Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

Most of the dozen core Yippies were men; histories of the Yippies include onlythree women in this group: Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, and Judy Lampe. 22Nevertheless the women were as actively involved in the movement as the men. Forexample, at the March, 1968, Grand Central Station Yip-In, Anita Hoffman spoke toreporters about Yippie plans for the Festival of Life in Chicago (Michael Stern 72). Shealso skirmished with nightstick-wielding policemen, putting herself into physical danger.Village Voice photographer Fred W. McDarrah captured her reaching across a police linetoward Abbie as the police attempt to chase the demonstrators away (McDarrah 124). Aswell, Anita Hoffman and Kurshan were present at the New Year’s Eve party that createdYippie. With Judy Lampe, they worked hard to turn the idea of Yippie into reality, evento the point of putting their bodies on the line.Despite their commitment to the movement, these women did not enjoy the sameprivilege within the Yippie movement as their male counterparts. The Yippies werefocused on political issues like the Vietnam War and did not stop to consider feminism orgender roles, even though the late 1960s saw a flourishing of feminist activism in theUnited States. This was typical for activist organizations at the time: the anarchist art22 There are no histories of the Yippie movement as a whole. Histories of the Yippies include memoirs byYippies themselves, biographies, and histories of the Chicago convention. In the first category areKrassner’s How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years (1971), written duringthe passion of the Yippie movement, Rubin’s earnest Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven (1976), Hoffman’smore distanced and meditative Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (1980), and Krassner’s second, morenostalgic, memoir Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (1993).In the second category are three fairly genial Abbie Hoffman biographies: Yippie historian Marty Jezer’sAbbie Hoffman: American Rebel (1992), Jack Hoffman and Daniel Simon’s Run Run Run: The Lives ofAbbie Hoffman (1994), and Jonah Raskin’s For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996),as well as Larry Sloman’s compilation of memoirs and interviews, Steal this Dream: Abbie Hoffman andthe Countercultural Revolution in America (1998). Finally, Milton Viorst dedicates a chapter to the radicalactions of Jerry Rubin and the Yippies in Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s (1979), and DavidFarber also addresses their more violent and radical nature in Chicago ‘68 (1988).37