I Interviewed My Husband's Ex-Wife Because I Believe in Her Critical New Book and Passion for Women's Rights

It is my fiancé David’s book party, and his ex-wife, Clara Bingham, is there. I have met her once before. She is a brilliant journalist who is beautiful and charismatic. I like her vibe. I invite her to talk privately in the hallway for a minute. Straightaway, I tell her that I think we can have this ex-wife-new-wife relationship in a different and friendly way. ” We don’t have to scratch each other’s eyes out,” I say. “And I have no designs on your kids. I have my own.” Clara responds, “I am with you—but do we need to share clothes right away?”

That was 17 years ago. Now, David and I are about to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. Clara is remarried to Joe, and she and I share way more than our wardrobes. We have a blended family of five children (it climbs to eight when you add Joe’s three). We all celebrate birthdays and holidays together, and even though everyone is grown up, we remain connected in ways that are authentic, kind, and pretty damn great. Clara and I continue to enjoy an inimitable friendship, a sort of step-sisterhood that we cherish.

While she does not have any biological sisters, sisterhood is something Clara magnetizes and honors with zeal, both personally through her galaxy of friends and professionally. This is beautifully manifested in her newest book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973. An oral history of second-wave feminism, The Movement is a tapestry of voices from those who fought and brought women’s rights to the forefront of the national agenda in ways unprecedented. It’s a remarkably powerful read and is, as the New York Times aptly says in its praise of the book, “rollicking good fun.”

The Movement is a perfect fit for Clara, a woman with an activist passion and a keen desire for political engagement. Had she been born 20 years earlier, Clara’s commitment to the women’s movement could have been the centerpiece of her coming of age. Her timing on that may not be perfect, but Clara’s clarion call to women’s equality by way of The Movement comes just in the nick of time when women’s rights are in particular peril.

Clara and I reflected on The Movement’s relevancy to readers and women past and present when she and I recently spoke over Zoom. The subject matter is close to her heart. In 1972, while growing up on NYC’s Upper West Side, amid a sea of protests and demonstrations, Clara became acutely aware of the women’s movement. When she was nine years old, she had posters of Bella Abzug—an outspoken feminist representing Clara’s Congressional district and Shirley Chisholm—the first black congresswoman and woman to run for President—on the wall of her bedroom. She told me they were her “hometown heroes.”

During such tumultuous times, Clara found herself not only drawn to politics but also to sports. A self-described athletic tomboy, she wanted to play ice hockey and baseball, just like her younger brother.

“I had my skates and would go out and practice several times a week,” Clara tells me. “And then the other hockey sisters like me started joining in. We would stick our ponytails into our helmets hoping the management wouldn’t notice. This was an all-boys league. And some of the girls wore figure skates and were detected by the management, and we were all kicked off the ice. We were told that we could not play ice hockey.”

There was no corresponding league for girls, Clara continued. “This was absolutely devastating for me”.

Ice hockey would be the first of a one-two punch that formed Clara’s sense of gender injustice. She also yearned to play baseball like her brother, who was on a baseball team.

“And guess what? Girls were not allowed in Little League yet, either! So I would go and practice with them, but I couldn’t play! And I was really pissed off that I could not participate.”

And so, her outrage and indignation aligned Clara with her hometown heroes. From that point on, she would see herself as a rabid feminist. So, it makes sense that writing The Movement enhanced her feminist energy. When I asked how the book has changed her, she said, “I see so many more things through a gendered lens than I ever had before. I’m much more sensitized.”

Clara tells me that when watching a movie or TV series, she will instantly lean toward dissecting it. “I feel like I am analyzing more and watching out more for sexism and root patterns.”

Her respect for her feminist forbearers, those she calls “this generation of second-wave warriors,” grew in ways unanticipated. “I learned so much about how much they sacrificed, how hard it was to do what they did,” she says.

Clara looks beyond herself in appreciation of those who have come before her. “The more I dug into this movement and the people I talked to, the more I understood during this critical 10-year period, how the women’s movement penetrated so many corners of the country and hundreds of thousands of different women’s lives.”

“It didn’t matter how old they were,” she continues to say about those impacted by the movement. “It was young. It was Black. It was White. It was artists. It was health care providers. It was athletes. It was obviously businesspeople. And there were printing presses. There were communes. I feel like calling it a tidal wave is trite at this point. It was more like an earthquake. It was this grassroots rumbling just pounding through the country.”

Writing The Movement evolved Clara, just as it did her family. She felt her awareness of old-fashioned gender stereotypes grow inside her, which she brought home. “I was worried that I would become really hostile to my husband and be mad if he asked me to do anything domestic,” she admits. “Luckily, he was very conscious about our domestic duties and who would do what. He had not cooked much before the book at all. But then he started cooking dinner, something he hadn’t done before, and he started grocery shopping and being much more helpful. And that was great because it meant we didn’t get into any outdated stereotypical husband/wife roles.”

As a mother of two grown sons and a daughter, writing the book also shifted how she parents. She says with her sons, she is more aware of their relationships with their romantic partners and in ensuring they don’t fall into the heteronormative trap of expecting women to pick up the domestic slack, to do the dishes, the laundry. “I have no tolerance for that at all,” says Clara.

Ultimately, Clara says she wrote this book for her daughter’s generation, who will grow up with fewer rights than our generation because of the reversal of Roe V. Wade. She wants them “to understand that this movement succeeded for the first time in thousands of years in elevating the status of women from second-class citizens to first-class citizens. And that their grandmothers were raised in an America that didn’t expect women to work beyond being domestics, nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers, period. 

Beyond her own family, it makes perfect sense that Clara wants all her readers to leave their experience of The Movement with what she learned in writing it.

“I want them to feel enlightened, inspired to go out and make the world a better place.”

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, is out now. Learn more at clarabingham.com.

Nancy Steiner is a master-certified life/executive coach and the founder of Steiner Coaching Solutions. She is a mentor/coach at The Harvard Business School and a coach to a group of women ages 60-plus seeking comfort and joy. Learn more at steinercoachingsolutions.com.