Consciousness raising groups

Consciousness raising groups

Consciousness raising (often abbreviated c.r.) is a form of political activism, pioneered by United States radical feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group of people on some cause or condition. It is the first half of the adage "Admitting the problem is half the battle."

Process
Early radical feminists argued that women were isolated from each other, and that as a result many problems in women's lives were misunderstood as "personal," or as the results of conflicts between the personalities of individual men and women, rather than systematic forms of oppression. Raising consciousness meant helping oneself and helping others to become politically conscious. Consciousness raising groups aimed to get a better understanding of women's oppression by bringing women together to discuss and analyze their lives, without interference from the presence of men.

While explaining the theory behind consciousness raising in a 1973 talk, Kathie Sarachild remarked that "From the beginning of consciousness-raising ... there has been no one method of raising consciousness. What really counts in consciousness-raising are not methods, but results. The only 'methods' of consciousness raising are essentially principles. They are the basic radical political principles of going to the original sources, both historic and personal, going to people—women themselves, and going to experience for theory and strategy". However, most c.r. groups did follow a similar pattern for meeting and discussion. Meetings would usually be held about once a week, with a small group of women, often in the living room of one of the members. Meetings were women-only, and usually involved going around the room for each woman to "rap" about a predetermined subject — for example, "When you think about having a child, would you rather have a boy or a girl?" — speaking from her own experience, with no formal leader for the discussion and few rules for directing or limiting discussion. (Some c.r. groups did implement rules designed to give every woman a chance to speak, to prevent interruptions, etc.) Rapping from personal experience was used as a basis for further discussion and analysis based on the first-hand knowledge that was shared.

Radical feminist advocates of c.r. argued that the process allowed women to analyze the conditions of their own lives, and to discover ways in which what had seemed like isolated, individual problems (such as needing an abortion, surviving rape, conflicts between husbands and wives over housework, etc.) actually reflected common conditions faced by all women. As Sarachild wrote in 1969, "We assume that our feelings are telling us something from which we can learn... that our feelings mean something worth analyzing... that our feelings are saying something political, something reflecting fear that something bad will happen to us or hope, desire, knowledge that something good will happen to us. [...] In our groups, let's share our feelings and pool them. Let's let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to actions".

Ellen Willis wrote in 1984 that c.r. has often been "misunderstood and disparaged as a form of therapy", but that it was, in fact, in its time and context, "the primary method of understanding women's condition" and constituted "the movement's most successful organizing tool." At the same time, she saw the lack of theory and emphasis on personal experience as concealing "prior political and philosophical assumptions."

Compare with co-research as used by the Italian Autonomist marxists.

History
"Consciousness raising" groups were pioneered by New York Radical Women, an early Women's Liberation group in New York City, and quickly spread throughout the United States. In November 1967, a group including Shulamith Firestone, Anne Koedt, Kathie Sarachild (originally Kathie Amatniek), and Carol Hanisch began meeting in Koedt's apartment. Meetings often involved "going around the room and rapping" about issues in their own lives. The phrase "consciousness raising" was coined to describe the process when Kathie Sarachild took up the phrase from Anne Forer:

On Thanksgiving 1968, Kathie Sarachild presented "A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising," at the First National Women's Liberation Conference near Chicago, Illinois, in which she explained the principles behind consciousness-raising and outlined a program for the process that the New York groups had developed over the past year. Groups founded by former members of New York Radical Women — in particular Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists, both founded in 1969 — promoted consciousness raising and distributed mimeographed sheets of suggesting topics for c.r. group meetings. New York Radical Feminists organized neighborhood-based c.r. groups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, involving as many as four hundred women in c.r. groups at its peak. Over the next few years, small-group consciousness raising spread rapidly in cities and suburbs throughout the United States. By 1971, the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which had already organized several c.r. groups in Chicago, described small consciousness raising groups as "the backbone of the Women's Liberation Movement". Susan Brownmiller (a member of the West Village-One c.r. group organized by New York Radical Feminists) would later write that small-group consciousness raising "was the movement's most successful form of female bonding, and the source of most of its creative thinking. some of the small groups stayed together for more than a decade".