scottishmummy, sorry this is late (from last night, referring back to Thu 25-Nov-10 22:44:07), but I was really interested in your comment: "i struggle with the all women are oppressed but many dont know it hypothesis".
It is all too possible to be oppressed without knowing it, or knowing how. Good political journalism, for example, should aim to expose the insider trades, the secret ownerships, the hidden kickbacks, the scope of problems (i.e. revealing when certain phenomena are widespread, so that those "suffering alone" can organise).
Bad political journalism is, of course, self-indulgence, "I'm more an insider than you are!" stories which are personal stories, not really political ones. For example, in an age in which homosexuality is no longer illegal, was it really important to publicly out David Laws? Of course not. I saw a political journalist I know, out that evening, who made his excuses to leave a party, saying some news outlet had just "broken" the story and they all had to follow, even though they had all known for ages that he was gay. This story probably makes me sound like a bit of an insider, too, for which I apologise. However, I'm bearing witness to it here, according to the model I described for "good" political journalism, above.
If it is only a "clever few" who are enlightened, or have inside knowledge of any kind, that is indeed insidious.
That is probably why moral people who have seen any kind of "light" try to share it. "Public interest" journalism and whistleblowing, and proselytising feminism.
Perhaps the problem you identify comes when the proselytisers come to seem like insiders themselves, or gatekeepers, through reserving the "inner truths" for themselves (perhaps by over-intellectualising), or through not being sufficiently humble, respectively. What do you think?