Consciousness raising essay

The first job now was to raise awareness and understanding, our own and others — awareness that would prompt people to organize and to act on a mass scale. The decision to emphasize our own feelings and experiences as women and to test all generalizations and reading we did by our own experience was actually the scientific method of research.

Historically, Poetry has been utilized as a consciousness-raising tactic by consciousness-raising groups. Activist and writer Audre Lorde was noted to have been one of many scholars who wrote of poetry as a means of communication for women of color activist and resistance groups.

“Raising consciousness?” I wondered what she meant by that. I’d never heard it applied to women before. “I’ve only begun thinking about women as an oppressed group,” she continued, “and each day, I’m still learning more about it — my consciousness gets higher.” Now I didn’t consider that I had just started thinking about the oppression of women.

Consciousness-raising — studying the whole gamut of women’s lives, starting with the full reality of one’s own — would also be a way of keeping the movement radical by preventing it from getting sidetracked into single issue reforms and single issue organizing.