If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that oral histories have come up pretty frequently on the show, and that I also work with oral histories in my own current research project. So I was delighted when the opportunity came up to talk with today’s guest, Clara Bingham. Clara is a journalist, and her two most recent books have been works of oral history that let the subjects speak for themselves. Her most recent book is The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973. It is a follow-up to her previous book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found Its Soul. Clara has had a fascinating career as a political reporter, writer, documentarian, and more. I’ll let her tell you about it all. I know historians are occasionally a little skeptical about journalists who write history, but I think we have a lot to learn from each other. That was definitely the case in this interview, and I loved hearing from Clara about how she tracked down people to interview, the ways she wove their accounts together, and why she thinks of herself as more of a historian than a journalist these days.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Clara Bingham, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973
- Clara Bingham, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found Its Soul
- Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler, Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law
- Clara Bingham, Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress
- Clara Bingham, “Girls on the Bus,” Vogue
- North Country, the film based on Class Action
- The Last Mountain, the documentary Clara Bingham produced
- George Plimpton and Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl
- Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do
- Clara Bingham, “Code Names and Secret Lives: How a Radical Underground Network Helped Women Get Abortions Before They Were Legal,” Vanity Fair
- Griffin Dunne, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
- bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
- Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
- Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I am your host and producer, Kate Carpenter. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that oral histories have come up pretty frequently on the show, and that I also interview people and work with oral histories in my own research. So I was delighted when the opportunity came up to talk with today’s guest, Clara Bingham.
Clara Bingham:
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Clara is a journalist, and her two most recent books have been works of oral history that let the subjects speak for themselves. Her most recent book out just last month is The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973. It’s a follow-up to her previous book, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul. Clara has had a fascinating career as a political reporter, writer, documentarian and more. I will let her tell you all about it.
I know historians are occasionally a little skeptical about journalists who write history, but I think we have a lot to learn from each other. That was definitely the case in this interview, and I loved hearing from Clara about how she tracked down people to interview, the way she wove their accounts together, and why she thinks of herself as more of a historian than a journalist these days. Enjoy my interview with Clara Bingham.
Clara Bingham:
I did, from an early age, know that I wanted to be a journalist, so that was a helpful thing. So in high school and college, I wrote for my college papers. And then after college, I actually landed in Hong Kong after traveling around Asia and worked for a magazine there back when it was an English colony and easy to get a work visa. And from there, I went to Papua New Guinea, where I was a UPI stringer covering the elections there. So I still say that was the highlight of my career. It was so fascinating.
I was there for about nine months as a stringer, and my articles were in the Australian papers because it used to be an Australian colony. So there was interest in Australia, not really anywhere else about Papua New Guinea. But after I wrote about a scandal in the logging industry, all of a sudden my visa dried up and I had to leave.
And then I had a series of jobs in Boston that led to working on the Dukakis campaign back in 1988, which of course ages me. I’ve always been a political junkie and really cared a lot about politics. So this was my first time of going, I realized, “Oh, I’m going to the other side here.” But I knew I would learn a lot and it turned out to be true. I worked in the press office as a press aide in Boston, which is where it was headquarters, the campaign. Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts back then.
And then I was sent to Tennessee to be the State Press secretary based in Nashville, which was a fabulous lesson in American politics and democracy. And Dukakis lost badly in Tennessee because of his position on guns mostly. And I traveled all over the state doing events for him and feeding speeches on microphone, different microphone contraptions to different political correspondents all over the country. So it was really fascinating going to that. I went to that convention, which was back in… That was in Atlanta.
So I got a sort of intensive political education and realized that I wanted to be a political reporter. I went and moved to Washington where I’d spent some of my childhood and eventually landed a job at Newsweek in their Washington Bureau, where after covering many things like the housing department, which was back then you would actually get a beat for being the housing reporter. These days, I think that probably doesn’t hardly exist anymore for general magazines and newspapers. I covered the Hill and then eventually I covered the White House, which was amazing. I was only 28 years old.
I had a senior reporter who I worked with named Ann McDaniel, and she put up with me. We traveled all over the country with George Herbert Walker Bush, the first Bush, and on Air Force One and the press pool back then. And still today they had a small group of journalists. It would be, then it was one newsweekly, one wire service, one network television. This was of course before cable news, and we would go everywhere and then have to write a report immediately if anyone from the staff or the president came back to talk to us. You know, I went to Kenny Bunkport and had to do body duty following him on the golf course, you see people doing that now with Donald Trump. So that was great fun.
