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

acknowledgment that her business skills helped to run the Yippie office, or that she hadbeen working on a doctorate in psychology at Berkeley before joining Mobe and theYippies (Jack Hoffman 89; David Farber, Chicago 3; Jezer, Abbie 127; Viorst 431). Ofthe Yippie historians only Krassner mentions Judy Lampe’s contribution as designer ofthe Yippie logo (Confessions 157). Jezer falls into the same trap when he describes thewomen’s influence within the Yippie core in terms of their power over their romanticpartners. “Anita Hoffman also had influence through Abbie,” he writes in AbbieHoffman: American Rebel, “as did Jerry’s girlfriend, Nancy Kurshan, who had been apolitical activist before she met Jerry” (127). There is little consideration of the women’sown merits apart from their relationship with the Yippie men. Krassner does concede thatwhile the “Yippie leadership had a male image in the media, in reality much of the hardcoreorganizing was done by women—Nancy Kurshan, Anita Hoffman, Walli Leff, JudyClavir, Ellen Maslow, Anne Ockene, and Robin Morgan” (164). Yet he leaves it at that,and never goes on to describe who these women were or just what they did. Thus hisacknowledgement of their contribution falls flat. In Yippie histories, a “Yippie” means aman.Yet both men and women participated in Yippie. But Yippie, like other activistgroups at the time, and much of America in 1967, did not consider gender an issue. So itwas the men like Abbie Hoffman, Lampe, and Sanders who were interviewed as “Yippieleaders” by the media (“Politics” par. 3, 6). It was the men who were the public face ofYippie and the men who published in alternative newspapers like the East Village Otherand WIN: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action; therefore it is not surprising39