groups in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, involving as many as four hundred women in c.r. groups at its peak. Over the next few years, small-group consciousness raising spread rapidly in cities and suburbs throughout the United States. By 1971, the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which had already organized several consciousness raising groups in Chicago, described small consciousness raising groups as "the backbone of the Women's Liberation Movement". Susan Brownmiller, a member of the West Village would later write that small-group consciousness raising "was the movement's most successful form of female bonding, and the source of most of its creative thinking. Some of the small groups stayed together for more than a decade". "In 1973, probably the height of CR, 100,000 women in the United States belonged to CR groups." Early mid-century feminists argued that women were isolated from each other, and as a result many problems in women's lives were misunderstood as "personal," or as the results of conflicts between the personalities of individual men and women, rather than systematic forms of oppression. Raising consciousness meant helping oneself and helping others to become politically conscious. Consciousness raising groups aimed to get a better understanding of women's oppression by bringing women together to discuss and analyze their lives, without interference from the presence of men. While explaining the theory behind consciousness raising in a 1973 talk, Kathie Sarachild remarked that "From the beginning of consciousness-raising ... there has been no one method of raising consciousness. What really counts in consciousness-raising are not methods, but results. The only 'methods' of consciousness raising are essentially principles. They are the basic radical political principles of going to the original sources, both historic and personal, going to people—women themselves, and going to experience for theory and strategy". However, most consciousness raising groups did follow a similar pattern for meeting and discussion. Meetings would usually be held about once a week, with a small group of women, often in the living room of one of the members. Meetings were women-only, and usually involved going around the room for each woman to talk about a predetermined subject—for example, "When you think about having a child, would you rather have a boy or a girl?"—speaking from her own experience, with no formal leader for the discussion and few rules for directing or limiting discussion. (Some c.r. groups did implement rules designed to give every woman a chance to