And then during that time, 1991, Anita Hill went in front of the Judiciary Committee, which was made up at the time of entirely white men, Joe Biden being, the time, the chairman, and testified against the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. This was a really epic moment in women’s history in particular. And everyone, I remember it so well, almost gives me chills, people stopped what they were doing for days during these really dramatic hearings where Anita Hill, who is a Black woman, was not treated with that much respect from the men on the bench. And it became very clear to everyone watching this that there just weren’t enough women in Congress and that the deck was stacked against her. And I believed her, and so did a lot of women in America, but Clarence Thomas ended up being confirmed, and he is now sitting on the bench and responsible partly for Roe v. Wade being overturned. So this was ’91.
And then the election happened a year later in ’92 when Bill Clinton was elected. And that year has been called the Year of the Woman. There’ve been several since, but it was definitely a very important moment in women’s history because the number of women in the Senate tripled, and in the House it doubled. They had to build bathrooms off of the floor. There were people like Strom Thurmond who was this incredibly ancient, formerly pro-segregationist senator from South Carolina, accosted Patty Murray in the elevator thinking she was the new senator from Washington State, thinking that she was a page. It was really a culture shock on the Hill back then when all of these women swarmed in.
So I quit my job at Newsweek and I wrote a book about it called Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress. Not necessarily the most exciting title, but it was a really fun two-year. For two years I followed four members of Congress back and forth to their districts all over and spent a lot of time with them in their offices, and I just embedded myself essentially in their lives. And I wrote a book about it that came out a few years later.
That was sort of the beginning of my consciousness, really, of women’s issues because I’d gone to college in the ’80s. I graduated from college in 1985, which was during, I now realize, the backlash against feminism. I went to Harvard, and I hadn’t taken a women’s history class or a women’s studies class, and there weren’t that many really being offered. It wasn’t something I was that interested in because I benefited so kind of materially from the women’s movement that had preceded me just less than 10 years earlier. So I kind of blindly walked into Harvard, walked into my job at Newsweek, thinking of course this is what women do. And then I wrote this book.
And then the book after that was also an amazing… I freelance for magazines. I wrote a lot of, I was based in DC then, a lot of profiles of women. I covered women who were covering the White House, women on the bus for Vogue, and a profile of Madeline Albright. So I became really interested in women who were changemakers, who were doing a job that had never been done before by women. For some reason, and I still don’t really know why, that always fascinated me as a story. It’s a classic David and Goliath drama.
So the next book I wrote with a college classmate who was a lawyer, it was called Class Action. It was about the first class action for sexual harassment ever. It was a landmark case. It took place in the iron mines in Minnesota, which were up in Northern Minnesota, Hibbing and Eveleth, these towns that were very tough and rough. And the women there, because of affirmative action in ’70s, were hired to work for really the only good job, only union jobs up there in the Taconite mines, and had suffered very extreme sexual harassment from the men there who were threatened that women were taking their jobs and didn’t feel that they belonged in the mines. These were not underground mines, they were just massive factories essentially.
And not until the Anita Hill hearings did these women realize that what they were experiencing was actually illegal, and it was something called sexual harassment, which is something that had just been making its way through the courts is a idea. And so they sued. It was a very long case. And by the time I got involved, they were about to settle, and they did settle after three grueling court cases. And so my friend Laura Leedy Gansler and I had a wealth of depositions and court testimony, which as historians know, is just gold because there it is, it’s completely public, you can use it. And Laura, being a lawyer, worked on all the legal parts of the story. And I spent my time going up to Eveleth and Hibbing and finding these women and some of the men too, and interviewing them. It was almost as exotic as my Papua New Guinea reporting because I was a fish out of water and getting people to trust me was very hard. I had to drink a lot of beer and play a lot of darts, which luckily came pretty naturally.
I eventually cracked the code and got a bunch of people to trust me with their stories. And they were harrowing stories, really tough, especially the main character, Lois Jensen, who was the lead plaintiff in this case that the New York Times hadn’t even covered when it happened. So people on the East Coast didn’t know much about it, but all the lawyers knew about it because it was an important legal story and precedent. That book came out in 2003. And then miraculously, two years later, in 2005, I went to the opening of the movie based on the book called North Country.
Sadly for a writer, you don’t want the movie based on your book to have a different name because it doesn’t help sales that much. But I was very happy with the way it came out. It was directed by a female director named Nikki Caro. And at the time, there were very few female directors to be found. It starred Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand who were my heroes, and they both got Oscar nominations. So it was a pretty dreamy experience to have a book. It was not reviewed by the New York Times. It didn’t sell very many copies. It was just really labor of love on our part and a great adventure to write it. But to have it made into a movie, it was pretty fabulous.
And then after that, this is why the trajectory kind of turns. I made a doc, I went down to freelance for magazine and write about mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. I witnessed this horrific environmental crime essentially, where mountains were just being blown up instead of going underground, which was expensive. Mining companies discover they could just ignite lots of explosives and blow mountains up and get straight to the coal because of the Bush administration had reduced a lot of the environmental regulations and that allowed for this. So I was so shocked by this and realized it was such a visual story that I ended up with people who knew how to make documentaries, making a documentary called The Last Mountain. And that experience, I spent a lot of time in West Virginia with these heroic environmental activists who were just so brave and fascinating, and I fell in love with first-person voice.
So after that documentary, which thankfully premiered at Sundance in 2011, and did quite well, and I think it’s probably still streaming, I realized that I wanted to go back to writing books, that that was much more my thing, and one didn’t have to raise lots of money. Documentaries are so hard to make and grueling and involve so many people and so many logistics. So I wanted to simplify my life and go back to writing.
At the time, I was very good friends with a wonderful historian who I’m sure you’ve heard of, John Meacham. We hadn’t actually overlapped at Newsweek, but he had been the editor of Newsweek for a long time. And he, at that point, had left Newsweek and was becoming a book editor. And we sat down and he said, “I think you should write a book for me.” And I said, “But I want it to be first-person. I’ve now fallen in love with this.” And he said, “Well then, it needs to be an oral history.” And I said, “I love the ’60s. I just love the ’60s. I’ve just always been a student of the ’60s having missed them, having been born in 1963. So he said, “Okay. So you’re writing an oral history of the ’60s.”
By hook or by crook, that book turned into Witness to the Revolution, which came out now eight years ago in 2016, also in the summer. I focused on one year. It was the school year of 1969, ’70, and it was a year that had been pretty under represented, under reported, under cataloged. And unlike 1968, for example, there were several books about 1968, but ’69, ’70 was quite a year. It was the year of Kent State when four students were killed by the National Guard in Ohio and 13 were shot. There were many, many student, it was sort of the peak of the student protests against the Vietnam War, which was raging at the time, and also the beginning of the feminist movement.
And so that book, which was really about many parts of the different movements for social change that were taking place at the time, Woodstock gets a chapter that was August of ’69, and the counterculture, the psychedelic drug culture gets lots of attention. That was a lot of fun to report, as you can imagine. And there were so many colorful, fascinating characters. And I realized too that they were getting older and that this was a moment. I got Tom Hayden. I got lots of people who now are no longer alive to talk to me about what it felt like for them during these different momentous events.
But when I wrote that book, I fell into what is a classic trap, and I interviewed the leaders of SDS, the leaders of the moratorium, which was the biggest student protest at the time in Washington. They were mostly all men and the leaders of the Black Panther movement, which actually I interviewed Erika Helgeson, who was an amazing Black Panther member.
But most of the people I were men. And I had one chapter in that book on the rise of the feminist movement and how it came out of the Vietnam anti-war movement, the radical part of this, of the feminist movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement. I interviewed Robin Morgan, who was just a former yippie, former radical who’d been deeply involved in the anti-war movement. And then as she said to me, “Woke up one day and realized that the only thing women were doing in these organizations were rolling joints and pouring coffee for the guys,” and that they never got to speak in public or write anything or have any sort of official role that was recognized by the press, but they were very much the engine behind both the civil rights and the anti-war movement.
Robin Morgan is so colorful and she’s a poet, and she had so much to say. She had this great line, “There’s something contagious about demanding freedom, especially where women who comprise the oldest oppressed group on the face of the planet are concern.” So there was so much demanding of freedom going on in the ’60s, sexual freedom, racial freedom, political freedom, freedom to just be who you needed to be, and yet there was a blindness to women’s rights and women’s freedom. And so by the end of the ’60s, so many women all over the country were having what was later called a click moment of a kind of change in consciousness, of understanding where they saw the world through a different lens and understood that they were oppressed actually.
And so I wrote one chapter in Witness about this, and it lingered with me, and I realized immediately, “Well, this has to be my next book.” This is in fact the most long-lasting of the ’60s revolution, and the one that had the largest impact on the most amount of people, seeing it was 50% of the population, and no one’s getting any younger.
