Anne Forer Pyne, an early feminist activist and writer whose use of the phrase “consciousness raising” helped make it a foundational principle of the women’s rights movement, died on March 21 in Tucson. She was 72.

Her death, in hospice care, was caused by kidney failure, her brother, Danny Forer, said.

Ms. Pyne, a self-described left-wing hippie, was a young kindergarten teacher in the late 1960s when she began attending meetings of New York Radical Women, a small group that met in cramped Manhattan apartments to discuss how to fight the oppression of women.

Before overturning entrenched power dynamics and cultural norms, however, they knew they first had to identify and define them. Ms. Pyne, by her account, was uncertain about what, exactly, women needed to be liberated from. So she asked.

“One night at a meeting I said: ‘Would everyone please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman?’ I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.’ ”