16

Learning in/through Public Space:

Young Girls and Feminist
Consciousness-raising
Maria Rodó-de-Zárate and Mireia Baylina

Introduction: An educational journey to empowerment

and social action

We are a collective of feminist women who come together to raise our

own consciousness and try to show others the inequalities and vio-
lence that women continue to suffer because of the patriarchal system,
which assigns specific roles to the female sex and others to the male sex,
given men the dominant place in society and relegating women to sec-
ond place, dependent on them. We want to put an end to the physical,
psychological and moral violence that women suffer in everyday life.1
Acció Lila

This chapter seeks to explore how the young girls of a feminist group
think and act politically in their urban environment, and specifically how,
through their experiences, they manage their intersecting oppressions and
look for strategies to combat them. The aim is to show how they think
reflectively about their experiences in the public space, manage their inter-
sected oppressions and find individual and collective strategies to struggle
transform or resist. Through their awareness of their oppression and under-
standing themselves as a political issue in a process of consciousness-raising
they become empowered both personal and collectively. The way they share
their personal experiences, develop their own tools to strengthen them and
take actions to make them known are processes and practices of informal
education important to be considered.
The study focuses on discussion groups held with Acció Lila (‘Purple
Action’), a group of about 10 white girls aged 16–21 years living in the city of
Manresa (Barcelona province). This collective was born out of the need that
a group of girls had to raise their consciousness of the gender oppression
they suffered, to train themselves to understand the power mechanisms that

244

S. Mills et al. (eds.), Informal Education, Childhood and Youth

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
 Maria Rodó-de-Zárate and Mireia Baylina 245

Figure 16.1 Acció Lila’s performance against traditional gender roles for the 8th
March, Manresa
Source: Col · lectiu Feminista Acció Lila – http://acciolila.blogspot.com.es

affected them and share their experiences. From these reflections came the
need to take their struggle to the streets, carrying out all types of public
activities (performances, video showings, talks, spreading their ideas with
posters and banners, concerts) and dealing with diverse topics such as sexu-
ality, work, personal relationships, gender stereotypes, standards of beauty,
and so on (Figure 16.1).
Their main space of interaction is the Ateneu Popular La Sequia, a squatted
house in the Manresa city centre where they carry out all different types of
cultural, leisure and political activities.2 This self-managed project of squat-
ting is led by an open assembly and with the goal of responding to the
city’s lack of spaces for young people, becoming a place to plan and live
out new forms of entertainment, alternative means of communication, and
alternatives to the capitalist consumer society.
The chapter is framed into the studies of young people’s use of pub-
lic space from a gender perspective, which are very scarce in Catalonia
and Spain, and are in the minority in the international context (Rodo-
de-Zárate, 2011). On one hand, the literature on youth participation in
urban public space shows that this relationship is complex and controversial.