With Witness, almost all of the quotes I use in that book were for my interviews. And during that book, when I wrote that book, I developed my new form of writing, and it’s now what I see as a form of writing history. So I stepped out of journalism really into writing history, but as an oral history narrative where there is an arc and there are events that people, what I would do is I realized the way to create dramatic tension is to find an event that is a dramatic event. So let’s say Kent State, and I dug everywhere. I found eight people who were there. One was a newspaper reporter, one was a photographer, one was a student who was shot, Dean Kahler. And I got them to tell me, “Give me the TikTok of that week in their lives.” And I wove together a chronology essentially of Kent State through their personal experiences.
I love that chapter just because there was so much action and there was so much drama. And also because it was so horrifying and shocking, everyone remembered everything because of course, we now know that when you have a shocking, either very good or very bad memory, that creates adrenaline, that actually helps to sear one’s memory.
This form, of course, I did not invent, and my model for it was the biography Edie, which is the biography, oral history biography of Edie Sedgwick who was a Warhol girl, and it was written by George Plimpton and Jean Stein. Some people I know consider it the perfect book. It is very much a pure oral history. There’s very little explanation from the authors, but their interviews are so well done and then so well crafted and the patchwork of voices is so well written essentially that you just read the whole book without really knowing who’s telling you what, but you’re having a visceral experience of who Edie was and what her life was like and what it was like for the people who knew her.
So that was my goal. My goal was the model for oral history narrative. And my book was not Studs Terkel, the very famous of course, oral historian from Chicago who would write these epic books like Working, for example, where he would interview hundreds of people, choose 50, and then whittle down those and shape and craft those first-person testimonies and do one after the other. Instead, I wanted it to read more like a conversation, and I wanted there to be a narrative arc. So that I think really worked with Witness. And Witness is now being taught a lot. And it’s also the kind of book that students can relate to.
I know people who are teaching, and I often will zoom in on their classes and hear just very moving things, like, “I didn’t really read anything else on the list on our reading list, but your book, I read chapters out loud to my roommates.” There’s a immediacy to oral history that it’s not a dense way to tell history. And I think it’s just maybe a little more accessible for people who aren’t deep students of history.
So I decided my next book would have to be about women’s liberation, and I went immediately to my editors, John Meacham had left by then at Random House and said, “This is what I want to do.” And this was 2016, and they said, “We can’t sell books on feminism. Nah, no way.”
So I just started freelancing. I did a story for Vanity Fair on the Jane Underground Abortion Network, and I thought, “Okay, I’m going to test this out first of all and see if this is the kind of story I want to live with for the next X amount of years.” Because as you know, you have to sort of fall in love to write a book and because it’s such a deep relationship and it’s so consuming and it’s good to really like your characters, like your topics.
So I interviewed about six or seven of the women who lived in Chicago during were part of the Women’s Liberation movement there. And they, at the beginning, this wonderful woman, Heather Booth started, someone asked her, “I have a girlfriend who needs to have an abortion. Can you help?” And she called a doctor who she could trust and he delivered a safe, illegal abortion. And then the calls kept on coming. She was inundated with these requests and said, “If you call this number, just ask for Jane,” which of course was not her name, but it was a good code name.
Soon enough, she was at University of Chicago, the numbers became so large that she enlisted a large group of women who developed a very secretive hierarchy for how to make this happen, who was going to take the call, who was going to brief the patient who they called clients, who was going to find the doctor for them, who was going to drive them. It all had to be extremely secretive and underground. And eventually, the doctor who they had relied on vanished, but before that happened, they learned from him how to perform abortions themselves, which is still kind of stunning to me. And it turns out, actually it’s not a terribly difficult procedure if it’s done in early stages.
So they performed thousands of abortions themselves. There were about six of them who were doing it, and they all got busted in 1972. They were called the Abortion Seven, just like the Chicago Seven, and were lucky enough, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land a few months later, and they didn’t have to go to jail for 10 years, which is what they were up against.
By the time I finished this article and a few others, Me Too had occurred. Harvey Weinstein was exposed by the New York Times and the flood of thousands and thousands of women who came forward talking about the sexual harassment and molestation they had experienced often at work changed the country. It was such a massive wave of outpouring, and all of a sudden editors were a little more interested in women feminism. So I was able to get a contract for this book with Simon & Schuster. I spent five years on it really from start to finish. It was quite a journey. It was really amazing.
