Feminist Consciousness-Raising – National Women's Liberation

1960s consciousness-raising meeting

Consciousness-Raising (C-R) is a tool that the Women's Liberation Movement adopted from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, where it was called “telling it like it is.” In C-R, women answer a question using examples from their personal lives, then the group uses these personal testimonies to draw conclusions about the political root of women's so-called “personal” problems.

History and details can be found in our Consciousness-raising toolkit. More Examples of questions can be found in our Birth Strike Study Guide. For A history of Consciousness-raising, read “Consciousness-Raising a Radical Weapon” from Redstockings' book Feminist Revolution.

C-R is used to:

- Collect and analyze data (e.g. women's life experiences)
- Get to the root of sexism–figure out who benefits and who pays
- Understand that the pain and struggles in our lives are not our individual problems and we cannot solve them on our own
- Take action (using C-R conclusions as the basis for our theory and strategy)