CANR
WORK TITLE: The Movement
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.clarabingham.com/
CITY: New York
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COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 400
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1963, in Louisville, KY; daughter of Robert W. (in newspaper publishing) and Joan (a book publishing executive) Bingham; married David Michaelis (a biographer), 1993 (marriage ended, 2007); married Joseph Gregory Finnerty III (a lawyer), April 26, 2014; children: (first marriage) three; (second marriage) three stepchildren.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A., 1985.
ADDRESS
CAREER
United Press International (wire service), stringer from Papua New Guinea, 1987; press secretary for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, 1988; Newsweek, New York, NY, Washington correspondent, 1989-93; freelance writer. Producer of the documentary film The Last Mountain: A Fight for Our Future, 2011.
AWARDS:Exceptional Merit in Media Award, National Women’s Political Caucus, 2004, for an article in Vanity Fair; Pare Lorentz Award, International Documentary Association, c. 2011, for The Last Mountain; Speaking Out for Justice Award, American Association of University Women, and award for best book of the year, Los Angeles Times, both for Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including Best American Crime Writing, 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Daily Beast, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., Talk, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Washington Monthly.
Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law was adapted by Michael Seitzman as the feature film North Country, starring Charlize Theron and Francis McDormand, released by Warner Bros. in 2005.
SIDELIGHTS
Clara Bingham spent the early part of her career in the nation’s capital. In 1988 she worked as press secretary to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. After the election she joined Newsweek magazine and spent four years as a Washington, DC, correspondent. In 1993 Bingham began to look back at her years in Washington and the women she interacted with on Capitol Hill.
In Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress, Bingham offers biographical profiles of four female career politicians, all Democrats. Patty Murray became the first female senator in 1992 and was reelected to her fifth term in 2016. Cynthia Ann McKinney, an African American woman from Georgia, won the first of her six terms in the House of Representatives in 1992. Representative Pat Schroeder served from 1973 to 1997. Representative Louise Slaughter has been serving since 1987.
Bingham posits that the 1992 election greatly increased the number of women in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, thereby redirecting the traditionally conservative male legislative bodies toward issues relevant to the betterment of women. She credits her subjects for their roles in “hard-won legislative victories on family leave, sexual harassment and abortion,” according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Although not convinced that the author proved her point with a mere four profiles, Leora Tanenbaum observed in the Women’s Review of Books that “Bingham offers a unique opportunity to witness the priorities of female politicians at perhaps the most volatile and encouraging moment ever for women in Congress.”
Sexual harassment is the subject of Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, which she wrote in collaboration with lawyer Laura Leedy Gansler. In 1975 the Eveleth Taconite Company of northern Minnesota was forced by a consent decree to open its doors to female mine workers. One of the four women hired was Lois Jenson, a single mother forced into poverty by the meager wages available to women in a hardscrabble mining town. She and the other women were immediately subjected to unspeakable harassment. They were not only groped and verbally demeaned, but “assaulted, stalked, and terrorized by the men they worked with on a daily basis,” reported Stephanie Mencimer in the Washington Monthly. In Kliatt, Nola Theiss warned readers that “the events were graphic and crude.”
Jenson, the focus of the book, complained to management and her union to no avail. Finally in 1984, after a worker came to her home and threatened her son, she appealed to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. After enduring nearly three more years of terrifying harassment, she was authorized to begin legal proceedings against her employer. It would be a lost cause for four lone women to mount a case against the combined resources of the mining company and the union, so Jenson was compelled to seek class action status. Local public opinion worked against the women for seven more years until Jenson found lawyers willing to commit themselves to a struggle that would eventually cost millions of dollars to prosecute.
The trial finally began in 1992, and the courtroom proved to be an even more frightening venue than the mine. The women were battered by relentless questioning as lawyers pried into the most intimate and private corners of their lives. In 1993 they won, but the ordeal was not over. They had to sue for damages in 1995 and face even more brutal questioning before a judge, who ultimately decided against them. The women appealed and won the right to a jury trial, but they were already defeated: “ill, exhausted, bitter and resentful,” as Alice Kessler-Harris reported in the Women’s Review of Books. At the end of 1997, twenty years after Jenson first descended into the Eveleth mines, the women consented to individual settlements. Technically, they had won the right to sue as a class for sexual harassment, but the fight had destroyed them. Kessler-Harris wrote of Jenson: “The endless waiting, the rollercoaster of hope shattered by negative decisions, the brutal exposure of her most intimate and painful youthful experiences, drove her into paranoia and depression. … Forced onto disability leave, … pills and more pills altered her once lithe body, blotched her skin and clouded her mind.” The struggle was portrayed in the 2005 film adaptation North Country, starring Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award nomination for her performance.