I interviewed about 120 women and some men. And then I also had much more of an archival experience with this book than I’ve ever had before because so many of the main players like Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan and Fannie Lou Hamer and Florence Kennedy had died. And so I needed their first-person voices, not just a biography about them. So that became a big hunt for me, finding voices of women who had died. And also many women were quite old. The average age was 75 to 97, and and I was asking people to remember things that had happened 50, 60 years ago, which was a big ask. Luckily, there were several archives. Smith has one in Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe where women had been interviewed for oral history archives in the ’90s, which was much closer, of course, to the period of time. So I used a mix of different sources for this book.
Kate Carpenter:
Fantastic. I have a lot more I want to ask you about this book, but first I also want to ask what I sometimes refer to as my nuts and bolts questions about how you write. So the first one is just when and where do you like to do your writing?
Clara Bingham:
I have an office in my house in Brooklyn, and it’s tiny, and I like that. I like having almost a closet to work in because I don’t want a lot of distraction. A good view is not a good thing for me. So I write at home or I write in libraries depending on how chaotic my life is at home.
I have three kids and my husband has three kids, my second husband. Luckily, by the time I was really writing this book, many of them were way off to college and adulthood, but there were periods where I just had to go to a library and just to really focus. So I had a few spots in New York. I went to the New York Society Library, which you belong to. And I actually wrote most of Witness there. It’s on 79th of Madison. It’s a great jewel. It costs $200 to join, and it has an amazing reading room on the 5th floor, and it’s jammed. You have to get there early to get your seat with a lot of frustrated writers who are sitting there tapping away. I like being in a community of people working because it focuses me, and I can’t talk on the phone, and I can’t go to the kitchen and have my fifth snack of the day. So it was very great.
Also in Brooklyn. I worked at the Writers Room in Brooklyn. I moved to Brooklyn recently. So finding a place like that where it’s quiet and preferably where there are other people who is as tortured as I am is often preferable. But I also spent a lot of time working at home late nights. I’m not a morning person. I wish I was. I wish I was one of those go to bed at 9:00, wake up at 4:00, get it all done by noon, exercise, then do your day job. But I am not disciplined enough for that. So I actually would find myself working until midnight or 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning. I like night work because that’s quiet the same way morning work is.
And also for a lot of this work, I was on the road and interviewing people. So it was very much two stages. There was the repertorial part. It was a lot of gumshoe, a lot of finding people, getting them to trust me, getting them to agree to talk to me, talking to them. Unfortunately, Covid happened for a lot of this book. So I did a lot of Zoom interviews.
Before that, I traveled all over because I love going to people’s houses. Many of these women had their archives. They had a bunch of boxes out that they were ready to ship off to Duke, Smith, Radcliffe, whatever college they happened to go to that was agreeing to take their papers. And so that would always be very helpful, as you can imagine. Photos, documents, speeches, things that would be impossible to find online. And also getting just a sense of really who they were. So I love those in person, but they’re not as efficient. So once Covid happened, I realized, “Wow, I can Zoom with someone in California and I can have three interviews over the course of three days.” And that was really great too.
So I did the interview stage and then the writing stage, and they’re very different, the way that now promoting a book is so different. It’s very schizophrenic. You go from being a politician to a hermit and back to a politician. So it’s very confusing personality-wise.
Kate Carpenter:
Absolutely. How do you like to organize your sources, your notes, your materials?
Clara Bingham:
This time I use Google Docs, which I really relied on. It was the first time I’d used them, I should have with my last book, but I wasn’t hip to it. I put everything on Google Docs, so all the transcripts. So I would have everything transcribed. I didn’t do the transcripts myself because I had thousands and thousands of pages. But organizing those transcripts was a massive job and outlining them. But luckily, I could search, which was such a good thing.
So I had lots of folders on Google Docs, which I wish I had done a better job probably of organizing. And I put all of my archival material on there as well if I could scan them and they were scannable. I also had paper files and notebooks. For example, I used transcripts outtakes from Shola Lynch’s documentary on Shirley Chisholm. I got them at the Brooklyn Library that has a Shirley Chisholm archive, and I just had to Xerox them. They were not online. So I put them all in lots of binders. And there were other oral histories that were quite old in the library of Congress that were just PDFs that I had to Xerox that weren’t searchable.
