Consciousness-raising

Consciousness-raising, often abbreviated as c.r. or CR (and sometimes unhyphenated), is the feminist process of acquiring a new awareness of the link between experience and theory, particularly between experiences as women and theories of women's oppression. It can describe a personal realisation, or the raising of many people's consciousness (public consciousness raising), for instance through mass political action.

Feminists of the women's movement in the early 1970s popularized consciousness raising because they saw that it was a major struggle for women to understand the ways in which they themselves unconsciously accepted sexism in, for instance, their every-day personal lives.

One key example of consciousness-raising connections is the phrase, "the personal is political," which Carol Hanisch used as the title of one of her papers in 1970.

See also the click, the often-used onomatopoeia for the moment of realisation, when an instance of consciousness-raising occurs in someone's mind.

Quotes about CR

Joanna Russ wrote, in What Are We Fighting For? (1998), pages 436-437:

Experience alone is unintelligible. Theory alone is empty. Consciousness-raising is whatever brings the two together, formally or informally, in a classroom, a house, on the street, in an apple orchard in Sonoma. It is research.

Christine Delphy wrote, in the 1977 essay "Nos amis et nous" (reprinted in L’ennemi principal, vol. 1, this quote on p.191):

Ce qui est racisme chez l'oppresseur est haine de soi chez l'opprimé. Il est normal que les femmes soient antiféministes; c'est le contraire qui serait étonnant. Et la prise de conscience, le «devenir-féministe», n'est pas une Pentecôte soudaine et brutale; la conscience n'est pas acquise en une fois et une fois pour toutes; c'est un processus long et jamais terminé, douloureux de surcroît, car c'est une lutte de tous les instants contre les «évidences»: la vision idéologique du monde, et contre soi. La lutte contre la haine de soi n'est jamais terminée.

...translated by Diana Leonard, in Close to Home, pages 118-119:

What is racism for the oppressor is self-hatred for the oppressed. It is normal for women to be antifeminist: it is their being feminist which is astonishing. Gaining consciousness, 'becoming feminist', is not a sudden and brutal Pentecost. Feminist consciousness is not acquired once and for all, it is a long and never-ending process -- and painful with it. We must constantly struggle against the 'evidence': against the view of the world presented to us in a variety of ideologies, and against ourselves. The struggle against self-hatred is never ending.