On The Movement

Transcript:

Chapter One – A Young Mother

My name is Sallie Bingham. I’m a lifelong writer.

I’ve been blessed to be able to publish sixteen books in my long career.

Novels, short stories, memoirs, and most recently, a historical novel, my first called Taken by the Shawnee, which I’m very happy about.

But I’m also really happy about the fact that a book has just been published called The Movement, nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy two, with a subtitle something like, the way the women’s movement changed the world How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 by Clara Bingham who happens to be my niece.

Particularly, it’s excited about this book because that was the period when I was joining the women’s movement. I’d really been unaware of feminism growing up in Kentucky and then going to college and then marrying right out of college and moving to New York.

And I was beginning to feel very restricted by what I felt was the narrow realm of being a young wife with two children and another on the way.

It wasn’t a question of anything dramatic like abuse.

It was just the grind of taking care of other human beings, especially little human beings.

And because that was such a priority, it had to be a priority, I didn’t have really anybody else. My husband at that time was a lawyer working in New York—long hours.

I sometimes had hired help, but it was a sometime thing. Not for lack of the money to pay for help, but because I felt such a passionate conviction that I needed to be with these little boys.

My mother had led a very different life, very politically engaged, and we had been raised by other women.

One wonderful woman who really was my life savior, Lucy Cummings. But because I knew what my mother had lost, and I think she knew too, by losing that early contact with her children, I didn’t want to repeat that.

I had seen what I thought my mother had lost by not having regular daily contact with her five children. And I think she did feel the loss, although she never said anything about it. So I was determined not to follow that particular pattern, very familiar and upper class white households, really based on the British system.

I felt as though I wanted to be the important figure in these little boys’ lives.

But it meant that for a long period of time, probably two decades, my writing career to which I was passionately devoted, I’d already published three books, had really fallen into the background.

I always wrote. I would get up at five in the morning to get in an hour before the boys woke up, but I wasn’t able to keep up with publishing.

Publishing is almost another full time job. So I wasn’t publishing anything. And if you spend two decades without publishing anything, you are vanished as a writer. I still knew I was a writer, but I didn’t have any books to refer to. My three early books were out of print.

This is a very painful situation for me and I didn’t understand its political implications.

I knew that a lot of other women of my generation were struggling with the same issue. They had children, they wanted to raise their children, but they had a passion.

So this is a familiar problem for many women, maybe especially of my generation.

If you have a passionate need to follow some path in life that has nothing to do with marriage and children, you’re really in a very difficult spot if you decide in to have to get married and have children, and a lot of women do wanna do that. I think also I was somewhat misled by a slogan that I heard from time to time that went something like you can have it all.

Well, the truth of the matter is you can’t have it all. No human being can. And if you make certain decisions that make it very difficult for you to pursue your passionately and loved career, there are gonna be consequences. No doubt about it. And I paid for those consequences.

I really disappeared as a writer.

Chapter Two – The Movement

So by the early sixties, I was in this quandary.

Boys were still little. I was still deeply engaged, but I knew that I was losing something. And, therefore, when I first began to hear about what was called, really scornfully, “women’s lib”, we never called it that. We called it “the women’s movement” or “women’s liberation.”

Everything I was reading and hearing began to make a lot of sense to me, That it wasn’t just my particular problem, but it was a problem that had to do with the structure of our culture here in the United States.

The expectations for women, which in in the conventional white world were very high. You not only had to raise perfect children, but you had to cook perfect dinner parties, entertain perfect people.

And all of that was just a crushing burden that we didn’t really know how to escape.

Probably would be possible to escape, but not if you were mired in a more or less conventional upper class white life.

So I began to go to meetings, the first time I’d ever been to meetings composed entirely of women.

These were consciousness-raising groups. The most important tool of of the early women’s liberation. And I wish they went on today. Maybe they do.

I don’t think they do. So here I was with a group of six or eight women, some of whom I know knew, some of whom I didn’t. For the first time, sitting down in a living room and talking about these problems because they weren’t being talked about. They weren’t being addressed.

And we all were more or less in the same situation. We had small children.

We had means. We were not impoverished. That was not the issue. The issue was the direction of our lives.

And that’s a very complex issue. We all had years of child raising before us. None of us at that point were getting divorces, although everyone in that group later did get divorced.

So we weren’t contemplating that as a way out. We were trying to figure out how to live with the confines of what defined a good woman and also pursue a career.

And it wasn’t that we came up with any solutions. I don’t remember that we came up with any solutions.

But it was the support of other women going through the same difficult issues—was enormously important to me and not just to me, but to many other women.

And then we began to explore the rules of the culture which were inhibiting us, such as no equal pay for equal work. It wasn’t even discussed.

And the few of us who were working in jobs, only two or three, were experiencing being paid less than their male counterparts.

I had never even thought about that. But clearly, that was a huge issue if you were a working wife and mother.

We began to talk about the silencing of issues around women, such as pregnancy and abortion. Nobody mentioned abortion. It was illegal then.

