Tuesday Reads

Obituary:  Noted second-wave feminist Anne Forer Pyne, credited with coming up with the idea of "consciousness raising," has died of kidney failure at the age of 72.

Ms. Pyne, a self-described left-wing hippie, was a young kindergarten teacher in the late 1960s when she began attending meetings of New York Radical Women, a small group that met in cramped Manhattan apartments to discuss how to fight the oppression of women.

Before overturning entrenched power dynamics and cultural norms, however, they knew they first had to identify and define them. Ms. Pyne, by her account, was uncertain about what, exactly, women needed to be liberated from. So she asked.

“One night at a meeting I said: ‘Would everyone 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.’ ”

Ms. Pyne’s simple question, quoted by the author Susan Brownmiller in her 1999 book, “In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution,” ignited the group. As women shared their firsthand accounts of slights and injustices they had endured — at work, at home and in the bedroom — they found patterns, and solidarity.

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