So I tried to put everything together as much as I could and in a searchable mode, which helped because it was ungainly. It was 10 years instead of one year, which I’d done with Witness, and it was a bear to organize. It was a bear to outline and decide what I was going to focus on and what my time limits were. And then I had thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of transcripts to get through. And so it was a lot. Google Docs helped me. And also I could share, I had random researchers every once in a while so we could get on the same document, which I liked.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m curious, I mean, one of the cool things about reading a book like this is that as the reader, it’s sort easy to forget the author exists. It’s easy to be tricked into feeling like, “This book just came into existence. It’s the people’s voices as they were.” But obviously, massive amount of work goes into constructing it, into weaving these narratives together. So how do you go about writing a project like this? What does the construction look like?
Clara Bingham:
It’s very labor-intensive. I mean, at first I thought, “Oh, this is so great. I don’t have to write” because I’m a pretty tortured writer. But then I realized most of the time that I was working on this, I wished I could just write it because I needed people to say what I needed them to say, and if they didn’t, I had to go find someone else to say it.
So I tried to… First of all, I wrote it chronologically, and that is the best way for me to organize telling a story. And that helped me with form and outline, just deciding that I had both themes and I had chronology. For example, Our Bodies, Ourselves, women, the women who founded this amazing bestselling book about women’s health, they appear in three different chapters throughout the book, and so does Shirley Chisholm. She appears when she runs for Congress, and then she appears when she goes to Congress, and then she appears again in 1972 when she runs for president.
So I would break apart characters and themes chronologically. So that was how I outlined it, and I thought that worked out pretty well. But then the actual… And I call it writing, people would call it weaving. I feel like it really was, I was writing this in a lot of ways. I was a puppeteer. People had to be in the room. And so for example, I didn’t consult with historians and get their opinions. And that of course made it harder because it meant that the characters had to tell the story that would give us the history. And I, of course, wrote introductions where I felt that that was needed and sometimes lengthy footnotes. But I tried as hard as possible not to be in the story, not to have too much of my voice there, except for in the introduction. And it’s sort of making a documentary without a narrator, which is really challenging.
So it just means you have to have good material, you have to have good interviews, you have to be very good at interviewing people. You have to ask them often the same question over and over again in different ways to get them to explain what you need them to explain, because you can’t do it for them, you can’t do it for the reader. And then I liked having multiple voices who experienced the same thing when possible, because that would fill out a story.
But in this case, often I’d have just one person. And then of course, I relied on people being good storytellers. And some people were are and some aren’t. You can’t win them all. And so for the people who are good storytellers, they got much more airtime because they were able to do the job I needed them to do because I couldn’t help that much, though I did do a lot of sandpapering, as I call it, and condensing to make it more readable for the reader. But I didn’t rewrite anything. Everything was always very much in their voices.
And then of course, I used documents. And in this case, there were a lot of fantastic arguments on the floor of the House and the Senate, testimony in congressional hearings. Everyone wrote a manifesto. I mean, these women were so loquacious and they had so much to say, and many of them were brilliant writers. There was Vivian Gornick and Margo Jefferson and Robin Morgan. Everyone had something, Alix Kates Shulman, Alex Shulman. So they were just scads of great writers. So I could also use their memoirs, which I really relied on. In the case of Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, they both wrote memoirs that I used.
So it was a mix. I ended up cutting out a lot of the documents because I realized it was too dry. And I got friends to read early drafts who would take big red slash red pens through what I thought was a fascinating testimony in front of the ERA Birch Bayh committee. So I had to slash and burn a lot, and then I had to dig a lot to find vivid… I was looking for vivid, personal, authentic, I sort of hate that word, but a vivid, personal, candid, emotional descriptions. I wanted the reader to know what it felt like to be there so that it wasn’t just a factual telling, it was personal. So in a way, this is a personal history, and it makes sense because this was such a personal revolution. The personal is political, and it really was. It happened in the bedroom as well as the boardroom, as well as the factory floor. It happened everywhere. And so much of this story really is about personal transformation that happened individually.
So that helped, in a way, make it a viable oral history in a way because the learning, hearing from these women what they went through themselves, instead of hearing about it second hand, to me, felt like the real way of telling this history, the most effective way of telling this history. And as far as I know, it is the first oral history narrative of this movement. There are a lot of memoirs. There are a lot of collections of writings. There are a lot of collections of interviews, but nothing like this has been done. And also what I try to do that’s different than the vast body of literature on this period is I wanted to also include different parts of the movement that people might not think of as being related to women’s liberation.
