WHERE THE REAL WORK (AND MAGIC) HAPPENS
Three days after the 2016 presidential election, a new friend slid into my Twitter DMs . . . to invite me to a feminist consciousness-raising meeting.
“Hey lady,” she wrote. “I’m not sure if someone forwarded you the message, but I’m having people over for a consciousness-raising meeting to discuss feelings and practical actions that we can take to . . . you know, try to stop the human rights apocalypse.”
I immediately accepted her invitation.
You might be asking: Emma, what the heck is a consciousness-raising meeting and why does it sound like something out of the 1960s and ’70s? If the term sounds a bit retro, that’s because it is—consciousness raising is an activist strategy popularized in the late sixties by radical leaders within the women’s movement. The idea is pretty simple: come together, in person, to share life experiences with other women in order to understand what it actually means to be “oppressed” on a practical level. Saying sexism exists is one thing. Hearing five or ten or fifteen women discuss the overlapping ways that sexism plays out for them is quite another. Conclusions drawn in these groups can then be used to draft papers or spark actions.
Radical feminist Carol Hanisch—best known for popularizing the statement “the personal is political”1—wrote about the beginnings of consciousness raising within the women’s movement for the feminist magazine On the Issues in 2010. According to Hanisch, during a 1968 New York Radical Women meeting, Anne Forer, another member of the group, said that women needed to “raise our consciousness” in order to properly consider themselves an oppressed group.
As Hanisch wrote of that meeting, “Anne went on to list a number of things women had to do to make themselves attractive to men, like not wearing our glasses, playing dumb, doing all kinds of painful things to our bodies, wearing uncomfortable clothing and shoes, going on diets—all because ‘people don’t find the real self of a woman attractive.’”
This naming of specific (and personal) forms of oppression, regardless of how seemingly small, was picked up by other members of the group, specifically Kathie Sarachild, who took the phrase and tactic and ran with it. Later that year Sarachild presented “A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising” at the First National Women’s Liberation Conference. By 1971, the concept was so popular that a pamphlet distributed by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union2 began by stating definitively: “Consciousness-raising groups are the backbone of the Women’s Liberation Movement.”
Forty-eight years after Forer expressed the need to “raise our consciousness,” I was invited to do the same, in the very same city.
The friend of mine who planned this meeting, Erin Darke, had just come off starring in Good Girls Revolt, an Amazon show that centered on women—specifically the women of a fictionalized version of Newsweek—getting “woke” to the need for women’s liberation in 1969 into 1970.
The show was based on a true story. In 1970, forty-six female researchers at Newsweek sued the magazine for gender discrimination, because as women they were allowed to research and report stories but not actually write them. Both in real life and on the show, consciousness-raising meetings played a key role in getting enough women on board with filing an official complaint and in organizing plans for such a complaint. Preparing for and shooting the scenes that depicted this awakening had made a real impression on Erin.
“The consciousness-raising meeting scenes were some of my favorite scenes to shoot, and I just remember every time we would shoot one I’d just sit there being like, why don’t we do this anymore?” Erin told me. “It was a huge part of what empowered so many women to know that they weren’t alone. So I left the show thinking about that—and then the election happened.”
Erin felt like Donald Trump’s election was an attack on her humanity as a woman. So the next day she composed an email to the women in her life inviting them to a consciousness-raising meeting, like the ones she had acted out on Good Girls Revolt.
Three days later she headed down to DC for a Good Girls Revolt–related panel with Eleanor Holmes Norton—current congresswoman and the former ACLU lawyer who had helped organize the women of Newsweek.3 Eleanor spoke about what feminism looked like in the sixties and seventies, and what she worried younger women might miss out on.
“She worried about our generation of women because we seemed to be so separated. It was like we had been trained to compete against each other for the success that we now knew was possible,” remembered Erin. “As soon as she said that, I realized that was the thing I had been feeling and couldn’t really put words to. I just deeply missed a sense of community among women.”
Erin hoped that gathering some women in her living room might be a first step toward reclaiming that sense of community.
So, a week after getting Erin’s message, I headed over to her apartment, not quite sure what I’d be walking into.
That first night I found myself in a room with about twenty other women and one woke dude. Very quickly, it became clear that although this space was not going to be totally exclusionary to men, its mission was going to be built around and led by women. That evening included a lot of feelings and a lot of tears and a lot of open-ended questions. Three hours later we knew that it would become something more.
Over the months that followed we continued to meet, and when a few people emailed Erin asking if they could bring boyfriends or straight male friends into the fold, she decided against it.
“The experience of being a woman is something that everyone in that room understands,” Erin explained. “I do think that sense of common understanding is so powerful, and it has led to people being able to come and feel really comfortable and included immediately, and also to feel okay being vulnerable.”
