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30-527: Active members in the NYSRPA engage in many different activities. The organization is engaged in legislation and political awareness campaigns in New York. It sponsors and holds competitive firearm sporting events across the state. Finally, it educates and supports various firearm activities of particular interest to juniors and women in the community. On January 29, 2013, NYSRPA filed a notice of legal claim against

60-409: A consciousness-raising tactic by consciousness-raising groups. Activist and writer Audre Lorde was noted to have been one of many scholars who wrote of poetry as a means of communication for women of color activist and resistance groups. This focus has also been studied by other feminist scholars as a new approach to women's literary writing experience, and the usage of critical consciousness through

90-490: A form of therapy", but that it was, in fact, in its time and context, "the primary method of understanding women's condition" and constituted "the movement's most successful organizing tool." At the same time, she saw the lack of theory and emphasis on personal experience as concealing "prior political and philosophical assumptions". However, some in the feminist movement criticised consciousness raising groups as "trivial" and apolitical . Historically, poetry has been used as

120-511: A means of raising awareness in the wider society. In The God Delusion , anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins uses the term "consciousness raising" for several other things, explicitly describing these as analogous to the feminist case. These include replacing references to children as Catholic, Muslim, etc. with references to children of the adults who are members of these religions (which he compares to our using non-sexist terminology) and Darwin as "raising our consciousness" in biology to

150-803: A wire services reporter in Des Moines before leaving to join the Delta Ministry in Mississippi in 1965, inspired by the Freedom Summer reports the year before. There, she met the co-founders of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), Anne Braden and husband Carl Braden , who hired her to run the SCEF NY office. By early 1968, Hanisch had secured the SCEF offices for the weekly meetings of

180-484: 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

210-610: 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.' Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising. On Thanksgiving 1968, Kathie Sarachild presented A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising , at

240-424: The closet among welcoming, tolerant individuals and share personal stories about coming out. The idea of coming out as a tool of consciousness-raising had been preceded by even earlier opinions from German theorists such as Magnus Hirschfeld , Iwan Bloch and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs , all of whom saw self-disclosure as a means of self-emancipation, the raising of consciousness among fellow un-closeted individuals and

270-879: 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

300-578: The New York Radical Women, and it remained their base until the group dissolved in the early 1970s. In 1970, her most famous essay, 'the personal is political' was published in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation. Hanisch states that the essay was named by the two editors Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt. In the essay, the phrase is actually not used at all but it instead states: One of

330-526: The United States. In November 1967, a group including Shulamith Firestone , Anne Koedt , Kathie Sarachild (originally Kathie Amatniek), and Carol Hanisch began meeting in Koedt's apartment. Meetings often involved "going around the room and talking" about issues in their own lives. The phrase "consciousness raising" was coined to describe the process when Kathie Sarachild took up the phrase from Anne Forer: In

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360-435: The creation of art as a liberatory praxis. Art as a liberatory praxis has also been explored through a radical queer lens through a number of publications and journals such as Sinister Wisdom and Conditions , online publications with an emphasis on lesbian writing. In the 1960s, consciousness-raising caught on with gay liberation activists, who formed the first "coming-out groups" which helped participants come out of

390-461: The editors of Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation (where it was published), Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt . She also conceived the 1968 Miss America protest and was one of the four women who hung a women's liberation banner over the balcony at the Miss America Pageant , disrupting the proceedings. Hanisch was born and raised on a small farm in rural Iowa, and worked as

420-468: The first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. She co-founded and currently co-edits with Kathy Scarbrough Meeting Ground online , the third version of "Meeting Ground." The statement of purpose from 1977 describes itself as providing "an ongoing place to hammer out ideas about theory, strategy and tactics for

450-578: The highly controversial NY SAFE Act . In a separate challenge, NYSRPA sued the City of New York on March 29, 2013, seeking to invalidate the city's restriction on transporting handguns outside of the city. The District Court ruled in favor of New York, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court of the United States granted NYSRPA's request to review the case, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. City of New York

480-583: The home for self-defense". The Supreme Court granted the petition on April 26, 2021, but re-framed the question to "Whether the state's denial of petitioners' applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the second amendment". NYSRPA executive director Tom King objects to the state's gun law, which requires anyone seeking a license to carry a concealed weapon to demonstrate "a special need for self-protection." King said that violates his Second Amendment rights. Awareness campaign Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising )

510-439: 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." Early mid-century feminists argued that women were isolated from each other, and as a result many problems in women's lives were misunderstood as "personal," or as

540-871: 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 ". Consciousness raising groups were formed by New York Radical Women , an early Women's Liberation group in New York City, and quickly spread throughout

570-668: 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

600-423: The original sources, both historic and personal, going to people—women themselves, and going to experience for theory and strategy". However, most consciousness raising groups did follow a similar pattern for meeting and discussion. Meetings would usually be held about once a week, with a small group of women, often in the living room of one of the members. Meetings were women-only , and usually involved going around

630-476: 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

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660-444: The possibility of explaining complexity naturalistically and, in principle, raising our consciousness to the possibility of doing such things elsewhere (especially in physics). Earlier in the book, he uses the term (without explicitly referring to feminism) to refer to making people aware that leaving their parents' faith is an option. Carol Hanisch Carol Hanisch (born 1942) is an American radical feminist activist. She

690-439: The results of conflicts between the personalities of individual men and women, rather than systematic forms of oppression. Raising consciousness meant helping oneself and helping others to become politically conscious . Consciousness raising groups aimed to get a better understanding of women's oppression by bringing women together to discuss and analyze their lives, without interference from the presence of men. While explaining

720-432: The room for each woman to talk about a predetermined subject—for example, "When you think about having a child, would you rather have a boy or a girl?" —speaking from her own experience, with no formal leader for the discussion and few rules for directing or limiting discussion. (Some c.r. groups did implement rules designed to give every woman a chance to speak, to prevent interruptions, etc.) Speaking from personal experience

750-401: The theory behind consciousness raising in a 1973 talk, Kathie Sarachild remarked that "From the beginning of consciousness-raising ... there has been no one method of raising consciousness. What really counts in consciousness-raising are not methods, but results. The only 'methods' of consciousness raising are essentially principles. They are the basic radical political principles of going to

780-599: The women’s liberation movement and for the general radical movement of working men and women." In 1996, Hanisch delivered a speech at the 30th Anniversary Symposium on “China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” at the New School for Social Research . The speech was titled "Impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Women's Liberation Movement." Hanisch credited William H. Hinton 's book Fanshen as well as

810-898: The works of Mao Zedong for influencing the emerging women's liberation movement of the 1960s. She cites both Black Liberation and Maoist theory, and in particular Maoist notions of " speaking bitterness " and " self-criticism ", for helping to develop the idea of consciousness raising groups within American radical feminism. In 2013 Hanisch, along with Scarbrough, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Kathie Sarachild initiated "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of 'Gender'", which they described as an "open statement from 48 radical feminists from seven countries". In August 2014, Michelle Goldberg in The New Yorker described it as expressing their “alarm” at “threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge

840-402: Was an important member of New York Radical Women and Redstockings . She is best known for popularizing the phrase " the personal is political " in a 1970 essay of the same name. She does not take responsibility of the phrase, stating in her 2006 updated essay, with a new introduction, that did not name it that, or in fact use it in the essay at all. Instead she claims that the title was done by

870-560: Was argued before the Supreme Court in 2019. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen , a case challenging New York State's concealed carry permit system. Paul Clement , an attorney who represents NYSRPA, petitioned the Supreme Court to answer the question "Whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside

900-1114: Was used as a basis for further discussion and analysis based on the first-hand knowledge that was shared. Some feminist advocates of consciousness raising argued that the process allowed women to analyze the conditions of their own lives, and to discover ways in which what had seemed like isolated, individual problems (such as needing an abortion , surviving rape , conflicts between husbands and wives over housework, etc.) actually reflected common conditions faced by all women. As Sarachild wrote in 1969, "We assume that our feelings are telling us something from which we can learn... that our feelings mean something worth analyzing... that our feelings are saying something political , something reflecting fear that something bad will happen to us or hope, desire, knowledge that something good will happen to us. ... In our groups, let's share our feelings and pool them. Let's let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to actions". Ellen Willis wrote in 1984 that consciousness raising has often been "misunderstood and disparaged as

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