Liberation: A Powerful Play About Second-Wave Feminism—and What Came After

What Feminism Lost When Consciousness-Raising Disappeared

Broadway is this country’s true boulevard of broken dreams.

Its economics are unforgiving. Weekly running costs well over a million dollars and reward only smash hits. Shows must be big, familiar, and easy to market. There is little room for work that unfolds slowly, quietly, or ambiguously.

The audience—largely out-of-towners—tends to favor spectacle, jukebox scores, and Hollywood stars over serious drama. Recognition matters more than creative innovation. Emotional punch matters more than moral complexity.

And critics, even now, wield enormous power.

As Gypsy famously puts it: Ya gotta have a gimmick.

Against this backdrop, I recently saw one of the shows now headed for closure. Liberation, I was told, was about a 1970s Ohio consciousness-raising group. And it is about patriarchy, sisterhood, and the hard work of finding oneself. All of that is true. But it is also something else—and something more unsettling.

At its center is a daughter trying to understand her mother’s life. In doing so, she confronts choices that once felt necessary, brave, even liberating, but that now appear puzzling or incomplete.

The play is not finally about feminist ideology, but about feminist inheritance—about coming of age with the benefits of a movement whose struggles you never had to live through.

I found the play intensely moving, in part because it recalled how second-wave feminism actually changed the world—not through institutions or platforms, but through small, face-to-face gatherings in which women tried to make sense of their lives together.

Consciousness-raising groups were not just political tools; they were formative spaces. They helped people turn private unease into shared understanding—biography into politics.

What Liberation captures, and what Broadway now struggles to sustain, is this older model of political life: participatory, intimate, demanding, and unfinished. The play’s power lies not in judging what feminism became, but in showing what it felt like to choose without knowing how history would judge you.

The estrangement between mother and daughter is not a failure of empathy; it reflects a deeper rupture—a culture that has inherited the language of liberation while losing the practices that once gave that language meaning.

That Liberation reached Broadway at all is remarkable. That it is closing quickly is hardly surprising. But its brief run raises a larger question: what happens to social movements when their ideas survive, but the participatory moral cultures that sustained them disappear?

Generational Misunderstanding and Moral Inheritance

One of Liberation’s signature strengths is that it treats a single life not as anecdote but as evidence. The mother’s choices—her marriage, her compromises, her moments of rebellion and retreat—function as a kind of historical record. Like any such record, her life resists easy interpretation. To read it outside its context is to confuse outcomes with intentions and legacies with understanding.

The daughter approaches her mother’s past with the moral language of a later era. She knows what feminism made possible. She assumes its insights. She treats its victories as baseline. What she struggles to grasp is the uncertainty under which those gains were forged.

The mother did not live as a symbol of second-wave feminism, nor as a transitional figure awaiting judgment by a wiser future. She lived through a series of difficult decisions made under pressure, with limited information, constrained options, and competing obligations.

This is where generational misunderstanding enters. Each generation inherits past achievements without understanding the dilemmas that faced their predecessors. Rights feel obvious; risks fade from view. What once required courage can later look like accommodation. What once felt necessary can appear, in hindsight, as weakness.

The daughter’s confusion is therefore not just personal; it is historical. She is trying to read a life shaped by moral conditions that no longer exist.

Liberation refuses to resolve this tension by casting the mother as either a hero or a victim. Instead, it stages the difficulty of judging a life without having lived its constraints—economic dependence, social expectation, the emotional cost of defiance. Feminism did not relieve the mother of responsibility to others; it made those responsibilities impossible to ignore.

The mother’s compromises are not signs of false consciousness, but of tragic choice—the kind that arises when values collide and no option is clean. The daughter’s impatience reflects a broader habit of flattening the past into types: the liberated woman, the compromised housewife, the sellout, the pioneer. Liberation resists that flattening by reminding us that lives are not arguments and choices are not footnotes to theory.