It was so shameful that you wouldn’t mention it even if you had had an abortion.

And one of the first things Ms. Magazine did when it was first published was to get a lot of fairly well known women to talk about the fact that they had had illegal abortions.

With money, you can usually purchase any kind of medical solution you want. That, of course, only applied to a very few women. For the rest of us, there was no way out. If you got pregnant by accident because you were raped or assaulted, You just had to have the child. There was no way out. We’re trying to be pushed back into that right now in 2024, which is terrifying.

I remember when I was in college hearing a girl crying in the kitchen at night because she was pregnant. She didn’t wanna be pregnant. She didn’t know what to do about it, and nobody knew what to do about it. It turned out, I found out many years later, that there was an informal network called The Janes, who were women who could help you to find an abortion.

It was just, I think, maybe just in New York or just on the East Coast, but they were offering a way out to a very few women. It was not a big group. It was not a public group as it was very, very secret.

So this consciousness-raising group allowed me to talk about issues that I had never felt I could talk about before, not in my family, not at college, not afterwards.

And it really changed my whole attitude. I began to realize that my problems were not purely personal.

They had to do with the society that I had decided to live in more or less unconsciously in the late fifties, early sixties.

So time marched on. The women’s movement evolved in many ways, involved many more women, began to deal with issues of class and race, which were extremely important.

People have forgotten, I think, that Gloria Steinem, at the height of her important career, always had a African American woman with her when she went around the country giving speeches.

Because it was never true that African American women were somehow excluded from the white women’s movement.

Some of them may have felt excluded because they were excluded from the culture in general, but it was never the aim of the women’s movement to only involve white women or white upper class women.

Some of that is inevitable because if you’re white upper class, you usually have been educated, you have access to means that most women in this country don’t have access to. That’s an unsolvable problem, I think, in in capitalism.

So the result was that I got a divorce—five of the six other women got divorces—and found that living as a single mother, even though I had no financial problems, was extremely difficult.

My sons were quite unhappy, quite upset.

It showed up in their behavior at school and so on. So it wasn’t that life was any easier, but I did finally have some free time. Because the time I used to spend cooking these elaborate dinners, entertaining, trying to keep my husband amused, which was impossible, and all the sort of extra thrills of raising children like, you know, taking them to all kinds of events and so on. I was able to get rid of that.

Chapter Three – Rekindling Her Career

So at least every day, I had three or four hours of my own time. And so I started writing and publishing again. It was a big struggle because I no longer existed as a writer. I did in my own mind, but I didn’t in the mind of anybody else.

And I don’t think I would have really been able to make it—I was already in my forties—if I hadn’t been able to go to these amazing writers and artists retreats, they really are remarkable. I went I spent some time at Yaddo in upstate New York, in Saratoga.

I spent some time at a writer’s retreat in Virginia.

I spent the really, the best times I ever had were two or three visits to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Because what they do at McDowell, which is just ideal, is you have a room in an old old farmhouse.

You have your breakfast, and then you take off for your little studio, little small house, usually quite far away in the woods, and you’re there. You’re there from nine AM till five PM. And you don’t have the excuse of going out for lunch because somebody brings you a picnic basket with your lunch in it. At first, it was absolutely terrifying.

What was that gonna do with spending eight hours sitting alone? It was with a typewriter then… for all these hours when there was just there was no entertainment. There wasn’t anything to do. I’d there was no way to get into the little town.

Other people were working. They were not available.

So I really had to just sit and stare at the page and try to get started on something.

And finally, after agonizing days, I did get started on a novel, short novel.

And I never tried to publish it and I don’t think it was really worthy of being published. It was my way of getting back into my life as a writer. About a woman at a remote retreat who gets fascinated by collecting mushrooms.

That was the sort of symbol of the whole book was these various kinds of mushrooms, including poisonous mushrooms.

So I came out of that month at McDowell ready to take on not only writing, but publishing.

And if I hadn’t had that opportunity, I wish everybody had that opportunity, I don’t know that I could have done it. Because when we would all have dinner together in the main house, we talked about writing. We talked about the problems of writing. There were many men involved, so they were not particularly attuned at that time to what we were going through as women, but the other women were. And some of them had already been quite successful.

It’s hard to get into these colonies.

Usually, you can only get in if you’ve been quite successful as a published writer.

I had the good fortune of having started to write plays and not too many playwrights were applying.

So I was very pleased to be able to use playwriting rather than novel or short story writing when they were overwhelmed with those writers. And I think that and my talent explained getting into these very restricted places.

So I was then started on my way.

Lots of disruption followed. Another marriage, another divorce.

And it really was still a great struggle, internal struggle for me to justify the life I was living with the life I imagined as a writer.

Because even though I now did have some time, I had no community, had no support. It took me forever to find a publisher.

Many, many rejections.

Same thing with agents. Many, many rejections.

And by this time, I had several manuscripts going, novels, some more short stories. And I knew they were good, but I could not find the entree to the publishing world, which is still almost entirely in New York. I didn’t live in New York. I didn’t know all those people.

