ELLISVILLE, Mo. — They called it consciousness-raising.

Nearly 50 years ago, Ruth Rosen and her friends sat in a Berkeley, Calif., living room and tried to imagine how their lives would have been different if they had been born as men. The stories spilled forth: a father who would not pay for college because girls didn’t need a degree; a nurse who told how the doctor treated her like a little girl; a woman who mused about an 11th Amendment to the Bill of Rights sparing women from cleaning toilets.

“We’d go around the room,” Ms. Rosen recalled. “For a year, we discussed one injustice after the other. Then we began to see the commonality, wherever you were there was some difference because you were a woman. People began to realize, ‘I’ve never thought about it that way before.’ ”

It’s a long way from that Berkeley living room to a bar in this conservative suburb of St. Louis, where a small band of women (and a handful of men) gathered to plot the way forward in the age of President Trump. But as women emerge among the most active standard-bearers of the resistance to this presidency, they are drawing on tactics honed in the 1960s-era consciousness raising groups that awakened women to their thwarted aspirations and power.

One by one, the women in Ellisville recounted their own awakenings, how the election had jolted them out of mostly comfortable suburban lives. Many had tried keeping their opinions to themselves, outnumbered as they were in a red state and bound by the ethos of “Midwestern nice.” They spoke of their children and their fears about the future they would face. Some felt shame for failing to act earlier in causes like Black Lives Matter, with the city of Ferguson so close at hand.