In November, citizens of the United States again voted against a woman who would have been the first female President, electing instead an unrepentant misogynist who has been accused of sexual wrongdoing by more than a dozen women and found liable by a jury for sexual abuse. After decades of feminist activism, and just two years after the U.S. Supreme Court stripped American women of our hard-won right to abortion, Kamala Harris’s loss feels sore but somehow not as acutely painful as 2016, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. This time around lacks the sense of shock that came with the first Trump victory—it’s less a punch in the face than pressing hard on a bruise.

The second Trump win came after a campaign that championed male dominance and aggression, and as such, it marks a dark point on the long timeline of American feminism. The women’s movement sought to elevate women to legal equality with men and then to greater power, turned “female problems” into political ones, and not only taught women about our own bodies but insisted we have full sovereignty over them. That Harris is the second woman to run for President on a major party ticket is evidence of the movement’s progress. And her loss, like Clinton’s, is evidence of a movement’s aims unfinished.

When Americans think of “feminism,” what many conjure up is the second-wave feminist movement of glamorous Gloria Steinem and apocryphal bra-burners. This movement has been much discussed and much critiqued, but is often flattened and poorly understood. Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 is both an oral history and a historical corrective, gathering stories from the women (and a few men) who midwifed, birthed, and cultivated the feminist movement over one of America’s most revolutionary decades. The book is remarkably comprehensive and layered, at once a gripping story that flows from lush symphony to glorious din (the cast of characters is more than 25 pages long), and also an invaluable historical record of a world-changing time. It is a book that I suspect will be cracked open for decades to come, and will prove indispensable to feminists, historians, and anyone else seeking to understand the history of women’s rights in America.

It’s also a new story about a familiar time, one that shatters stereotypes about second-wave feminists and details a movement as movements really are: diffuse, dynamic, contested, fundamentally righteous, sometimes misguided, frequently painful, and often wonderfully fun.

The brilliance of this book is that Bingham allows movement-makers and movement-observers to speak for themselves, which means that she doesn’t force a single narrative of what the feminist movement was, who made it, or what flaws it had. Third- and fourth-wave feminists have often criticized the second wave for being too preoccupied with the concerns of frustrated upper middle-class housewives to the exclusion of Black and brown women. The cacophony of voices in Bingham’s book makes clear that, in fact, the feminist movement very much sprung from the civil rights movement, and Black and brown women were organizing and leading the whole time—they just weren’t given the same air time and media attention as their white counterparts.

This erasing of history has unfortunately been expanded by some well-meaning modern critics who, in objecting to the disproportionate attention paid to white women’s problems, also reinforce the false notion that the second wave was in its beginning a white women’s crusade, primarily the work of familiar names such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. The voices in The Movement tell a very different story—one in which there was no singular, organized movement led by top-down leaders, and instead there were a bunch of different women operating in many different ways, sometimes working in concert and sometimes not, pushing back on the status quo and making the thing that would later be called the second wave.

Bingham is a career journalist with a keen eye for generation-defining movements and feminist milestones—her previous book, also an oral history, was 2016’s Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul. She has spent her career writing about American politics and women’s issues for publications including Newsweek and Vanity Fair, and covered the country’s first class-action sexual harassment case as well as the systemic cover-up of sexual assaults in the Air Force Academy. In The Movement, she is particularly skilled at organizing myriad distinct and occasionally conflicting narratives into a coherent whole, and at connecting sprawling events that perhaps seemed unrelated at the time. Billie Jean King’s various revolutions in women’s tennis—starting the first women’s pro tour, eventually beating Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes—bookend other feminist accomplishments big and small, from the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves to Ruth Bader Ginsburg arguing against gender discrimination before the Supreme Court.

The book moves chronologically from 1961, as the roots for what would become “women’s lib” were being planted, through 1973, when the movement gained its greatest win in the now-overturned Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision. Bingham interviewed more than 100 people for the project, and where key actors were dead or otherwise unavailable, she pulled from interviews and other records. “No single book can possibly convey the whole of this sprawling movement,” Bingham writes. But she gets about as close as can be.

The women of The Movement worked across many areas of American life: in the halls of political power, in sports, in the arts, in activist circles, in health care, in media. Some of them—from Representative Barbara Lee of California to artist Judy Chicago; from journalists Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Lynn Povich, and Susan Brownmiller to the activists, scholars, and writers Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Jo Freeman, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, and Germaine Greer—are still working, writing, and organizing today. Others made their mark before departing either the movement or the earth: Bella Abzug, Audre Lorde, Shirley Chisholm, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kate Millett, Florynce Kennedy. (That there seem to be a disproportionate number of Black women in the “deceased” group is a stark reminder that inequality between the sexes is not the only kind of inequality Black women face.)