Another group member (and friend), Kate Dearing, told me that having a women-focused space helped create an atmosphere that was both emotionally intimate and primed for practical action.
“We have a bunch of highly functional, effective women that will just throw down. But at the same time, there is a kind of intimacy,” she said. “People come and share stories and we do hug, and cheerlead, and emotionally support each other, and then we’re also like, okay, how do we want to be engaged? How do we make a difference in this reality? And I think that combination is so powerful. So good for souls.”
By mid-December the group had a name—Women to the Front—and by mid-July the group had raised more than fifteen thousand dollars for EMW Women’s Surgical Center,4 the very last abortion clinic in the state of Kentucky. The event was a resounding success. We raffled off Sam B. tickets and did sound checks and danced the night away. My friends, new and old, had created a space where people could gather and love one another and affirm their commitment to building a world where women’s bodies are their own, where activism and joy can go hand in hand.
To tweak a beloved Hamilton quote: Women, we get the job done.
* * *
Second-wave feminists (1960s) understood the value of creating spaces for and by women. Half a century later, those spaces are no less valuable.
They may look a little different in 2018 than in 1968, but the basic tenet of fostering shared experiences and understanding remains. The Internet—specifically social media—has offered endless opportunities for virtual connection. I am a part of three different feminist LISTSERVs, on which women are able to have near-daily debates, share information, and organize real-life meet-ups in various cities.
“We need spaces both on and offline where we can build and share ideas without interruption,” said Jamia Wilson, former executive director of WAM! (Women, Action and the Media), the organization that runs one of those aforementioned feminist LISTSERVs. “And without mansplaining. And to be able to develop strength as a community and to create shared strategy passing.”
Advocacy organizations such as WAM! have learned that the best way to activate existing members and reach new ones is—surprise!—online. Higher Heights, an organization dedicated to “building a national infrastructure to harness Black women’s political power and leadership potential,” often hosts Twitter-based Sunday brunches,5 using the hashtags #BlackWomenLead and #SundayBrunch. These hashtags help facilitate discussions on topics such as running for office and what’s at stake for black women under the Trump administration.
Many women I spoke to—both established activists and organizers and newly minted ones—expressed that in the wake of Trump’s election they simply wanted to be around other women. So it only seemed natural to begin new organizing efforts with other women in mind.
Anna Poe-Kest, who lives in New York City and works in city government, spent much of November and December 2016 going to various politicalish meet-ups with women friends and colleagues. One such gathering was made up entirely of women who work in city government—a lot of “type A personalities,” as Anna put it. These meet-ups felt cathartic at first, but after a while she began to feel as though there was a lot of talking going on but not a whole lot of productive, concrete action.
Then the Women’s March happened.
Anna and a few of those same women, who also happen to be her close friends, knew they wanted to go down to DC. They decided to tap back into the group they had met up with weeks prior and head down to DC. “All of us still had it in our minds,” said Anna. “We weren’t ready to let it die.”
They ended up renting a big van and piling about fifteen people into it. They also found housing in DC for every person who caravaned down with them. It was completely chaotic—and it felt great.
Reinvigorated from the march, Anna and her friends Elana Leopold, Monica Klein, and Ishanee Parikh reconvened in New York to really think through what they could do to resist on a long-term basis. Their first brainstorm session lasted six hours. They wanted to make sure that if they created something, it would fill an existing gap, rather than trying to replicate work that other people were already doing. So they spent time thinking about their unique skills and what they had access to that other young women who are otherwise like them might not.
“Part of it is that having grown up in this world, having had our first jobs in politics and New York City government, we’ve been able to make all these connections to these amazing women who are all of our mentors—the best, most sought-after communications specialists for campaigns or the second in command below the mayor, for example,” said Anna. “At the same time we saw a lot of our friends, who maybe had never been in a courthouse before, or had never been to a mass protest before the Women’s March, and they were so inspired by it but didn’t really know how to do anything afterward. They were going to get fatigued and needed to figure out how to turn that into sustained activism that doesn’t just die out. Protest is not the new brunch. It was for like a month, and it’s not anymore.”
And so out of those brainstorm sessions came the Broad Room. Its mission6 is ambitious—to “train an army of young women in NYC to take political action and resist the right-wing agenda.”
To build this nonviolent “army,” the Broad Room does three things: (1) holds practical trainings on activism and government, led by experts, that is, the mentors of the organization’s founders; (2) sends out a weekly newsletter, The Broad Memo, with practical calls to action; and (3) holds social events to foster connection between members—because what’s activism without some levity and joy?
And (if you haven’t already gathered) each of these three things is led by and for women. Anna told me that early on, the women of the Broad Room decided that they would be happy to have men donate their time and skill sets to behind-the-scenes work or to fund-raising, but any role at the center—whether as leadership or trainer or benefactor—would be taken up by women.