The play also raises a deeper question about inheritance itself. What does it mean to receive a movement’s gains without having taken part in its making? The daughter wants a story with a clear ending; her mother’s life meanders, stalls, and doubles back. Their conflict is not just personal, but cultural—between a world that expects moral clarity and one that once accepted moral struggle as unavoidable.

By treating the mother’s life as a historical record rather than a cautionary tale, Liberation reminds us that the past exists not to be judged, but to be understood. Historical empathy, the play suggests, is the discipline of recognizing that the freedom to judge is itself an inheritance—won by people who never knew how their stories would end.

Consciousness-Raising as Lived Moral Practice

What Liberation dramatizes—often more clearly than later theory—is a form of feminism rooted not in abstraction but in lived moral encounter. The consciousness-raising group at the center of the play is not a classroom or a training ground for ideology. It is a space where women test their experiences against one another’s lives and try to make sense of them together.

This is feminism not as doctrine but as practice, and its power lies in that difference.

Carol Gilligan’s work helps clarify what is at stake here—not because the play illustrates an “ethic of care” in any schematic way, but because it shows how moral understanding emerges through relationships. Gilligan argued that moral reasoning begins not with universal principles but with attention to particular lives, responsibilities, and entanglements.

In Liberation, the central questions are not theoretical—What is patriarchy?—but relational: What do I owe my husband? My child? Myself? Other women? The play insists that these questions cannot be answered in advance. They must be worked through, imperfectly and often painfully, in the presence of others struggling with similar tensions.

This helps explain why the play resists the clean moral arcs contemporary audiences often expect. Second-wave feminism, as Liberation portrays it, did not offer a single path forward. It created a forum where conflicting goods—care and autonomy, loyalty and self-realization—were placed into conversation rather than ranked in advance. From a distance, this can look like confusion or compromise. From within, it looks like moral seriousness.

From Participation to Institutions

At the same time, Liberation stages a tension that Nancy Fraser would later describe: the movement’s shift from participation toward recognition and institutionalization. Consciousness-raising groups were participatory by design. They required presence, listening, and vulnerability. They produced no credentials, no policy deliverables, and no permanent structures.

That informality was their strength—and also their weakness. As feminism moved into professional organizations, legal frameworks, and bureaucratic settings, something important was gained in durability and reach. But something was also lost: the slow, collective work of making sense of one’s life in common.

The generational divide at the heart of Liberation reflects this shift. The daughter inherits feminism largely as an achieved status—a set of rights, recognitions, and assumptions. The mother lived it as a risky, emotionally demanding process with no clear endpoint. Fraser’s critique of feminism’s accommodation to managerial logics hovers in the background of the play, not as an argument, but as a lived contrast between participation and administration.

Power, Informality, and Moral Risk

That contrast also recalls Jo Freeman’s famous warning about the “tyranny of structurelessness.”

Consciousness-raising groups prided themselves on their informality and egalitarianism, yet they were not free of power, hierarchy, or exclusion.

Liberation does not romanticize these spaces. It acknowledges their limits—their lack of diversity, their blind spots, their internal tensions. But it also suggests that what made them effective was not their purity, but their willingness to confront power face to face rather than delegate it to formal authority.

Freeman warned that informal structures can conceal power; the play adds a further insight—that formalization can also drain moral life of immediacy and risk.

Recognition, Dialogue, and Moral Formation

Hovering over all of this is Charles Taylor’s insight that modern identity is formed through recognition and dialogue. The self, Taylor argues, is not discovered in isolation but articulated in conversation with others who acknowledge—or fail to acknowledge—one’s moral claims.

Consciousness-raising groups functioned as engines of recognition. They gave women language for experiences that had previously gone unnamed. But they also demanded something harder: exposure to disagreement, to judgment, and to the unsettling realization that one’s choices might not align with another’s sense of justice.

Liberation captures this dialogical process with unusual honesty. It shows that moral formation requires time, presence, and friction—and how easily those conditions disappear. The play does not mourn feminism’s past so much as the loss of spaces where moral selves were formed collectively. In their absence, politics often becomes louder and faster, but thinner—more visible, less transformative.

