When the FBI Infiltrated the Women’s Liberation Movement
In the late 1960s, the FBI began recruiting female informants across the country to spy on the growing Women’s Liberation Movement. But why? And what happened when the feminists realized they were being watched? Cristen unravels an often overlooked chapter of the Bureau’s infamous COINTELPRO counterintelligence program when then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the movement for gender equality was either a Communist front or a pipeline to violent radicalism. For Women’s Liberation leaders and activists, that real surveillance seeded legitimate fears of infiltration that curdled the movement from within.
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