The style of debate was something more raucous, self-reflective, and intelligent than most presidential debates of the last half-century can claim. Consciousness-raising groups were not the pseudo-Marxist communist boot camps those names suggest, top-down vehicles full of dogma and hostile to dissent. We do not give our ancestors enough credit. “Having learned to see the world through men’s eyes, one suddenly began to view life through the eyes of a woman,” as Ruth Rosen, the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, put it, “and that woman was you.” Mimeograph machines across the nation begin to burn up, photocopying guidelines which urged, among other things, that “ Sisterhood is a warm feeling!” and “ No men allowed at women’s consciousness-raising sessions this year maybe next year.” Women reported having the experience, transcendent because it felt new, of finding other women with the same problems they had: faked orgasms, bad marriages, broken professional dreams. Their complaints, these women in living rooms found, could largely be laid at the feet of men they began to call themselves feminists newspapers wrote profiles of these groups as light trend pieces. Being a grassroots sort of affair, precise origins were never the point. It was a technique they’d borrowed, depending on who you ask, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or Maoist revolutionaries. A few women gathered in a room in 1967 or so, and began to talk about things.

The party-line history always gets told the same, oversimplified way.

The world split open by ruth rosen