This fall, I’ve been reading Clara Bingham’s book “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.” It has immersed me in this decade of turmoil and huge social and cultural changes.

      I was too young to really experience and understand the events happening in the U.S. during this time period. As a young woman in the early 1980s, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be able to walk into a bank and open a checking account without a man’s signature or to apply for a credit card or to get a prescription for birth control pills and walk into a pharmacy to have it filled, no questions asked. My mother did not have these privileges when she was my age.

      Reading about the energy, hard work and coordination involved in securing more equality for women during this decade has been a wonderful antidote to the election results. I have found inspiration in the groups of women that formed all over the country to demand change (e.g., NOW and smaller/local consciousness-raising groups, marchers and protesters, politicians and attorneys, female professional tennis players and flight attendants).

      It may be one of the saddest facts of my life that, while I lived during a time of expanding rights in the United States, my last decades will probably see the pendulum swing the other way. We will need another mass movement in the years ahead to steer our country back to a path of equality for all people.

      Perhaps the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be a source of inspiration and hope for us all as we contemplate this new struggle.