Critics were moved by this account. Mencimer wrote: “Bingham and Gansler present a fairly even-handed account of the case, acknowledging, for instance, that the lawyers did not have perfect clients. … What is crystal clear, though, is that none of the women deserved the treatment she had endured at the mine.” A critic in Publishers Weekly noted: “The harshness and callousness of the abuse … will outrage readers. The equally brutal treatment class members received in … the federal court system … will shock them.”
Bingham was only six years old during one of the most tumultuous years in the memory and the words of people who were there. In 1969 and 1970 millions of Americans at home and abroad were poised on the brink of revolt—for a multitude of reasons. Hippies were tripping at Woodstock while conscripted soldiers were dying in Vietnam. African Americans and white radicals demanded action on civil rights while the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected names. Civil disobedience filled the headlines almost daily and, when that failed, groups like the Weather Underground engaged in domestic terrorism.
Nearly fifty years later Bingham produced an oral history intended to capture the breadth of the dissent. She interviewed at least one hundred survivors of the chaos: participants and eyewitnesses, including celebrities like actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda, and Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Bingham dedicated a chapter to each major challenge of that year, resulting in more than twenty-five chapters. The year ended short of outright revolution, but many of the issues and much of the anger smoldered in the ashes, unquenched.
Critical response to Witness to the Revolution was generally favorable. Zane Schwartz commented in Maclean’s that Bingham’s “brilliance is as an editor. She weaves the interviews together with only the occasional footnote or brief chapter introduction. The voices speak for themselves,” even when memories diverge: “inconsistencies reveal the beauty of this book: it is raw and incomplete, but all the more authentic for being so.” Heather Wilhelm observed in Commentary: “The most interesting voices … belong to the activists gone awry,” when their protests escalated into violence and even bombings. Todd Gitlin commended Bingham in the American Prospect for her portrayal of “the sheer wildness and horror of the year.” More than one critic concluded that current protest movements, cyberleaks of confidential information, questionable political decisions, and the angry helplessness of disenfranchised multitudes have much in common with the events of 1969 and 1970. Dan Kaplan reported in Booklist: “The individuals Bingham features led a seismic shift in American culture and politics that continues to resonate today.”
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Bingham next published the 2024 The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, an oral history capturing the voices of numerous women who embodied the movement that defined a decade of women’s struggle to reject millennia of being treated like second class citizens. Through historical study, Bingham chronicles the awakening, organizing, and agitating that women like Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisolm, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg achieved to reject the legal, political, medical, and economic limitations put on women’s lives. Bingham presents the voices of artists and politicians, athletes and lawyers, Black and white.
Bingham begins with Betty Friedan’s influential book The Feminine Mystique, and continues with the founding of the National Organization of Women, Ms. Magazine, Bobbie Gibb who was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, the underground Janes who performed abortions, Billie Jean King’s win in the battle of the sexes tennis game, and others who participated in the women’s movement. The book ends with the 1973 ruling by the Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade case legalizing abortion.
The Movement is written in a similar oral history narrative style as Bingham’s previous book, Witness to the Revolution, and is part history, part encyclopedia. The book’s comprehensive accounting also reveals discrimination in employment, the boxes women were forced to be put into, and the emotional, personal, cultural, and political effects of the revolution. She also delves into women’s participation in the Civil Rights movement and anti-war protests. Bingham “draws on abundant interviews and oral history archives to create a brisk, firsthand account of the women’s movement,” stated a Kirkus Reviews critic, who called the book “A vivid contribution to women’s history.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Prospect, summer, 2016, Todd Gitlin, review of Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, p. 106.
Booklist, January 1, 1997, Mary Carroll, review of Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress, p. 785; June 1, 2016, Dan Kaplan, review of Witness to the Revolution, p. 12.
Commentary, September, 2016, Heather Wilhelm, review of Witness to the Revolution, p. 60.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2002, review of Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, p. 538; May 1, 2016, review of Witness to the Revolution; May 15, 2024, review of The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.
Kliatt, May, 2004, Nola Theiss, review of Class Action, p. 36.
