedding ring on and go and pretend that you were married to your gynecologist. So it was just very hard to get birth control and everyone got pregnant, and it was a shit show, basically. And so we went through the book, the stories are kind of stunning. And I was writing one of the abortion chapters on June 22nd, 2022 when the Dobbs decision came down. I started howling with anger, and I haven't really stopped howling since because it was so obvious to me then how we were going to go straight back. And now we have 20 band states that essentially are living under Jane Crow. It is the same thing. I mean, women do not have human rights in those states.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I hope and pray that Republican legislatures have just really underestimated the impact of this as much as it seems like they have in terms of galvanizing women and men

CLARA:

Voters

ELISE:

To show up. And the story of the Janes.

CLARA:

Yeah, they were my favorites. It started with this woman, Heather Booth, who would worked for SNCC and worked for SDS. She was the classic civil rights antiwar activist. She was at University of Chicago getting a graduate degree, and a friend of hers from the Civil Rights Movement came to her and said, my girlfriend's pregnant. We need a doctor. Can you help us? And she knew was civil rights doctor in Chicago who gave this woman a safe abortion. And all the word got out just lit like wildfire. And suddenly her dorm room phone started ringing off the hook, and she said, don't ask for Heather, ask for Jane, because she needed cover. And she started fielding all these calls. They kept on coming. And so she recruited the women in her women's liberation group in Chicago, had a really strong women's liberation community. And it became very big.

And there were dozens of women who worked for this underground abortion network, essentially. And they found safe doctors. They put advertisements in all the underground papers that said, need an abortion Call Jane with the number. And they had people who had different jobs so that no one knew the whole story of what was happening. It was very secretive. And eventually they learned that the main doctor they were depending on was not an md, and he had been trained by the mafia. So they thought, well, if he can do it, why can't we? And they started apprenticing essentially with him, and about six of them learned how to perform abortions. And by 1972, when they got busted, they had performed 11,000 safe abortions. Women were coming from all over the Midwest to see them. So they were incredibly heroic. And if Roe v. Wade hadn't passed, been come down by the Supreme Court, been decided by the Supreme Court a year later, they all would've gotten 10 years in jail.

ELISE:

And what was also beautiful and unsurprising about the stories that it was quite expensive until they started doing them, at which point they were essentially doing them for free if needed

CLARA:

And needs based. And of course, because the doctor was still charging a lot, I mean, some of these women were paying $700 for abortions, which 1968, that's probably the equivalent of $5,000. And they were just being taken to town taken advantage of.

ELISE:

Let's talk a bit about Shirley. Let's talk about Chisholm, and particularly at this moment in time, and what she did for all of us, and tell us a little bit about her campaign, because it was also fascinating and to recognize the lack of support from black men and from some women.

CLARA:

Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah.

CLARA:

The National Women's Political Caucus, which she helped found, didn't endorse her, nor did the Black Congressional Caucus, which she helped found. She was the most amazing, badass, audacious, brave, confident woman. And she was the first woman, black woman, elected to Congress from a Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. And against all odds, she spoke fluent Spanish and just raised no money, but went everywhere and got all of the women in beds, die to vote for her. And she turns up in Congress, which had 10 female members out of 535 and 11 black members out of 500. So horrified to think of how few there were. So there she is, the first black woman ever to step foot on the floor of Congress and January of 69, and she's treated so terribly by the mostly southern white congressman on the first day she goes, she went to the member's dining hall, got her lunch, sits down at an empty table, and a congressman comes up to her and says, ma'am, that's the Georgia delegation table.

And she said, well, I'm sorry about, I didn't know where the New York one was. Would you welcome to join me for lunch? And he said, no, no, this is the Georgia delegation table. And she said, well, that's very nice. Thank you for having me, and would you like to join me for lunch? She ate lunch alone. No one joined her at that table, and it got worse. There was a man who would spit in his handkerchief every time she passed him. She then bought her own handkerchief and then passed him spat in hers. The same time he sat in his, she just faced these horrific people down. And then she had the audacity to run just a few years later for president in 1972. And Bella Abzug, who was her companion and colleague in Congress, and who she'd started the National Women's Political Caucus with, was upset because Shirley didn't check with her.

And the Congressional Black Caucus was upset because they thought a man should be the first black person to run for president. So she was really on her own, but she was really driven. And she realized that the five white men who were in the primaries were not representing so many of the students out there who were extremely alienated because of Vietnam and Nixon and so many members of the black community couldn't relate at all to who was running. And she was a huge coalition builder. She was the first Rainbow Coalition, and she had staff members of all races. She was very advanced on L-G-B-T-Q issues, which Noah was at that time, and she was pro-Choice was one of the founders of NARAL. And so she was just amazing. And she spoke to college students all over the country,

And she turned on Barbara Lee, who was a college student at Mills. She was a welfare mother of two and head of the Black Student Union and a Black Panther. And she invited Shirley to come speak and was really amazed by her. And Shirley Chisholm said, well, you need to register to vote. And Barbara Lee was like, no, I wouldn't do that. I'm a radical. Why would I want to vote? There's no one to vote for. And so Shirley Chisolm recruited Barbara Lee, who ran her campaign in Oakland and later became a 13-term congresswoman. It's great from Oakland. So she basically inspired a whole generation of young people who felt completely disenfranchised.

ELISE:

Yeah, the Barbara Lee story is great because essentially she's like, I'm going to flunk me out of this course. I'm not voting, I'm not engaging in politics. Screw these assholes. Does she get an A? I think she gets an A

CLARA:

She was taking a political science class where the assignment was you have to work on a presidential campaign.

ELISE:

Chisholm was like, you are voting, and I dunno if you want to read this part, this moving, because obviously Shirley knew she wasn't going to win.

CLARA:

Right?

ELISE:

But the point was to do it anyway,

CLARA:

You can read it.

ELISE:

This is Shirley: “When I got to the convention hall, it was lit up by noise. That was a wonderful moment for me to see the way all of the delegates received me at the convention, because I had felt that someday a black person or a female person should run for the presidency of the United States. And now I was a catalyst of change.” Sorry. Oh, but it's amazing and prescient.

CLARA:

Kamala Harris met her Shirley once apparently in Oakland, I think probably in ‘72 when she was campaigning. So let's hope that she's Shirley's dream come true.

ELISE:

A big thank you to Clara Bingham for this incredible piece of history and also to LA Live talks for sharing the audio with us today and to New Road School for hosting the event. I think Clara probably gave you a good understanding of what is in this book, but we really only scratched the surface. It's such a fun and dynamic read that will really place you back in the moment. And it's fascinating to understand and really feel that the women, the activists of the day, there were some men who were involved in this as well. Obviously, were grappling with many of the same issues that we find ourselves contending with now. So history repeats itself, friends, but hopefully we can start telling new stories soon.