The women’s movement Bingham captures was not one only of organized activists, but of various groups of feminist-minded women changing their homes, communities, and industries. This, too, corrects a too-simplistic historical record that imagines second-wave feminists primarily as pen-and-megaphone-wielding Betty Friedans and Gloria Steinems who organized marches and wrote books. In reality, progress for women was being forged in ways large and small, from Eleanor Holmes Norton in courts of law, to Judy Chicago in art schools, to Shirley Chisholm in Congress, to Toni Morrison in literature, to Billie Jean King on the tennis court.

Bingham also makes clear that this movement was not particularly welcome, even on the left and even in other radical and justice-oriented circles—and that the extent to which leftist and progressive men (and some women) failed their feminist comrades has still not been fully reckoned with. She fleshes out a scene, now infamous in progressive circles, in which Marilyn Webb, then a 25-year-old activist who had organized for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and who would go on to co-found the feminist publication off our backs and have a long career as a journalist and author, took the stage at a “counter-inaugural” anti-war protest in Washington on the day of Richard Nixon’s inauguration, January 20, 1969. Webb spoke out in favor of women’s rights, only to be jeered, sexually harassed, and threatened with rape by some of the men in the audience. (“Marilyn is a very attractive woman, and for whatever reason, she had decided to wear a short skirt, which showed her off,” anti-war activist turned professor Paul Lauter tells Bingham, in a contemporary quote that still seems to reflect some of the male attitudes of decades past.) When feminist Shulamith Firestone grabbed the mic, the crowd became so heated that activist (and, later, Chicago Seven defendant) Dave Dellinger told the women to get off the stage before they caused a riot. Afterward, Webb told Bingham, she got a phone call from a woman she said sounded like Cathy Wilkerson, a fellow leftist and later a member of the Weathermen, who told her, “If you or anyone else ever gives a speech like that, anywhere in the country, ever again, we’ll beat the shit out of you.”

Wilkerson, for her part, tells Bingham the call didn’t come from her. She and multiple men quoted by Bingham argue that the men screaming at Webb were likely FBI plants or other undercover agents, not actual anti-war protesters or real leftists. Anyone who has spent much time in modern leftist circles (or, frankly, right-wing conspiratorial ones) is familiar with this “our boys would never” refrain that presumes that any bad act from a member of the in-group is actually the work of an infiltrator. It’s jarring, and telling, to see this hand-waving about an incident that is now widely understood to have been a turning point in feminist history—a moment when a critical mass of left-wing women seemed to collectively say, enough.

Many second-wave feminists came out of the civil rights and anti-war movements and were slowly ground down by gender discrimination from their supposed comrades. The “Take her off the stage and fuck her” jeers pushed them over the edge, and some 40 of them ended up gathering afterward to rage and vent. This was not because it was an unusual moment of stunning sexism, but because it was a moment that encapsulated the deep and reflexive misogyny that pervaded so many leftist and progressive movements, from the civil rights movement to the Black Power movement to the anti-war movement. There really were infiltrators in all of these movements, including the feminist one, as is well documented in Bingham’s book. But there was very real sexism, too—a fact that will feel depressingly familiar to many feminists more than a half-century later.

Other moments of familiarity are much more amusing. In 1970, a group of feminists seized the offices of the leftist underground magazine Rat Subterranean News, which, feminist writer and activist Robin Morgan told Bingham, “had become this porn-infested boy thing.” With Rat in feminist hands, Morgan published her salvo “Goodbye to All That,” excoriating the leftist men who claimed to embrace “women’s lib” and then derided, mocked, and mistreated the women among them. “Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanasesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating,” she writes. “We are the women that men have warned us about.” I considered copying and pasting that quote into an Instagram post. I suspect it might have gone nearly as viral as the “We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” meme.

Morgan was hit with a backlash that probably sounds familiar to any feminist writing online today. “Within a day the shit hit the fan,” Morgan told Bingham. “I mean the phone began ringing off the hook. I received anonymous death threats from quite a few revolutionary brothers. Some of them are still alive and around and should be ashamed. But they would call and say, ‘You’re a fucking cunt, you’re going to be dead, and if the cops don’t get you, we will.’”

