ELLISVILLE, Mo. — They called it consciousness-raising.
Nearly 50 years ago, Ruth Rosen and her friends sat in a Berkeley, Calif., living room and tried to imagine how their lives would have been different if they had been born as men. The stories spilled forth: a father who would not pay for college because girls didn’t need a degree; a nurse who told how the doctor treated her like a little girl; a woman who mused about an 11th Amendment to the Bill of Rights sparing women from cleaning toilets.
“We’d go around the room,” Ms. Rosen recalled. “For a year, we discussed one injustice after the other. Then we began to see the commonality, wherever you were there was some difference because you were a woman. People began to realize, ‘I’ve never thought about it that way before.’ ”
It’s a long way from that Berkeley living room to a bar in this conservative suburb of St. Louis, where a small band of women (and a handful of men) gathered to plot the way forward in the age of President Trump. But as women emerge among the most active standard-bearers of the resistance to this presidency, they are drawing on tactics honed in the 1960s-era consciousness raising groups that awakened women to their thwarted aspirations and power.
One by one, the women in Ellisville recounted their own awakenings, how the election had jolted them out of mostly comfortable suburban lives. Many had tried keeping their opinions to themselves, outnumbered as they were in a red state and bound by the ethos of “Midwestern nice.” They spoke of their children and their fears about the future they would face. Some felt shame for failing to act earlier in causes like Black Lives Matter, with the city of Ferguson so close at hand.
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“I just can’t be complacent any more,” said Megan McCarthy, who organized the Ellisville meeting, one of the nearly 5,000 “huddles” convened last month that the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington hope can channel the protesters’ fervor into sustained political action. The latest effort will be “a day without a woman,” a general strike called for Wednesday.
Many of the women who marched — and many who attended the Ellisville meeting — are new to activism; about a third told march organizers they had never attended a protest before. So as leaders try to translate this enthusiasm into tangible political change, they are updating consciousness-raising for a new age.
The original groups began with the personal and built to the political, as the movement’s rallying cry went. “It was kind of like group therapy without the therapist,” said Fran Rodgers, another movement veteran.
Over time, as women realized their individual experiences were part of a broader pattern of discrimination, some took action. Ms. Rosen, the author of “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America,” remembers her group taking over the local radio station to broadcast stories about women they felt were not being told.
Now the new groups are facing outward from the beginning, convened explicitly to foster activism. The first generation of consciousness-raising helped name the problems; this version is intended to capitalize on a newfound alarm: Rights that women thought they’d already won may be at risk.
At the Crafty Chameleon bar in Ellisville, over the craft beers that are the house specialty, the women broke into small groups to introduce themselves, explain why they were there, and figure out what to do next. Mrs. McCarthy walked them through the choreography laid out in a playbook on huddles downloadable from the women’s march website. The meeting took on a confessional air from the beginning.
“We felt there was nothing we could do,” said Amy Vollmer. “I need someone to tell me that activity does help. These little feet — do they make a difference?”
“I feel like I’m in the twilight zone,” said Darcie Shannon. “The fear talk is separating us. I’m trying to find an outlet where our voices can be heard.”
The premise of the huddles, as in the original consciousness-raising groups, is that women will be emboldened if they feel less isolated.
In this, women are drawing on a long history in the United States of organizing outside traditional political structures because they were so long denied the right to vote, said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. They banded together in the abolitionist movement or social reform drives in health care, prisons or the treatment of the mentally ill.
It’s a distinctly female form of organizing. And it’s one that activists can tap.
“It’s what women do naturally,” said Lisa Guide, associate director of the Rockefeller Family Fund. “Collaborating on a meeting at work, caring for sick loved ones. It’s still women sitting in a circle with each other.”
At the Missouri meeting, women stuck Post-its on a board listing the activities they could do for causes they championed: Hold potluck suppers to meet and support local immigrants. Convene interfaith gatherings. Attend more marches — against the Dakota Access pipeline, for release of Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Bombard members of Congress with letters and calls. Help with voter registration, since Missouri has adopted a strict voter-ID law. Notably, none involved traditional women’s issues such as equal pay or child care.
As with the resistance movement as a whole, the Missouri group is weighing the satisfactions of partisan action with the fear of alienating potential allies, including Republicans who are uneasy about parts of the Trump agenda. Some women emerged from the huddle determined to extend the model of small-group discussion to even more politically stony ground.
Liz Klein grew up in Jasper, Mo., a rural town that has seen manufacturing flee and farmers struggle. The town is effectively Trump country.
“I feel like, this is very scary for me, I should start going back there and try to engage people,” she said. “Hey, I would like to listen to what you have to say, why you feel the way you feel, not preach to you about the way I feel, remind them or help them come to understand that there’s not a disconnect in the way you think. We’re not that different.”
Such personal outreach, said Ellen Bravo, a co-director of Family Values at Work, one of the groups that backed the women’s marches, is at the heart of building broader social movements. “You have to pay more attention to who’s in your sphere of influence,” she said. “It doesn’t take much to sit someone down and say, ‘Who told you that immigrants don’t pay parking tickets or they get food stamps?’ ”
It’s too early to say whether this newest incarnation of an old tactic will change minds, win elections or even coax enough women with harried lives to stay involved. Professor Fitzpatrick, though, sees a reassuring continuity.
“To me, it’s another link in the chain,” she said. “We didn’t succeed yet again in elevating a woman to the White House but don’t count us out. We’re not out of the game.”
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