Consciousness raising

Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group on some cause or condition. Common issues include diseases (e.g. breast cancer, AIDS), conflicts (e.g. the Darfur genocide, global warming), movements (e.g. Greenpeace, PETA, Earth Hour) and political parties or politicians. Since informing the populace of a public concern is often regarded as the first step to changing how the institutions handle it, raising awareness is often the first activity in which any advocacy group engages.

However, in practice, raising awareness is often combined with other activities, such as fundraising, membership drives or advocacy, in order to harness and/or sustain the motivation of new supporters which may be at its highest just after they have learned and digested the new information.

The term awareness raising is used in the Yogyakarta Principles against discriminatory attitudes and LGBT stereotypes as well as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to combat stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices toward people with disabilities.

Until the early-17th century, English speakers used the word "consciousness" in the sense of "moral knowledge of right or wrong"—a concept today referred to as "conscience".

In the Old Left, they used to say that the workers don't know they're oppressed, so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, 'Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.' s rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.

— Anne Forer

On Thanksgiving 1968, Kathie Sarachild presented A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising, at the First National Women's Liberation Conference near Chicago, Illinois, in which she explained the principles behind consciousness-raising and outlined a program for the process that the New York groups had developed over the past year. Groups founded by former members of New York Radical Women—in particular Redstockings, founded out of the breakup of the NYRW in 1969, and New York Radical Feminists—promoted consciousness raising and distributed mimeographed sheets of suggesting topics for consciousness raising group meetings. New York Radical Feminists organized neighborhood-based c.r. groups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, involving as many as four hundred women in c.r. groups at its peak. Over the next few years, small-group consciousness raising spread rapidly in cities and suburbs throughout the United States. By 1971, the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which had already organized several consciousness raising groups in Chicago, described small consciousness raising groups as "the backbone of the Women's Liberation Movement". Susan Brownmiller, a member of the West Village would later write that small-group consciousness raising "was the movement's most successful form of female bonding, and the source of most of its creative thinking. Some of the small groups stayed together for more than a decade".

"In 1973, probably the height of CR, 100,000 women in the United States belonged to CR groups."