Library Journal, June 1, 2002, Cynthia Harrison, review of Class Action, p. 172; May 15, 2016, Scott Vieira, review of Witness to the Revolution, p. 87.
Maclean’s, June 13, 2016, Zane Schwartz, review of Witness to the Revolution, p. 57.
New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2016, Jon Wiener, review of Witness to the Revolution.
Publishers Weekly, October 28, 1996, review of Women on the Hill, p. 64; May 13, 2002, review of Class Action, p. 60.
Washington Monthly, June, 2002, Stephanie Mencimer, review of Class Action, p. 54.
Women’s Review of Books, June, 1997, Leora Tanenbaum, review of Women on the Hill, p. 7; November, 2002, Alice Kessler-Harris, review of Class Action, p. 1.
ONLINE
Clara Bingham Home Page, http://www.clarabingham.com (December 15, 2016).*
Clara Bingham is a journalist and author whose work has focused on social justice and women’s issues. Her latest book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, will be published by Simon & Schuster on July 30, 2024. A history of the early years of second wave feminism, The Movement is written in a similar oral history narrative style to her last book, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul (Random House 2016).
Clara Bingham
Photo: Henry Michaelis
Bingham’s second book, Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, which she co-wrote with Laura Leedy Gansler (Doubleday 2002), was adapted into the 2005 feature film North Country (Warner Bros.) staring Charlize Theron and Francis McDormand. Both actresses received Oscar nominations for their roles in the film. Class Action tells the harrowing story of a group of female taconite miners in northern Minnesota who become the first women ever to sue a company as a “class” or a group, for sexual harassment. Class Action was a Los Angeles Times best book of the year and won the AAUW Speaking Out for Justice Award.
Bingham is also the author of Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress (Times Books 1997), which chronicles the lives of four female members of the 103 rd Congress following the 1992 “Year of the Woman” elections.
As a Washington, D.C. correspondent for Newsweek from 1989 to 1993, Bingham covered the George H. W. Bush White House leading up to and during the 1992 presidential election. Her freelance writing has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Ms., Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Talk, Glamour, The Washington Monthly, and United Press International, the wire service for which she wrote as a stringer from Papua New Guinea. Bingham also worked as a press secretary on the Michael Dukakis 1988 Democratic presidential campaign.
An expose about the Air Force Academy rape scandal that Bingham wrote for Vanity Fair earned her the 2004 Exceptional Merit in Media Award (EMMA) given by the National Women’s Political Caucus, and was anthologized in the Best American Crime Writing 2004 Edition. Bingham also produced a documentary that exposed the ravages of mountain top removal coal mining in Appalachia. The Last Mountain premiered at the Sundance Film festival in 2011, screened in theaters in over 60 cities, and won the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Award.
Bingham graduated from Harvard University in 1985 with a degree in History and Literature. In college, she raced on the varsity alpine ski team and served as co-news editor of the the Harvard Independent. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband.
Bingham, Clara THE MOVEMENT One Signal/Atria (NonFiction None) $32.50 7, 30 ISBN: 9781982144210
Historical study of "when women found the freedom to be who they needed and wanted to be."
Journalist Bingham, author of Witness to the Revolution, draws on abundant interviews and oral history archives to create a brisk, firsthand account of the women's movement, beginning with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, encompassing the founding of the National Organization of Women and Ms. magazine, and ending with the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Among those bearing witness to the crucial decade are Pauli Murray, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, Billie Jean King, and Gloria Steinem. All relate their frustration in confronting the legal, political, medical, and economic limitations on women's lives. As Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon, put it, women repeatedly got one message: "You're in this box. Here's the box. Here are the bars. I'm sorry, that's as far as you can go." Several women bring up the confluence of the women's movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-war movement. Others testify to the "anxiety-ridden secret lives" of women who had abortions--including Gornick, who found a medical resident who performed the abortion, gave her antibiotics, and checked in with her every day for the next week. "It was as good as it could be," she recalls, "but it was illegal and it was frightening." Nora Ephron, among others, recounts discrimination in employment. When she applied for a job at Newsweek, she was hired as a mail girl, while men with the same qualifications were hired as reporters. "It was a given in those days," she said, "that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule."
A vivid contribution to women's history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bingham, Clara: THE MOVEMENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537252/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c865c62c. Accessed 27 May 2024.