Adult Socialization and Out-Group Politicization: An Empirical Study of Consciousness-Raising

At the heart of the feminist theory of consciousness-raising is a very precise hypothesis about the conditions in which most women – and members of any other socio-political out-group – will overcome their socialization into the culture of the dominant in-group to acquire political consciousness. The hypothesis is that separate interaction directly among themselves in autonomous, all-female groups will lead women to develop a new consciousness of women as a political category with interests distinct from those of men. This article uses new data about local women politicians in Scotland to test the hypothesis that there will be a strong, symmetrical and independent relationship between a woman politician's political orientation towards women and her experience of separate interaction. This relationship holds good for experience of any kind of separate interaction, even if it is confined to groups of an entirely non-political character, thereby confirming the causal inference that politicization is the consequence of separate experience and not ils precondition.