Within the above statement is embedded the idea that women are stronger when they work together. When they are able to discuss the issues they each face, discovering many similarities of their conditions, the tendency for women is to start figuring out how to solve the problems and make life better for everyone, including themselves. The ideas they bring forward are often in contrast to the ‘solutions’ that have been put in place by a dominant while male ideology and are therefore considered to be radical. Women brought together like this begin to chafe against restrictions on them based solely on their gender, such as lower wages, fewer career opportunities, fewer opportunities in higher level positions, or restrictions on their movements as occurred in the pas, and restrictions on their voting rights.
Even when women come into the situation in which she is fully conditioned to accept a more ‘traditional’ lifestyle in which she is mostly or perhaps even entirely submissive to her husband, they tend to become more radical as they associate more fully with other women. This is because the other women express their own freedoms and rights, insisting on being treated more respectfully or with greater autonomy, and the conditioned woman begins to see life in a new light. Not only do they enable the conditioned woman to see what else might be possible for herself, they give this women the tools and language she needs to make that happen for herself and the strength of sisterhood to push it through.
When women gather together on a regular basis in a certain location such as a church, a library, or a convention center, that location can even become radicalized as the women begin to associate that place with the ideas that they are exploring. It becomes a place where feminist ideas can be expressed freely, in whatever way the women want to express them, but often in ways that are not usually seen as feminist. The author uses the sentence above in relation to strip clubs, usually more associated with male objectification of women, but they say the place becomes redefined as a woman’s space to explore their own sexuality with other women.