Direction for the Fourth Wave

I'm not sure of your chosen readership, although Tasha is justifiably an enthusiastic part of it. If the history of US feminist thought and the value of consciousness raising are the actual as well as ostensible subjects, and the women around you in law school, like Tasha, are the intended readership, then I think there are two good routes to improvement. First, the second-wave history from which "consciousness raising" emerged could use a little more direct attention: it is here described largely in the doctrinaire terms established by later, surprisingly unsympathetic dialogue. Because my mother was so directly involved in that intellectual and political movement, and because I was the oldest male person not required to leave the apartment when conscious raising in my mother's first group was going on, I have a clearer and more empathetic relationship to these events. The women who made their collective self-analyses the root of their politics were activated in the civil rights movement of the early '60s, and anti-war and anti-draft activism thereafter. They were accustomed to anti-racial and anti-capitalist ideological self-development; their feminism was neither separated from nor at any moment unaware of those larger struggles. Recapturing what they thought and how they built is valuable to your readership and part of the conversation you want.

In particular, I think, therefore, the second route to improvement is to focus clearly and simply on the consciousness raising process for which your current draft rather abstractly advocates. The second wave intellectuals created women's studies as a discipline (my mother was one of the team that built the first undergraduate program in the US), out of which so much of the current discourse has grown. But it does not effectively capture, I think, the particular combination of real joy and ironic outrage that the form of conversation that was even more than "consciousness-raising" produced. It's the emotional tenor of that moment, as well as its reshaping of so much social, political and literary theory, that stands to benefit you in your inquiry.