Some moments in The Movement seem so archaic it’s hard even for today’s middle-aged women to imagine them, like the inability to get your own credit card, or an airline personnel officer complaining in The Wall Street Journal about laws banning sex discrimination: “What are we going to do now when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify? Or what will we do when some guy comes in and wants to be a stewardess?” Other moments—the inability to get a safe abortion, the rage that flames in response to feminist activism and female power-seeking, the sexism that still courses through even progressive spaces—are easily recognizable. This sense of ping-ponging from a past so misogynist it’s hard to imagine to decades-old stories that are immediately familiar makes The Movement feel like both a crucial historical record and an urgently needed guidebook. That United Airlines used to offer male-only “executive flights” with stewardesses to serve men steak dinners feels like an artifact from another time; scenes of male legislators opposing equal rights legislation, and of feminists themselves arguing over whether opposing war or advocating for the particular interests of Black women or lower-income women fall under the feminist umbrella (what might now be called “intersectionality”), could have happened yesterday. That many women uttered the words “vagina” and “clitoris” for the first time in workshops to teach women about their bodies seems quaint in a world in which Our Bodies, Ourselves has sold millions of copies. But that women worried about appearing appropriately feminine and likable when telling their abortion stories to the men who would decide how to regulate women’s bodies is infuriatingly familiar.

So is the infighting. From its inception, second-wave feminism was contested in its focus and its strategies. There was hostility to lesbianism from some of the founders of the National Organization for Women, the feminist group started to be “a NAACP for women,” as co-founder and Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan put it; there were also lesbian activists who suggested that any woman who wasn’t a lesbian was insufficiently radical. There were prominent feminists who clung to power to the exclusion of up-and-comers; there were also activists who resented them, along with any feminist who got attention, and seemed motivated by taking more prominent women down a peg and taking part in denunciations and more-radical-than-thou competitions. (“A certain amount of cannibalizing seems to go with the territory whenever activists gather to promote social change,” feminist journalist and author Susan Brownmiller astutely observed.)

But The Movement also details the terrific fun of this era of feminism: the fuck-you sensibilities and the cackling rage; the exhilaration of challenging the always-has-been and the thrilling shock of becoming a woman you never imagined a woman could be; the delight in newfound freedoms and the intimidation inherent to exploring new expanses. “[W]e talked and we discussed and we sang for Shirley Chisholm and clapped for Eleanor Holmes Norton and tried to follow Margaret Sloan’s lyrics and cheered Flo Kennedy’s anecdotes,” Alice Walker says in the book’s final lines. “And we laughed a lot and argued some. And had a very good time.”

Today’s feminists have been set back on our heels. A man who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals and who was found liable for sexual abuse just retook the White House, even after appointing conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, undoing what was arguably the second wave’s biggest legal achievement. His vice president is obsessed with birth rates and mocks “childless cat ladies” even while his own wife, a Yale law graduate and until recently a corporate lawyer, who seems to have delayed her own childbearing until she was ready, has walked through many of the doors second-wave feminists opened. Trump’s Cabinet and staff picks include several men accused of sexual abuse, harassment, or both. After the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, an anti-feminist backlash seems to have taken root.

Hillary Clinton ran on the slogan “I’m With Her” in 2016 and won the popular vote by millions but lost the race anyway. Eight years later, Kamala Harris chose to downplay her own race and gender and the groundbreaking nature of her candidacy and instead ran as a candidate for everyone. Is that progress? Evidence of backlash? A simple political calculus that isn’t exactly rah-rah feminist but is a more efficient path to female power? If The Movement’s feminist history offers any lessons, it’s that there is no singular way to be a feminist, no singular way to move women’s rights forward—and no single answer to these questions.

But leftists fighting over whether the Harris campaign was sufficiently leftist or whether “the gender stuff” was a distraction? Some feminists working within the system—door-knocking for Harris or gathering signatures to put abortion rights on the ballot—while others insist the system is for sell-outs? Conservatives unhinging themselves at the prospect of women who won’t be cowed into submission? Women writing radical tomes and making art and breaking athletic barriers and smuggling abortion meds and demanding we imagine the once-thought-impossible or the rarely thought at all? Kamala Harris dancing and laughing and injecting a little bit of joy into a previously dour moment, then getting knocked back on her heels, and hopefully getting back up again? These scenes are in many ways facsimiles of older ones—modern snapshots that call back to a movement that is still in progress, and that was as world-changing as it is incomplete.