“Breaking Out,” 1970, author unknown.
The consciousness-raising route to change involved opening up to a small group of women about
personal matters. One set of sample questions for discussion included, Are you a “nice” girl? Have you
ever faked an orgasm? Do you feel guilty if your house is dirty or messy? Do you worry about being truly
feminine? How do you think men see you? Do you feel competitive with other women? As one woman
wrote about consciousness raising, “Nothing upside-downed my world as much. . . . I learned that maybe
I wasn’t so odd after all, because maybe, just maybe, patriarchal social constructions had caused the
various forms of discrimination I’d experienced all my life, both as a woman and as a person of color. I
was overjoyed. I embraced my new friend, feminism.”^5 Another wrote, “The light was blinding, and then
illuminating—and, I must say, the illumination was an astonishing comfort. . . . To be a feminist in the
early 1970s—bliss was it in that dawn, to be alive.”^6 When others belittled consciousness-raising
groups, calling them “coffee klatches, hen parties or bitch sessions . . . we responded by saying, ‘Yes,
bitch, sisters, bitch.’ ” In fact, one woman pointed out that coffee klatches were “a historic form of
women’s resistance.”^7
By changing women, consciousness raising changed all sorts of relations, often without conscious
plan. Women’s raised consciousness changed everyday experience, transforming relations with fathers,
mothers, siblings, boyfriends, husbands, children, bosses, supervisors, teachers, auto mechanics, shop
clerks . . . It was consciousness raising that made the women’s liberation movement different from NOW: