On the topic of history

And why it matters.

Earlier this week, I listened to the most recent episode of “Pulling the Thread with Elise Loehnen.” I listen to her podcast regularly because I always learn something new. This week was no exception. Her guest was author, journalist, and documentary film producer Clara Bingham. The topic of their conversation was Bingham’s latest book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.

The book is written as an oral history told by the women who were there and participated, each in their own way, in the major shift they created over those ten years. Women like Betty Friedan, who lit a fire with her book The Feminine Mystique, and Shirley Chisholm, who grew up in Bedford–Stuyvesant (aka “Bed-Sty”), Brooklyn, and went on to become the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for President of the United States. There’s writer-director Nora Ephron, whose first job was at Newsweek, but not as a journalist writing for the publication — because women were not seen as capable of that role and were hired only as secretaries and researchers. And the Janes, who formed an underground abortion network, and of course, Gloria Steinem, who founded Ms. Magazine. I bought the book after listening to the episode and dove in this weekend.

Showing us how we got here.

Back in 2018, there was On the Basis of Sex, a film about the early career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her work to end gender-based discrimination. In 2020, FX released the miniseries it produced Mrs. America. It tells the story of the efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s. The ERA “is an amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantees equality of rights under the law for all persons regardless of sex.” Although the origins of the ERA date back to 1923, Mrs. America focuses on the successful effort to lobby it through Congress in 1972.