The play’s fragility on Broadway thus looks less like a failure of taste than a sign of cultural displacement. A theater ecosystem—and a political culture—that prizes clarity, affirmation, and scale has little patience for the slow, uncomfortable work of moral becoming. Liberation reminds us that the personal became political not through proclamations, but through interpersonal encounters—and that when those encounters disappear, movements may survive, but their formative power does not.

A Necessary Caveat: Limits and Exclusions

Any serious reckoning with second-wave feminism must also acknowledge what Liberation only gestures toward: the movement’s exclusions. Consciousness-raising groups were overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and heteronormative. They often treated gender as the primary axis of oppression while bracketing race, class, sexuality, and disability. For many women—especially women of color—these spaces could feel alienating rather than liberating.

These critiques were not imposed later. Black feminists, socialist feminists, and lesbian feminists made them forcefully at the time, warning that appeals to shared “women’s experience” could erase difference and reproduce hierarchy. Jo Freeman’s concerns about informal power apply here as well: spaces that claimed to be leaderless were often shaped by unspoken norms and unequal cultural capital.

Yet acknowledging these limits should not obscure what consciousness-raising nonetheless achieved. Its exclusions were real, but so was its participatory intensity. The question is not whether the movement was flawed—it was—but whether contemporary activism has addressed those flaws without sacrificing something equally important.

Inclusion achieved through institutionalization may broaden representation, but it often narrows participation. What Liberation invites us to notice is not the loss of innocence, but the disappearance of spaces where ordinary people were expected to engage in sustained moral work together.

From Encounter to Platform: What Replaced Consciousness-Raising

If consciousness-raising groups have largely vanished, it is not because their core questions disappeared. Women—and men—still struggle to balance care and autonomy, work and family, loyalty and selfhood. What has changed is the infrastructure through which those struggles are made political.

Where feminism once relied on rooms, chairs, and conversation, it now operates through platforms, organizations, and policies. Contemporary activism is more visible, more professionalized, and more administratively legible. It excels at naming injustice, mobilizing attention, and securing recognition. What it does less well is cultivate the slow, dialogical work through which people learn to live with moral conflict rather than resolve it in advance.

Digital spaces reward speed, alignment, and performance. Bureaucratic institutions reward compliance, credentialing, and scale. Neither is well suited to the kind of work Liberation depicts: sitting with ambiguity, listening without scripts, and discovering that one’s deepest convictions are often entangled with fear, obligation, and loss.

The shift from consciousness-raising to contemporary activism thus reflects a broader transformation—from moral formation to moral signaling, from participation to administration.

This helps explain why the play feels out of time, not just out of sync with Broadway economics. Liberation asks its audience to do what many movements no longer require of participants: endure discomfort without immediate payoff, resist premature judgment, and accept that liberation can involve irreversible losses as well as gains.

The personal is still political—but it is no longer collective in the same way. Experience is affirmed rather than tested, displayed rather than worked through. What second-wave feminism offered, at its best, was not simply voice but a shared practice of meaning-making. That practice has no clear institutional successor.

What Survives When Moral Formation Disappears

Social movements often outlive the practices that once gave them meaning. Their language persists. Their victories are codified. Their symbols circulate. But the forms of moral formation that once animated them—how people learned to see themselves, interpret their lives, and act together—quietly fade. What remains is an inheritance without instruction.

Second-wave feminism is a case in point. Its ideas are everywhere: in law, in workplaces, in cultural expectations, and in the self-understanding of generations who never had to fight for its core claims. Yet its formative practices—the small, demanding, participatory spaces in which women made sense of their lives together—have largely disappeared. The result is a feminism that is widely affirmed but unevenly lived, confidently invoked but thinly inhabited.

A useful contrast is the Black Civil Rights movement, which was never simply a campaign or a list of demands. As Martin Luther King Jr. insisted, it aspired to be a beloved community—a moral and spiritual project as much as a political one. Rooted in the Black church, it encompassed not only protests and boycotts but songs, sermons, freedom schools, and rituals of collective courage. Civil rights was lived communally and repeatedly, not merely asserted.

