Feminism Unfinished

to  find

myself.

tomorrow

perhaps

i   will    begin

to  find

you.^10

They were making themselves the heroes of their own lives. But they sensed that this process could only
happen collectively. When women trade experiences and emotions, much depends on the responses they
get. A classic example: If a woman hinted at being abused, she might get sympathy, an empathic “Aren’t
men hard to put up with at times?” If instead the response was “That’s awful, did you call the police?” or
“That’s awful, you shouldn’t have to put up with that,” the sympathy remains but the message changes.
Suddenly women saw men with new eyes: his inconsiderate ways of making love, his refusal to share

housework, his assumption that his work was more important than hers.^11 When consciousness raising
worked well, it gave rise to the slogan “The personal is political,” because it created the discovery that
sexism—another word created by the movement and now universally understood—operated in every
sphere, including kitchen and bedroom. As Pam Allen wrote, reflecting her background in the civil rights
movement, “Personal liberation will happen simultaneously with the changing of society, not

independently.”^12

Feminist Theory

In developing feminist theory, women in consciousness-raising groups were to some extent reinventing an
analysis of women’s subordination. Women were not just ignorant of previous feminist theory—they had
been denied access to it by their education, just as African Americans had been denied their history. By
the end of the nineteenth century feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton had elaborated a radical,
sophisticated critique of male dominance and, occasionally, of gender itself. Yet the younger women were
equally unfamiliar with it and with the work of New Deal–influenced feminists discussed in the previous
chapter.
Ignorant of their heritage, the consciousness-raising groups did not read. Rather they started with the
evidence at hand—their own lives in the 1950s and 1960s. Ignoring the past also freed them to be
creative and to examine everything anew. Their process rested on existing gender characteristics, notably
women’s socialization toward intimate and emotional talk with other women, and then subjected those
very characteristics to critique. Women’s liberation founders realized that many women considered their
problems to be personal and that this misconception isolated them; as in Katz and Allport’s concept of

pluralistic ignorance,^13 many a woman tended to feel that she was the only one who didn’t like her looks,
her body, her sexual activity, her housework, and so on. Enunciating their discontents, consciousness-
raising group members soon recognized that those feelings were widespread and reclassified them as
social, not personal. Once that was understood, they began to analyze them, asking questions like: Who
benefits from sexism? Are men in general the enemy? How does sexism relate to and interact with other
forms of discrimination?