But I wrote about athletes and I wrote about artists, and I wrote about health and sex as well as politics and law. So just that way also, that gave it a little more pizzazz, I think, and made it a little more accessible too, because if you couldn’t relate to the athletes, you might be able to relate to the artists. If you couldn’t relate to the artists, you might relate to the lawyers. So in a way, there’s something for everyone in this book. And I’d have one friend who was like, “Just cut out the tennis players enough” and just, “Who cares about that?” Then I’d have another friend say, “I love the tennis players so much, will you please put more tennis players?” And I realized I’ve just got to find a way to put as many voices in from different parts of this movement that was all exploding all at the same time without it just feeling like a grab bag.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah, I mean, you obviously can’t talk to everyone who was part of the movement.
Clara Bingham:
That’s a soar. And I didn’t come close.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah. And you talked little in the introduction about how there are some areas you just couldn’t cover. How did you decide who you would talk to?
Clara Bingham:
Well, a lot of it was chance. It was who I could get access to, and either archivally in terms of archives or in terms of people who would agree to talk to me. And actually, some people who didn’t agree to talk to me, I still was able to get archive like Judy Chicago, the now quite famous feminist artist who started an amazing feminist art movement on the West Coast. She was writing her memoir and just didn’t want to talk to me. I tried every which way multiple times. And then it turned out the Archive of American Art had done a great long interview with her. She had written a wonderful memoir of her early years, Through the Flower. And so between a bunch of… And then I interviewed a lot of women who’d worked with her. So when I struck out with people, I would figure out if there was a workaround.
But the first person I interviewed was Susan Brownmiller, who at the time, who is one of the great chroniclers of this period, and she lived in the West Village, still does. And a good friend of mine, Joe Connison, knew her and was able to make the introduction. And so one led to the other, and then I would ask Susan, “Who can I talk to? Who was in your consciousness raising group in the West Village?” And she would give me someone else’s name, and then I would… And so often, that was how it worked. Or I would pick a topic that I knew I needed to cover, read everything about it, find out who I needed to interview who is still alive, track them down on Facebook or in the White pages and cold call them and hope maybe they’d respond to my email or my phone call. So it was just kind of classic reporting, like finding who I needed to find and then finding who I could find. So it was a very imperfect way of going about this, but I just had to do what I had to do.
Kate Carpenter:
You’ve mentioned little things here and there in our conversation about asking similar questions multiple times or having people reconstruct a week you talked about for Witness. Did you have strategies in your interviews to draw people’s stories out and get them past responses that they’ve given for the past 50 years?
Clara Bingham:
That was certainly my goal with every interview, that I would get them the subjects to relax and to be really candid. And for the most part, it wasn’t that hard. A lot of these women are not famous. And it was really refreshing and nice because the ones who weren’t famous actually really wanted to tell their stories, and they wanted history to know what they’d done. They wanted younger women to understand what came before them, and they were all getting older. And so I found that it wasn’t that hard to get people to talk to me. And because, this is the other thing that makes it a little easier as an oral historian, I could promise them that what was going to appear on the pages came out of their mouth. I wasn’t going to judge it. I wasn’t going to alter it in any extreme way so that they could just tell me their stories and be assured that that was the story that would be in the book.
And in some cases, people asked to see what I was going to use first in case they wanted to correct any mistakes. And so I made that deal with people who wanted that. It wasn’t that they could change what they said, but it was if they found that there were inaccuracies, they could correct it. And that was helpful because it wasn’t a “got you” journalism kind of project, which I’ve done in the past and is much harder. So there weren’t antagonistic interviews, which made it easier. But one of the questions that I… With Witness, one of the regular questions I would ask is, “When was the first time you dropped acid?” With this book, I asked, “When was your first illegal abortion?” Because sadly, almost everyone I interviewed had had multiple ones. And that was the shocker, for me. I didn’t figure out to ask that question at the very beginning, but I then soon learned, “Okay, this is a universal experience that almost everyone had at the time tragically.” And it radicalized so many of them.
I was always looking for moments of radicalization, moments of realization, and often having the hair-raising, life-threatening stories that these women would tell me were just so upsetting, so graphic. They were very brave about telling me their stories, that that experience often would be what would propel them into becoming involved in the movement in some way. So that usually would get me somewhere that I wanted to go asking that question.
Also, one of the things I did is what I love about this, as opposed to interviewing people on camera for a documentary, I could give it a lot of time. I could give it multiple days if they would let me have that kind of time so that I didn’t have to have the pressure of getting what I needed to get within an hour because I had a camera crew there. And because there was an intimacy to just being alone with someone that made for often better interviews, and I could get it with a documentary crew there.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, with our last little bit of time, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your own inspiration. You’ve mentioned a couple books that inspired these books specifically, but are there writers that you turn to to sort of use as models or inspiration as a writer?