And then, there was a huge family fight, which I won’t go on into here. I wrote about it in a book that Knopf published in 1989 called Passion and Prejudice.

Chapter Four – Moving To Santa Fe

And as a result of that huge family fight, I knew I had to get out of Kentucky where I was then living. I had moved back there from New York.

And that was when I had the blessed, blessed opportunity to move to the Southwest, particularly to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1991. Passion and Prejudice was quite successful. It actually made some money, which is rare.

And I then realized that in Santa Fe with no I was divorced. The children were grown with no family responsibilities.

At the beginning, no friends. I had the opportunity to make the writer’s life that I had always wanted.

And so since then, and that’s three decades, I have been able to write and publish quite regularly.

I’ve been very satisfied with what I’ve been able to do after these long years of confusion and struggling.

And I know that many women go through this. The culture has not changed in spite of all the efforts that we made as feminists.

It hasn’t really changed. It’s still very male-dominated.

Capitalism is never gonna be friendly to feminism.

And yet, I am able to do what I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m immensely grateful.

Chapter Five – The Importance of Consciousness-Raising Groups

Question: I’m not familiar, and I’m not sure most people these days are familiar with the idea of consciousness-raising groups. What happened to the consciousness-raising group?

Yes. I don’t think people do know what that was. I wish it went on today. If what it meant or at least the way I interpreted it, it was that we women had all been living in a state of unconsciousness, going through the rote, doing what we were expected to do without any real profound consideration of what that meant.

So consciousness-raising meant, and it was painful, really looking at your decisions from a feminist point of view, from a self empowerment point of view, and wondering why did I do that? Why did I sit and decide to get married right out of college? Why did I decide immediately to have children? Often, they didn’t even seem like decisions.

It seemed like they just happened. So it was an attempt to become more conscious of the shape of your life and how it fit into a much wider context that involved the policies and politics of this world.

It should have happened long ago. I think now probably some of it does happen when women are maybe teenagers or in their early twenties. But in those days, it didn’t happen partly because women were not talking.

I remember in the in the fifties and sixties going to dinner parties where the women were just never said a word. The men talked all the time.

In in the era even before that after dinner, the women would go into a separate room, often the hostess’s bedroom, and then maybe would be able to talk a little bit. But if men were around, women just didn’t talk. And it’s hard to imagine that now. It’s hard to imagine it. But it was a silencing that was so profound, it didn’t even need to be defined or discussed.

It was just the way things were.

And therefore, for women to be get together with other women in these consciousness-raising groups was just an extraordinary event. It never had happened.

Women didn’t even do things like going out to lunch together, as far as I knew.

They we had no female friendships that were so important that you would go somewhere, say, on a vacation with a female friend.

That kind of thing just did not happen, except if you were an out of the closet lesbian, which most of the women in my group were not. Then, of course, you’d already broken all the rules of the culture so you probably could do a little bit more as you wanted. Not for conventional middle and upper class white women. We were confined. We were confined.

And, of course, since many of us were dependent on fathers or husbands for the money we had, almost no one was working. And if we were working, we were in low paid secretarial jobs. We also were really indebted to the men in our families. If you’re dependent on a man for your livelihood, it changes your whole relationship.

You’re gonna be very reluctant to irritate that man, to oppose him because you’re totally dependent on him. If he decides that he wants to leave you or he decides he’s not gonna support you anymore, what are you gonna do? I think we forget that, that that was a huge factor for middle class and upper class white women because we did not have our own work. We had the work that we were passionately involved in like writing, but that was never going to make any money. And the whole financial issue was part of what began to come up in these consciousness-raising groups. Why do we have no financial independence?

How could that happen? We’re smart women. How could that happen? But we’d never been trained to work at jobs.

We had no skills of that kind. Most of us came out of a good liberal education, which is extremely important in making you a whole woman, but had nothing to do with working in the workforce. And anyway, the rules of the workforce were were a way to discriminate against women.

So we really were dealing with very profound issues, and they had not come up before, at least in my life, which was one reason I was so unhappy. Because if you’re suppressing a lot of the passionate feelings that you have about issues, you’re really in a state of either dormancy or coma or unhappy half-realized life. It’s just in unless you have read and it’s forgotten now, Betty Friedan’s book, The Problem that Doesn’t Speak Its Name The Problem That Has No Name, which is about middle class women struggling with those same issues. If you haven’t read that, it probably all seems like make believe, but it was powerful.

And this spread very widely. I don’t think it ever spread, you know, into the deep south and maybe not even into the Midwest. But in the big cities, there were a lot of women doing this. A lot of women.

And, of course, they would run into the usual opposition. You mean you’re not gonna be home to cook dinner? Well, what am I gonna do? The children are hungry.

What do you think I should do? I mean, you know, because the roles were so limited.

Men just didn’t cook. They didn’t pick up children in school. They didn’t spend any time with children except maybe on the weekend. So there was just, you know, it was just all, well, you’re busting up the family because you’re not gonna be here this evening. That’s almost inconceivable, isn’t it?