What distinguished the Civil Rights movement was not only its goals but its infrastructure. It cultivated shared habits, shared stories, and shared moral horizons. When participants marched, they did so as members of a community already practiced in endurance and solidarity. Its power flowed as much from its cultural and spiritual depth as from its political strategy.

Liberation shows what happens when a movement achieves historic success without leaving behind comparably durable practices of moral formation. Feminism transformed law and culture, but its most participatory spaces proved difficult to sustain once the movement professionalized and institutionalized. As those spaces disappeared, feminism’s insights traveled without the practices that once taught people how to live with them.

The play captures this disjunction with unusual clarity. It shows how a movement can succeed politically while hollowing out culturally—how hard-won insights become assumptions rather than achievements, and how moral seriousness fades even as the language of liberation spreads. What survives is not nothing, but it is incomplete: ideals without the intimate civic spaces that once made those ideals intelligible.

Feminism as Lived Practice, Not Doctrine

One of this essay’s central claims is that second-wave feminism was never primarily a body of doctrine. It was a lived practice—a way of interpreting experience.

Consciousness-raising groups did not begin with theory; they began with stories. Women gathered not to affirm shared beliefs but to test experience—to ask whether what felt private, idiosyncratic, or shameful might in fact be patterned, shared, and therefore political.

Movements rooted in lived practice change not only what people think but how they think—how they listen, judge, doubt, and decide. At its most powerful, feminism did not simply critique patriarchy; it reshaped moral perception. It taught women to recognize patterns, name tensions, and accept that liberation would involve trade-offs rather than clean resolutions.

Liberation captures feminism in this formative mode: uncertain, provisional, and emotionally demanding. It is not yet an ideology to be recited, but a way of grappling with the meaning of one’s life in relation to others. That is precisely the version of feminism that is the hardest to remember—and the hardest to pass on.

Mothers, Daughters, and the Private Life of Movements

Social movements are not lived only in marches, manifestos, or institutions. They are lived privately—in marriages renegotiated, in parenting reimagined, in ambitions pursued or abandoned, in compromises accepted with reluctance or relief.

Mother–daughter relationships become one of the primary sites where movements are transmitted, misunderstood, and judged.

In Liberation, the daughter encounters her mother’s feminism not as a coherent worldview but as a life—fragmented, ambivalent, and shaped by choices that resist contemporary moral clarity. From the daughter’s vantage point, those choices can look puzzling or insufficient. Why stay? Why accept certain limits? Why not go further?

This impatience reflects a broader tendency in contemporary feminism: confidence in moral superiority paired with a thin grasp of historical constraint. Earlier feminists did not experience themselves as transitional figures on the way to something better. They did not know which compromises would later be read as betrayals or which adaptations as failures of courage. They acted within material dependencies, emotional obligations, and cultural norms that are now largely invisible.

The daughter’s misunderstanding is thus not merely personal but structural. It shows how moral inheritance can breed judgment rather than humility—how later generations mistake survival for accommodation and courage for complicity. Liberation insists that such judgments are too easy, and that historical empathy requires recognizing how much of one’s moral clarity is itself inherited.

Consciousness-Raising as a Forgotten Civic Technology

Consciousness-raising groups were not knitting circles: they were a civic technology, much like the teach-in of the same era. Both were low-cost, replicable, participatory forms designed to turn private confusion into public understanding. They required no credentials, no hierarchy, and no permanent infrastructure. They depended instead on presence, time, and trust.

Like teach-ins, consciousness-raising groups have largely vanished—not because they failed, but because they succeeded without leaving durable institutional traces. They built no buildings, endowed no chairs, and founded no lasting bureaucracies. Their power lay in what they did to people, not in what they produced.

That success makes them easy to forget. Practices that leave no institutional residue are vulnerable to caricature, dismissal, or reduction to slogans. When later generations encounter second-wave feminism without its formative spaces, what remains can look thin or exclusionary—an ideology detached from the practices that once gave it depth.

