50 years ago,

a group of women were gathering in bars and living rooms to discuss their personal experiences and thoughts about the women’s liberation movement. Their intentions were simply to connect and casually share ideas beyond the formal meetings that they were participating in. Through the experience, they found that in these informal settings, they were learning a lot about the collective experience of what it means to be a woman. Carol Hanisch, a women’s liberation activist, was one of these women and after talking to the others, she found that it was actually these informal experiences that were especially powerful in learning and coalition-building. In 1970 she published a paper, The Personal is Political, about these informal meetings, called consciousness-raising groups. She argued that these groups should not be discredited because they were informal, because it is in the fact that they are informal that they derive their power. She asserted that in these informal spaces, women could share their personal experiences to collectively define the scope of the political climate surrounding the women’s liberation movement.  

When I learned about these first consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, it was difficult to ignore the parallels between then and now. Some 50 years after Carol Hanisch published The Personal is Political, my friends and I are also learning that our experiences as women are similar. Though we have all received formal education on women’s rights, what we’ve learned in Girls’ Club could not have been learned in school. The conversations that we’ve shared could not have been had in class, because the space we cultivated was safe and informal. Though we did not explicitly try to form a consciousness-raising group, we found that our results and structures mimicked those of groups of the past.

My involvement with Girls’ Club made me wonder about other modern consciousness-raising groups. One such group I found interesting is women’s networking groups, where women in business gather to talk about their problems, possible solutions, and experiences in their careers. These spaces for sharing collective experiences, often called networking groups, are important because, as Carol Hanisch said in 1970, a woman’s personal life is political. Women, even now, need to discuss their experiences for their own education and benefit and to learn what it means to be a liberated woman in this day and age.