Consciousness Raising Groups

A tactic usually associated with the U.S. Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) and other feminist-activist groupings born in the late 1960s, consciousness raising involved a range of practices that stressed the primacy of gender discrimination over issues of race and class. Grounded in practical action rather than theory, consciousness raising aimed to promote awareness of the repressed and marginal status of women. As proclaimed in one of the more enduring activist slogans of the 1960s—"The personal is political"—consciousness raising took several forms, including the formation of devolved and non-hierarchical discussion groups, in which women shared their personal (and otherwise unheard) experiences of everyday lives lived within a patriarchal society. Accordingly, the agenda of consciousness raising in the early days very often focused on issues such as abortion, housework, the family, or discrimination in the workplace, issues whose political dimension had been taken for granted or ignored by the dominant New Left groupings of the 1960s.

As a political tactic in its own right, consciousness raising received an early definition in Kathie Sarachild's "Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising," a paper given at the First National Convention of the Women's Liberation Movement in Chicago, in November 1968. Many of those involved in the early days of WLM had been politicized in the Civil Rights struggle and the protests against the Vietnam War. But they had become disenchanted with the tendency of nominally egalitarian New Left organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to downplay or omit altogether the concerns of women, and had struck out on their own. When challenged on the position of women within his organization in 1964, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael had replied that "The only position for women in SNCC is prone." As late as 1969 SDS produced a pamphlet that observed that "the system is like a woman; you've got to fuck it to make it change." The frustration of feminist activists in the 1960s produced a new women's movement, which stressed the patriarchal content of New Left dissent, almost as much as it raised awareness about gender and power in the everyday arenas of home and work.

As a political strategy, consciousness raising placed a high value on direct, practical action, and like much political activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, it produced inventive outlets for conducting and publicizing political activity. In 1968 the WLM took consciousness raising to the very heart of New Left concerns by conducting a symbolic "burial" of traditional femininity at Arlington Cemetery—the site of many protests at the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. As an exercise in consciousness raising, the mock funeral aimed to publicize the patriarchal tendency to define grieving mothers and bereaved widows in terms of their relationships with men. Similar guerilla style demonstrations marked the high point of consciousness raising as a form of direct action during the late 1960s. The New York Radical Women (NYRW) disrupted the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City in September 1968; the WITCH group protested the New York Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden on St. Valentines Day 1969. Other groups who employed similar tactics during this period included the Manhattan-based Redstockings, the Feminists, and the New York Radical Feminists.

The emphasis which early WLM consciousness raising placed upon small groups of unaffiliated women shows its roots in the anti-organizational politics of the New Left against which it reacted. The WLM may have reacted sharply against what it saw to be the patriarchal politics of SDS, but it shared with the New Left an emphasis on localized political activity exercised through small devolved "cells," which valorized the resistance of the individual to institutional oppression. In common with certain tendencies of the New Left, the premium placed upon an overtly personal politics has at times served to obscure the original commitment of consciousness raising to a more collective revolution in social definitions of gender and gender roles. One of the more visible legacies of consciousness raising can be seen in the proliferation of Women's Studies courses and departments at universities and colleges during the closing decades of the twentieth century.

—David Holloway

Further Reading:

Buechler, Steven M. Women's Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: A Contemporary History. New York, New York University Press, 1990.

Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to Post-Feminism. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995.