Liberation functions as a kind of recovery project. It reminds us that feminism once operated as a participatory civic culture, not simply as a set of positions to be affirmed.

Memory, Judgment, and the Afterlife of Movements

What a movement remembers about itself shapes what it can become. Second-wave feminism is often remembered for its claims—about equality, autonomy, and rights—but not for its methods. What endures are the outcomes that can be written into law or policy. What fades are the practices that once shaped moral selves.

This imbalance distorts judgment. Without memory of consciousness-raising, feminism’s past can appear either naïve or authoritarian: too exclusionary to admire, too dogmatic to emulate. The disappearance of its formative practices makes it harder to see how tentative, dialogical, and uncertain the movement actually was.

The afterlife of movements thus involves a paradox: success breeds simplification. The more fully an idea becomes common sense, the less visible the labor that produced it. Generational chauvinism—the assumption that later versions are automatically better—is one consequence of this amnesia.

Liberation resists that chauvinism by forcing its audience to encounter the moral density of an earlier moment, rather than treating it as a crude prelude to the present.

Why Consciousness-Raising Worked—and Why Its Successors Struggle

Consciousness-raising worked because it combined elements rarely found together today.

First, it was embodied. People sat in rooms together. They encountered silence, discomfort, and disagreement.

Second, it was narrative. Participants did not arrive with slogans or arguments. They told stories—about marriages, work, children, and disappointments. One account sparked recognition in another; patterns emerged through comparison. No conclusions were announced in advance. Understanding grew through listening.

Third, it involved moral risk. Participants exposed uncertainty and ambivalence. There were no correct answers waiting to be endorsed.

Finally, it achieved scale without losing intimacy. Groups were small enough to matter personally, yet numerous enough to feel historically consequential.

Many contemporary movements lack this combination. They are bureaucratized, professionalized, or mediated through platforms that reward performance over reflection. Engagement is measured by visibility rather than transformation. Solidarity is declared rather than worked through. The result is politics without the slow reshaping of moral perception.

Participatory Feminism vs. Platform Feminism

Second-wave feminism built political awareness through shared vulnerability. Women sat together, spoke honestly about their lives, and tried to make sense of their experiences as a group. The process was slow, personal, and often uncomfortable—but it changed how participants understood themselves and one another.

Much contemporary feminism—and activism more broadly—works differently. It is more bureaucratic and more digitally mediated. Action is often organized from above rather than grown from below. Participation frequently takes the form of signing statements, sharing posts, attending one-off events, or complying with institutional mandates. These efforts can mobilize attention quickly, but they rarely ask people to change how they see themselves or relate to others.

These tools have real strengths. They can expose injustice, coordinate large numbers of people, and expand representation. But they are poorly suited to personal transformation. The slow work of building trust, working through disagreement, and learning from one another is often treated as a distraction rather than the point.

The irony is striking. Today’s movements are more inclusive in who they represent, but less participatory in how they operate. Inclusion has expanded even as opportunities for sustained, face-to-face engagement have narrowed. Liberation reminds us that participation is not the same as inclusion—and that moral seriousness cannot be organized from above or mediated entirely through screens.

Theater as a Site of Moral Reckoning

This brings us back, finally, to theater—not as an industry or a diversion, but as a live, shared experience. Theater asks people to sit together, without distractions, and face a story as it unfolds.

Like consciousness-raising, it happens in rooms, depends on presence, and unfolds in real time. It cannot be paused, edited, optimized, or scrolled past.

Liberation is formally aligned with what it depicts, and its struggle on Broadway is no accident. It points to a larger cultural loss: the disappearance of spaces where people gather to sit with unresolved experience together. As movie theaters empty and entertainment migrates to private screens, theater remains one of the few places where moral encounter still requires shared time and attention.

That Broadway cannot sustain Liberation tells us less about the play than about the culture it addresses. We have not lost our concern for justice or equality. What we have lost is patience for the slow, demanding work of understanding how those ideals are lived—imperfectly, ambiguously, and at real personal cost.

That, ultimately, is what Liberation asks us to remember.