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The Married Consciousness ~ Nora Ephron
Published in the March 1973 issue of Esquire
I try to remember exactly what the lie was that I made up to tell friends a year ago, when I joined a consciousness-raising group. They would ask me why I had done it, why I had gotten into something like that — a group, an actual organized activity — and I think what I tended to reply was that I didn't see how I could write about women and the women's movement without joining a group. Consciousness-raising, according to all the literature, is fundamental to the women's movement and the feminist experience, blah blah blah; it seemed important to me to find out just what the process was about. I sald all this as if I were joining something educational, or something that was going to happen to me, as opposed to something I would activity participate in. The disinterested observer, and all that. As I say, this was a lie. The real reason I joined had to do with my marriage.
At our first meeting, we all went around the room explaining why each of us had come. For all intents and purposes, all eight of us were married — the one exception had been living with a man for several years — and, as it turned out, we were all there because of our marriages. Most of the women said that they hoped the group would help them find ways to make their marriages better. Margo, who was in no better shape than the rest of us but tended to have faith in theatrical solutions, said that what she was interested in from the group were mischievous pranks. When we all looked blank, she explained that what she meant by her catchy little phrase was devising experiments like putting hot fudge on your nipples to perk up your sex life. It came around to me, my turn to explain why I was there. I said that I too hoped that the group would help me find a way to make my marriage better, but that it was just as likely that I was looking to the group for help in making it worse.
My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I don't think the process works. Well, let me put that less dogmatically and more explicitly — this particular group did not work for me. I don't mean that I wasn't able to attain the exact goal I set for myself: in the six months I spent in the group my marriage went through an incredibly rough period. But that's not what I mean when I say it didn't work.
I should point out here that consciousness-raising was never devised for the explicit purpose of saving or wrecking marriages. It happens to be quite good at the latter, for reasons I would like to go into further on, but it is intended to do something broader and more political — "to develop personal sensitivity to the various levels and forms that the oppression takes in our daily lives; to build group intimacy and thus group unity, the foundations of true internal democracy; to break down in our heads the barrier between 'private' and 'public' (the 'personal' and the 'political'), in itself one of the deepest aspects of our oppression." Those lines are quoted from a mimeographed set of guidelines which were worked out by the New York Radical Feminists and which were read at our group's first meeting, along with a set of rules: each woman must speak from personal experience, the group has no leader, each member takes her turn going around the circle, no conclusions are to be drawn until each woman has spoken, no woman is to challenge another woman's experience. I do not have any idea of what happens in other groups. It took ours just over two hours to break every one of the rules, and just over two months to abandon the guidelines altogether.
I try to remember exactly what the lie was that I made up to tell friends a year ago, when I joined a consciousness-raising group. They would ask me why I had done it, why I had gotten into something like that — a group, an actual organized activity — and I think what I tended to reply was that I didn't see how I could write about women and the women's movement without joining a group. Consciousness-raising, according to all the literature, is fundamental to the women's movement and the feminist experience, blah blah blah; it seemed important to me to find out just what the process was about. I sald all this as if I were joining something educational, or something that was going to happen to me, as opposed to something I would activity participate in. The disinterested observer, and all that. As I say, this was a lie. The real reason I joined had to do with my marriage.
At our first meeting, we all went around the room explaining why each of us had come. For all intents and purposes, all eight of us were married — the one exception had been living with a man for several years — and, as it turned out, we were all there because of our marriages. Most of the women said that they hoped the group would help them find ways to make their marriages better. Margo, who was in no better shape than the rest of us but tended to have faith in theatrical solutions, said that what she was interested in from the group were mischievous pranks. When we all looked blank, she explained that what she meant by her catchy little phrase was devising experiments like putting hot fudge on your nipples to perk up your sex life. It came around to me, my turn to explain why I was there. I said that I too hoped that the group would help me find a way to make my marriage better, but that it was just as likely that I was looking to the group for help in making it worse.
My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I don't think the process works. Well, let me put that less dogmatically and more explicitly — this particular group did not work for me. I don't mean that I wasn't able to attain the exact goal I set for myself: in the six months I spent in the group my marriage went through an incredibly rough period. But that's not what I mean when I say it didn't work.
I should point out here that consciousness-raising was never devised for the explicit purpose of saving or wrecking marriages. It happens to be quite good at the latter, for reasons I would like to go into further on, but it is intended to do something broader and more political — "to develop personal sensitivity to the various levels and forms that the oppression takes in our daily lives; to build group intimacy and thus group unity, the foundations of true internal democracy; to break down in our heads the barrier between 'private' and 'public' (the 'personal' and the 'political'), in itself one of the deepest aspects of our oppression." Those lines are quoted from a mimeographed set of guidelines which were worked out by the New York Radical Feminists and which were read at our group's first meeting, along with a set of rules: each woman must speak from personal experience, the group has no leader, each member takes her turn going around the circle, no conclusions are to be drawn until each woman has spoken, no woman is to challenge another woman's experience. I do not have any idea of what happens in other groups. It took ours just over two hours to break every one of the rules, and just over two months to abandon the guidelines altogether.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/nora-ephron-consciousness-raising-10088296#ixzz1z5fJ74aq
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