recently listened to this reading of Kathie Sarachild's Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon by @gnc-centric, and i found it so very illuminating and insightful, so wanted to highlight a few quotes and excerpts!
"There turned out to be tremendous resistance to women's simply studying their situation, especially without men in the room. In the beginning we had set out to do our studying in order to take better action. We hadn't realized that just studying this subject and naming the problem and problems would be a radical action in itself, action so radical as to engender tremendous and persistent opposition from directions that still manage to flabbergast me. The opposition often took the form of misinterpretations and misrepresentations of what we were doing that no amount of explanation on our part seemed able to set straight. The methods and assumptions behind consciousness-raising essentially grew out of both the scientific and radical political traditions, but when we applied them to women's situation, a whole lot of otherwise "scientific" and "radical" people -especially men - just couldn't see this. Whole areas of women's lives were declared off limits to discussion. The topics we were talking about in our groups were dismissed as "petty" or "not political." Often these were the key areas in terms of how women are oppressed as a particular group - like housework, childcare and sex. Everybody from Republicans to Communists said that they agreed that equal pay for equal work was a valid issue and deserved support. But when women wanted to try to figure out why we weren't getting equal pay for equal work anywhere, and wanted to take a look in these areas, then what we were doing wasn't politics, economics or even study at all, but "therapy," something that women had to work out for themselves individually. When we began analyzing these problems in terms of male chauvinism, we were suddenly the living proof of how backward women are. Although we had taken radical political action and risks many times before, and would act again and again, when we discussed male chauvinism, suddenly we were just women who complained all the time, who stayed in the personal realm and never took any action. Some people said outright they thought what we were doing was dangerous. When we merely brought up concrete examples in our lives of discrimination against women, or exploitation of women, we were accused of "man-hating" or "sour grapes." These were more efforts to keep the issues and ideas we were discussing out of the realm of subjects of genuine study and debate by defining them as psychological delusions. And when we attempted to describe the realities of our lives in certain ways, however logical - for instance, when we said that men oppressed women, or that all men were among the beneficiaries in the oppression of women - some people really got upset. "You can't say that men are the oppressors of women! Men are oppressed, too! And women discriminate against women!" Now it would seem to go without saying that if women have a secondary status in the society compared to men, and are treated as secondary creatures, then the beneficiaries would be those with the primary status. Our meetings were called coffee klatches, hen parties or bitch sessions. We responded by saying, "Yes, bitch, sisters, bitch," and by calling coffee klatches a historic form of women's resistance to oppression. The name calling and attacks were for us a constant source of irritation and sometimes of amazement as they often came from other radicals who we thought would welcome this new mass movement of an oppressed group. Worse yet, the lies prevented some of the women we would have liked to reach from learning about what we were really doing."
"...the aim of going around the room in a meeting to hear each woman's testimony, a common-and exciting practice in consciousness-raising, is to help stay focused on a point, to bring the discussion back to the main subject after exploring a tangent, to get the experience of as many people as possible in the common pool of knowledge. The purpose of hearing from everyone was never to be nice or tolerant or to develop speaking skill or the "ability to listen." It was to get closer to the truth. Knowledge and information would make it possible for people to be "able" to speak. The purpose of hearing people's feelings and experience was not therapy, was not to give someone a chance to get something off her chest… that is something for a friendship. It was to hear what she had to say. The importance of listening to a woman's feelings was collectively to analyze the situation of women, not to analyze her. The idea was not to change women, was not to make "internal changes" except in the sense of knowing more. It was and is the conditions women face, it's male supremacy, we want to change. Though usually very provocative, fascinating and informative, "going around the room" can become deadening and not at all informative, even defeating the purpose of consciousness-raising, when it is saddled with rigid rules like "no interruptions," "no tangents," "no generalizations." The idea of consciousness-raising was never to end generalizations. It was to produce truer ones. The idea was to take our own feelings and experience more seriously than any theories which did not satisfactorily clarify them, and to devise new theories which did reflect the actual experience and feelings and necessities of women."
"The purpose of consciousness-raising was to get to the most radical truths about the situation of women in order to take radical action; but the call for "action" can sometimes be a way of preventing understanding - and preventing radical action. Action comes when our experience is finally verified and clarified. There is tremendous energy in consciousness-raising, an enthusiasm generated for getting to the truth of things, finding out what's really going on. Learning the truth can lead to all kinds of action and this action will lead to further truths. But no particular change in a woman's personal behavior, nor any particular action or strategy, are presupposed. By the very logic of the idea no action can be required ahead of time in consciousness-raising unless a group is using consciousness-raising specifically to brain- storm for an action. The idea is to study the situation to determine what kinds of actions, individual and political, are necessary. This is also true quite practically. If women fear they have to take action on what they are talking about, especially action alone, as individuals, they won't talk about anything they're not ready to take action on, or they won't be honest. In fact, part of why consciousness-raising is the radical approach is that women are not coming to take immediate action. We can't limit our thinking or our action only to that which we can do immediately. Action must be taken, but often it must be planned-and delayed. Our idea in the beginning was that consciousness- raising-through both C-R groups and public actions-would waken more and more women to an understanding of what their problems were and that they would begin to take action, both individual and collective. And this has certainly happened-on an unprecedented scale. Of course, with greater unity and organization more can actually be accomplished and solved. But people have to learn this, and there is more and more to learn about which methods of organization and action we need. There is also more to do about clarifying our goals and defining the obstacles-making connections between the oppression of women and other systems of oppression and exploitation. Analyzing our experience in our personal lives and in the movement, reading about the experience of other people's struggles, and connecting these through consciousness-raising will keep us on the track, moving as fast as possible toward women's liberation."
