- Reading: Tales from the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay.
Karla Jay experiences consciousness-raising meetings through membership of Redstockings.
“[R]epresentatives from Redstockings talked […] Women, they insisted, needed to learn, through a process they called “consciousness-raising”, or “C-R,” that they were oppressed as a class.” p. 40 *
“Though the representatives [from Redstockings] claimed C-R wasn’t therapy, it sure sounded like therapy. Would C-R just be endless sessions in which everyone sat around complaining about the pain of being a woman? I wasn’t sure, but C-R stuck seemed worth looking into. If I made some friends and allies within the Women’s Liberation Movement, that would make C-R worthwhile. ” p. 41
The contempt in Karla Jay’s writing when it comes to women voicing their pain is a symptom of internalised misogyny. As if women had nothing to complain about, as if women were not oppressed and disrespected every day. And women have a need to discuss their pain. No good can come out of bottling it all up. If we stay silent, if we pretend everything is fine, we end up with unresolved trauma, with crippling depression, with an inability to function under misogynistic oppression. Pain is a natural reaction to our circumstances as women, and we need to speak it aloud to realise that we are not alone and that there is something systematic about our pain. How can we come to the understanding that men are oppressing women?
Upon attending her first C-R group:
“Our first C-R meeting took place in the late spring or early summer […] there were only ten women present.
We sat in a circle and listened eagerly as Kathie [Sarachild] gave us instructions. Once we had chosen a topic, we were to start with anyone who wanted to speak first as long as we avoided always beginning with the same person. Each woman was to speak on the topic and to narrate her personal experiences. The listeners were allowed to ask questions to clarify each account, but we were not to challenge the truthfulness of any statements, nor were we to psychoanalyse a woman or her motivations. In “Notes from the First Year” (1968), Redstockings Pam Allen termed this approach creating a “non-judgmental space.”
After each woman had spoken, we were then to seek the common core of our oppression as women. […] As Katie Sarachild wrote in in the 1978 Redstockings collection Feminist Revolution, “The aim of going around the room in a meeting to hear each woman’s testimony … 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 idea was not to be “nice” or to provide “therapy” or to “change women.” The whole point was to develop knowledge to overthrow male supremacy.
Before we started speaking, Katie and Alix [Kates Shulman] gave us a quick history of consciousness-raising. Redstockings did not really invent C-R; the group borrowed the concept from Che Guevara and other Marxist Cuban revolutionaries who were organizing peasants in South America. They, in turn, had adapted a Communist Chinese strategy called “speaking bitterness.” When the Communists first attempted to organize the peasants in mainland China, they asked the peasants to speak about their own experiences as oppressed individuals. In the process the peasants understood that they were oppressed as a class, that their suffering was widespread, and that the masters profited from their pain. These understandings galvanized the peasants to revolt.
The same technique, Redstockings assured us, would liberate women. When the world’s majority realised the degree to which we were enslaved, we would rise up and overthrow the patriarchy.” p. 50-52
The basic idea of consciousness-raising meetings is to share personal lived experiences as women and then reflect on what the common thread, the common denominators are. It ensures that theory is not dry and based on lofty concepts, but on the contrary that it is directly derived from the lived reality of women.
“One of the idea of consciousness-raising was to give power and space to the “quiet woman”.” p. 52
And as women we are more likely to speak up in an environment of only women who have also shared their experience with the topic at hand. We know we will be listened to and heard, which is already a great step compared to other environment we are usually confronted to.
“But the changes wrought by C-R went well beyond my name. C-R totally altered my vision of who I was and where I was going. It gave me a political tool, a class analysis through which I could (re)view and come to terms with my Dickensian childhood. I trusted C-R in a way I would have never been able to accept psychoanalysis as a process for understanding my own life. Psychiatry had failed my mother, in part because she was a woman.” p.57
In short, consciousness-raising meetings are a way to bring women to a deeper understanding of the root causes of their pain and experience. It allows women to come personally to the conclusion that male oppression is indeed strangling their lives. As such, it is a very valuable tool, as it does not antagonise the participants with presentation of feminist theory as dogma, but invites women to draw their own conclusions. And the methods learnt during consciousness-raising meetings can later be applied to all walks of life, taking testimonies from writings and arts made by women, exploring subjects not broached in meetings, …
* Note that this passage goes on as follows: “Although Redstockings defined men in Marxist terms as a social class that oppressed women, they seemed bent on struggling with men rather than abandoning them”, definitely marking Redstockings as a reformist group.
Also: Karla Jay mentions her distrust of psychiatry. A few interesting posts on the subject linked here.