Clara Bingham:
Well, I mean, I did mention George Plimpton and Jean Stein, and they, I thought, were both great oral historians. Jean Stein went on to write several others. I know her daughters and I knew as well when she was alive, and I really admired. She dug deep and did long projects that she really committed to. So in a lot of ways, I see Jean as a model.
But the other thing that I love and that especially this project made me love even more is a good memoir. For example, I just finished Griffin Dunne’s memoir about his childhood called The Friday Afternoon Club, which was so fantastic and honest and gritty. And for this book, I read three of that are very classic. I’m sure most memoir classes teach these three books. But they were, first time I had read them, embarrassing to say, and they were so important to me. I’ve read them over and over again, and they were bell hook’s Bone Black, which is a just searing, strong memoir of her childhood, her really tough childhood, and Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, which is about her mother. It’s a memoir about her relationship with her mother. And in that, she talks about her mother’s abortions. She later told me about them in our interview.
Vivian Gornick is such a brilliant writer. I quote her a lot in the book from both our interview, but also from her Village Voice articles, which she wrote covering the movement that were so revelatory because she puts herself into them. It was the beginning of new journalism at the time. So we had Nora Ephron writing about this and Germaine Greer and all these budding amazing writers, women writers who were finally given space to express themselves.
And the other amazing memoir that I love so much is Negroland by Margo Jefferson, who I also interviewed. This too is a book about her childhood growing up in Chicago from a upper-class Black family, and what all the different gradations of society were in her neighborhood.
So I just love a memoir. I love a good memoir, and they’re so hard to do. Whenever I read them, I always think, “I could never write this. How do you do this? How do you put yourself on the page, so expose your heart and your soul like that?” And of course, that’s why I’m an oral historian, so I don’t have to. But I really, really admire writers who can do that. I do think it’s sort of the ultimate art form in a way, at least in my book.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten, or the most influential at least?
Clara Bingham:
It’s a little bit of a cliché, but I love Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I think just had its 20th anniversary. She was just at this Sun Valley Writers Conference a few weeks ago kind of commemorating it. But she’s got a chapter in there called Shitty First Draft, and I go to it all the time. It really helps me get started because she just is so encouraging about how you have to accept the imperfect and not strive for perfection. Perfection is never going to help you get anything on the page. And so I’ve just always loved her in particular, advice, writing advice. And I tell everyone I know who’s trying to write something to read Bird By Bird.
Kate Carpenter:
I know that you are promoting the movement now, and that is taking all of your energy, I’m sure. Are there other things that you’re kind of toying with for future projects?
Clara Bingham:
I’m thinking a lot about what I want to do next. For a long time, I really had a goal for myself this time, I said. I want to have a contract for my next book when this book comes out. So for the last six to eight months, of course, I was beating my head against the wall, and I realized I can’t do that because I was feeling like I was cheating on the women in this book. I was in such a relationship with all of them. It was almost hard for me to hand the book in and kind of give them up, give up our dialogue that was happening live on my computer screen. I fell in love with so many of them because they’re just so heroic and so interesting. And so I wouldn’t even let myself think that. And it felt like I was jinxing it too, because the whole time I was writing this book, I thought it’s never going to work, it’s never going to be a book. I had a lot of doubt because it was so sprawling.
My first draft was, get this, 280,000 words, so my editor was not happy, and I had to cut that in half. So the process really was quite more torturous with this book than I’ve experienced before. And so coming up with a new one, just it was impossible. So I’m now getting to that point where I can see ahead and see that I need something new. And I have some ideas, but I don’t feel like I can really share them yet. But I definitely need, I need a new one. If your listeners or you have any ideas for me, please let me know.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you think you’ll do another oral history?
Clara Bingham:
Yeah, I definitely love it. I just love it. Love it. As hard as it can be. I feel like I found my thing, and that all of the different reporting and writing I’ve done and documentary filmmaking I’ve done, it all makes sense now and that this is really how I like to tell a story.
Kate Carpenter:
Clara Bingham, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your writing process on Drafting the Past.
Clara Bingham:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Drafting the Past. You’ll find links to all of the books we talked about in a complete transcript at draftingthepast.com. There you could also check out show merchandise, learn how to support the show on Patreon, and sign up for the newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend about it. After all, friends don’t let friends write boring history.