“If a man wants to do some pro bono design work for us, that we’ll obviously give credit for, we will let him do that. And men can give us money and do all that shit. But anyone who’s actually benefiting from our work is going to be a woman,” said Anna. “So all the trainers are women. Any speaker at any of our events is a woman. We feature art in each of our Broad Memos, and all of that is by women. Part of that decision I think came on a personal level—all of us working in politics, we’re in very male-dominated spaces. And there’s a totally different way that you act in a woman-dominated space as opposed to a space where there are men. ’Cause men often take over the room.”
The advantages of having an activist space run by women go beyond women feeling empowered to speak up and lead. There are simply things—like motherhood—that are understood and considered more frequently and with greater care in such spaces. Women’s March national cochair Bob Bland gave birth to her second daughter, Chloe, about ten days into march planning. After spending three days in the hospital, Bland was back out and organizing—with her newborn in tow. Coming from the fashion and startup worlds, she found working with her march cochairs a welcome contrast, like night and day. And Bland says that it never would have been possible for her to work as hard as she did leading up to the march if she hadn’t been working with other women.
“I went straight back into organizing,” she said. “And the only way I could do that was because [the Women’s March] was women-led and because Tamika [Mallory] is a mother of her son, Tarique, and then Linda [Sarsour] has three children of her own, teenagers. And Carmen [Perez] has just so many nieces and nephews that she’s helped to raise. [. . .] As much as we were working ourselves to the core every single day, harder than we’d ever worked in our lives, just knowing that it was okay for me to bring my child and that I didn’t have to explain things was incredible. It was all right for me to breastfeed in public, and I wasn’t gonna be asked to go sit over there.”
Understanding that a new mom has to breastfeed seems simple, but it’s something that even many modern workplaces still struggle with. Given both the recognition that women-led spaces are best equipped to address these “simple” needs and the reality that freelancers now make up more than one-third of the American workforce,7 it’s no wonder that work spaces that explicitly cater to women are having such a moment.
Women’s co-working spaces8 and social clubs such as the Wing (New York City), Hera Hub (San Diego and DC), Rise Collaborative Workspace (St. Louis), the Hivery (Mill Valley, California), Paper Dolls (Los Angeles), and the Riveter (Seattle) have popped up all over the country. Though these types of spaces are primarily for working on your side hustle (or main hustle), networking, and holding professional meetings, many of them have unflinchingly embraced political engagement and expression as part of their mission. The Wing allowed Women’s March organizers to use its space at no cost during the weeks leading up to the march and bused one hundred of its members down to DC on January 21.9 The Hivery ended up renting six buses to take its members to the San Francisco march.10
These spaces, by virtue of being by and for women, end up being political, almost by default. As the Wing co-founder Audrey Gelman put it11: “Being a girl is no longer politically neutral. Your identity, whether you like it or not, is now political.”
6 STEPS TO FORMING YOUR OWN LADY-CENTERED SPACE
1. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU NEED. Do you want to create a space for general brainstorming and work? A group that meets monthly to organize around one particular issue? A place where women can share practical strategies for surviving sexism at school or the workplace? Go into this process with at least a loose vision of what you want to get out of it.
2. RECRUIT OTHER LIKE-MINDED LADY FRIENDS. You can’t have a lady gang of one. Reach out to your friends at first, then widen the pool. Invite women to invite other women into the fold. When you create a space with a common aim in mind, you may make some really fantastic, talented, and inspiring new friends in the process. At the end of every meeting, make sure to encourage members to bring new people next time!
3. FIND A PHYSICAL SPACE YOU CAN USE. Consistency is a good way to make sure that people keep coming back. Find a classroom, apartment, family room, or public space (a library or park with picnic tables) where you can meet. If you live in a city that already has a women’s co-working space or community center, email the people who run those spaces and see if they’d be willing to help you out.
4. WORK WITH THE OTHERS IN YOUR GROUP TO DEFINE SOME CONCRETE GOALS. Don’t meet just for the sake of meeting. After your introductory event, sit down with the people you’ve invited into this space and really talk about what your goals are. Create a mission statement, write it down, and continue to return to it. Having the occasional informal group therapy session is great—but make sure that you’re ultimately making plans to get off your chairs and couches and out into the world.
5. IDENTIFY OTHER GROUPS THAT YOU CAN COLLABORATE WITH AND SUPPORT. Once you’ve established your group, look beyond yourselves. Research the groups that are already doing the work you want to contribute to in your area, call them up, and ask them what they need. Is it money? Volunteers? Bodies at protests? Whatever they say, use the resources you have to help them out.
6. DON’T FORGET TO HAVE FUN! Celebrate milestones big and small. Dance around. Show affection. Recognize that joy can be radical.
