Feminism in the United States in the context of "Consciousness raising"

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political parties and organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive.

Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party), Student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups, such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.

Difference feminism is a term developed during the equality-versus-difference debate in American feminism to describe the view that men and women are different, but that no value judgment can be placed upon them and both sexes have equal moral status as persons.

Most strains of difference feminism did not argue that there was a biological, inherent, ahistorical, or otherwise "essential" link between womanhood and traditionally feminine values, habits of mind (often called "ways of knowing"), or personality traits. These feminists simply sought to recognize that, in the present, women and men are significantly different and to explore the devalued "feminine" characteristics. This variety of difference feminism is also called gender feminism.

Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group on some cause or condition. Common issues include diseases (e.g. breast cancer, AIDS), conflicts (e.g. the Darfur genocide, global warming), movements (e.g. Greenpeace, PETA, Earth Hour) and political parties or politicians. Since informing the populace of a public concern is often regarded as the first step to changing how the institutions handle it, raising awareness is often the first activity in which any advocacy group engages.

However, in practice, raising awareness is often combined with other activities, such as fundraising, membership drives or advocacy, in order to harness and/or sustain the motivation of new supporters which may be at its highest just after they have learned and digested the new information.

Richard Allen Posner (/ˈpoʊznər/; born January 11, 1939) is an American legal scholar and retired United States circuit judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified in The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited American legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.

Posner is known for his scholarly range and for writing on topics outside of law. In his various writings and books, he has addressed animal rights, feminism, drug prohibition, same-sex marriage, Keynesian economics, law and literature, and academic moral philosophy, among other subjects.

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Virginia junior senator Tim Kaine, in what was considered one of the biggest political upsets in American history. It was the fifth and most recent presidential election in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote.

Incumbent Democratic president Barack Obama was ineligible to pursue a third term due to the term limits established by the Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clinton secured the nomination over U.S. senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and became the first female presidential nominee of a major American political party. Initially considered a novelty candidate, Trump presented himself as a blunt-spoken political outsider and emerged as the Republican front-runner, defeating several notable opponents, including U.S. senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, as well as governors John Kasich and Jeb Bush. Trump's right-wing populist, nationalist campaign, which promised to "Make America Great Again" and opposed political correctness, illegal immigration, and many US free trade agreements, garnered extensive free media coverage due to Trump's inflammatory comments. Clinton emphasized her extensive political experience; denounced Trump and half of his supporters as "deplorable" bigots and extremists; and advocated the expansion of Obama's policies, stressing racial equality, LGBT rights, women's rights, and inclusive capitalism.

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.