It began with a memo. Its original title (‘Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie's Thoughts on a Women's Liberation Movement’) suggests the spirit in which it was written. Carol Hanisch, a community organiser for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, was responding to a memo by another staff member. Like so many other activists in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the New Left, this colleague did not view the fledgling women's liberation movement as truly political. Dottie Zellner had been particularly scathing about the new vogue for consciousness-raising, which she dismissed as therapy.

Carol Hanisch was (in addition to being a civil rights activist) a member of New York Radical Women, credited with bringing consciousness-raising techniques into second wave feminism. The group was itself a response to what we would now view as a quite shocking array of sexist attitudes and practices that had, until then, gone unchallenged in radical circles. Early attempts to extend the logic of liberation to women had met with widespread derision, with opposition coming not just from men but women: