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gained a new facility for overcoming obstructive group dynamics and personal investments. They also learned to truly listen to, and to forcefully articulate, points of view. Arlene Raven, who led the class described its purpose and process:14

The purpose of the Issues Class was to allow us to deal with all the important topics in the woman's movement, the peace movement, the humanistic movement, and in art, in a way that would place us in a specific relationship to those issues. Instead of simply articulating our positions, present the issue,and relate the bibliography -- i.e. the academic approach -- we assumed ourselves to be people who are particularly concerned with acting on those issues, in terms of how we lead our lives, and how we do our work.
What we did first of all, was to separate our own psychology from the discussion of issues. That unspoken other stuff that is going on when we discuss issues has caused a lot of problems in the woman's movement. So one of the things we did, was to find out what our attachment to the whole area of debate was; and to be clear when we are talking about an issue, that we are in fact talking about the issue at hand, rather than giving other messages along with it, such as: "I want attention," or "I am smart," or "I feel stupid." So first we went into what the interaction among ourselves was. We cleared that away through certain kinds of exercises. We assumed or pretended that we had cenrtain points of view that we didn't have in actuality, and argued from those. Then we looked at people debating in the class and analyzed the interaction.

This was a practical training too; because the Woman's Building is in a certain position in relation to the whole L.A. woman's movement, and many of the women in the F.S.W. occupy positions in the woman's movement locally. The class gave us a lot of insights as to how we were handling ourselves, and increased our ability to be constructive.
That is all background stuff. The issues that we discussed had to do with political life, with the woman's movement and art. Some of the issues included were: Trashing, lesbianism, the power of art, and the difference between politics and culture, which is an ongoing debate in the F.S.W.. We never reached any particular conclusions, because that was not what the class was about. What the class was really about,