Theirs was a secret space. In the early 1970s, Molly Smith and her sister Bridget attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising sessions in a friend’s living room near Washington’s Catholic University. They read books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking text about women’s health and sexuality. Sitting on cushions, the circle of women listened to one another, laughed and cried and shared their deepest secrets.
“Women needed spaces where they could be open, where they could be uncompromising, where they could speak about the beginnings of their feminism, where they could speak about their stories around their bodies without shame,” Smith, now 70, recalls by phone. “A lot of women didn’t understand their bodies at all.
