MondaysDecember 08, 2006Friday Night -- Eve Hinderer -- Lower East Side Anarchists and Women's Liberation -- 12.08.06Friday Night -- Eve Hinderer -- Lower East Side Anarchists and Women's Liberation Contents: _________________________________________ What: talk + discussion A few years ago, Alan, one of the regulars at 16Beaver put us in touch with Eve. At the time, we put together an evening with Ben Morea, who has since been a good friend. Subsequently, we had plans with Eve to organize some other evenings and to try and reconnect to individuals who were a critical part of a history of resistance in this city. Those evenings never quite manifested (yet), but we have managed to organize something with Eve herself. A founding member of New York Radical Women, circa '67-'68, Eve will speak on the beginnings of Women's Liberation as well as on the '60s Lower East Side Anarchist community. She hopes those in attendance will be able to use her as a resource for a broader discussion on continuity of involvement: knowing that the personal and political interpenetrate, how do we avoid the extremes of rage and withdrawal and stay engaged with the issues of our time. _________________________________________ The following is an excerpt taken from a biographical sketch intended for the Sophia Smith Collection where Eve's papers are being collected. "... All of this lasted until sometime into my first year at the City College of New York, where I first ran into left wing ideology, and began associating with the 'commies' my mother had warned me against. The south campus cafeteria in fact, was a den for left political radicals of every stripe. This was my first encounter with the alphabet soup of PL, the SWP, along with the WEB DuBois club, the Spartacist League, etc. I faced my first intellectual dilemma in feeling all these groups to be completely foreign to me ideologically, but feeling drawn to the rebellion they represented. At the same time that I was mingling with this radical population, my life at home with a verbally abusive father had reached a crisis, and at the age of 17 in 1965, I became a runaway. This sojourn with my godmother, in fact, sowed the seeds of my first bout of mental illness. She seemed to find nothing but character defects whereas my cronies back in school saw only the attractiveness of youthful rebellion. Unsurprisingly, I cut my visit ‘short’ after three months, promising Eve DeForest that I was done forever with those things that would hurt her and my parents, and return home and to school. After about a year of following through on these promises, I was suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and was ready to enter therapy for the first time. Since my family made it clear I would have to pay for these services out of my own pocket, I started work with Marjory Newstrand at $7.00/hour, twice a week. By that time, however, the damage my parents feared had been done, as I had been exposed to the body of thought known as Anarchism. A wooly-haired denizen of the South Campus cafeteria at CCNY had introduced me to the New York Federation of Anarchists. I would travel down from Yorkville where I had returned to live with my parents, to the East Village where I would join in the Federation’s nightly shared meals. (It was my first introduction to organic brown rice and macrobiotics. ) In the emphasis on community and personal liberation I found the missing links between my previous [right-wing] libertarianism and the concerns of the left wing. For anarchists, revolution embraced desire and need, the individual and community. In its’ emphasis on personal transformation as the starting point for revolutionary theory and practice, anarchism resolved my conflict between the left’s concern for justice and the libertarian emphasis on the individual. I took refuge in the tenets of anarchism..." To read the full version:
Eve Hinderer is a new supporter of NEFAC. She was involved in the Anarchist and Feminist Movements in New York City in the late 60's. This interview serves to illustrate some of her observations from her experiences, and attempts to draw lessons to be learned by anarchists today. She discusses the relationship between the personal and political aspects of anarchism, and left-wing militants of the time. What groups were active in New York City at the time? Lower Manhattan was pretty much the hotbed of revolutionary activity in the late 60's. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and the Anarchos collective were two main groups, and represented two very different strains of anarchism. I thought of the 'Motherfuckers' as an anarchist street gang, and in fact Ben Morea himself defined an affinity group as a "street gang with an analysis." Black Mask was the broadside Morea initially produced for 10 issues from November of '66 to May of '68 before he started the Motherfuckers. He used it as a forum to oppose white culture, saying "A revolution which will bring about a society where the arts will be an integral part of life, as in primitive society, and not an appendage to wealth." Ben then discontinued Black Mask, declaring that the Motherfuckers had transcended it, and that the real call was "into the streets." The guiding intellect of the Anarchos group was Murray Bookchin, with all the formulations he was making at the time about 'post-scarcity anarchism.' Anarchos actually referred to the magazine the group was publishing. Almost all the articles were by Murray, some with different pen names, as I recall. There was one article on 'Totality' written by Alan Hoffman, who I first met during the days of the New York Federation of Anarchists, circa 1965. The New York Federation of Anarchists was active in mid 60's in lower Manhattan and represented a kind of bridge between the '50s beats and the new 'hippie' culture. I took part in some of their communal meals they had regularly. I wanted to talk about "Motherfucker crossover": at the same time that there were these two collectives there were also the Yippies. They were very much One incident I was involved in was the yip-in at Grand Central terminal in February 1968. I got up on top of the info booth and got the hands of the clock off and yelled out "Up against the wall Motherfucker!" Immediately after, people wooed and started playing the drums. And of course the police charged. I got one of my shoes caught on the grillwork and instead of leaving without it, I struggled to recover it and jumped down into the arms of two plainclothes policemen. Which of these groups did you chose? Why? I was initially in the orbit of the Anarchos group because of the relationship I had with Steven Brownstein. We lived together for about 3 months early in 1967 at 32 Avenue B, which no longer exists. That fall, after he and I returned from our trip to the West Coast, Michael Brownstein and his wife Sandy took an apartment in the same building. This formed the nucleus of the Anarchos collective. As far as Ben Morea and the Up Against the Wall Motherfucker collective, I'm not even certain when I first met them. I moved back to the Lower East Side from where I had been staying with my parents uptown. I took an apartment on 4th Street East of Avenue B, in order to be close to the Anarchos group. As the year began to unfold there were tensions in the group because of its predisposition to 'nonmonogamous' relationships. Basically everything blew up in my face. All of this is to say, however, that regardless of my relationships with the Brownsteins, I had situated myself on the Lower East side and this was my connection to the anarchist community, including Ben Morea, who were active there at the time. What about SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), could you talk a bit more about the dichotomy of strains SDS was open to outside groups, not only students. I remember at a SDS I don't know what happened to SDS to make it fall apart, but at the Ann Arbor convention of June 1968 the tensions were evident. There were three lines of people lined up to speak into microphones, one at either side of the auditorium and one in the middle. It almost seemed to me from what people were saying that the three conflicted positions within SDS were represented by the different lines: the nascent Weatherman, the hardline Marxists (PL) on either side, and those who were naive to think the organization could be saved from its own internal conflicts in the middle. People like Bernadine Dohr and Bill Ayers were present at this conference. There was also a woman's action, which I took part in planning. The initial idea was to kidnap someone from the speaker's platform, which I thought was marvelous, and I even had this image of throwing a net over the speaker and dragging him away. But by the time the group agreed on how to proceed, I was embarrassed by how ineffectual I thought it would be and didn't participate. All that happened was that some of the women interrupted the speakers and caused a minor commotion. The 60's were a bit of a pressure cooker, and right around the years 1967-68 Could you talk about the New York Radical Women? The group started out of a Princeton SDS conference in the fall 1967. I had Politically, how would you define the New York Radical Women, and how did Well, we started the Women's Liberation movement! There was no movement hen we met! We were all very determined. One of the things that the group developed was consciousness raising. We discussed and developed a political analysis to see where the oppression came from. It was hard overcoming a feeling that our problems as women were somehow inferior to those of African Americans whose oppression was more 'objectively' based. What we were suffering from was nothing but the internalized oppression that Franz Fanon elaborated on in his theoretical work. We kept meeting up against a roadblock that our problems were all 'personal.' That's when I finally came out with the formulation "the personal *is* the political." This is true of all oppressed groups. The movement that takes place in consciousness raising from deeply felt worthlessness to an understanding of a shared oppression is essential for liberation. There was no question that all of us in the group were determined to surmount any and all obstacles in starting a movement of liberation. This formulation just better enabled us to make the bridge from self-scrutiny to a revolutionary consciousness. Women came into this group with different resources. I, for example, was What were the positive and negative aspects of these groups? Why did you I felt betrayed by the Anarchos group. Even as I began to act on the group Could you elaborate on the relationship between Ben Morea and Murray I remember one meetings on Avenue B in the fall of '67. The room was packed with people. Murray Murray's erudition has always very much impressed me. He was a Ben was a man of action on the other hand. The Motherfuckers were centered Could you comment on the class/background of the anarchist/radical left-wing I think one of the reasons I dropped out of women's liberation as early as I One thing that felt exhilarating for me in joining NEFAC and coming back New left vs. Old Left and NEFAC tradition of Anarchist-Communism. I don't First of all, New Left is very much a term of the 60's. The groundbreaking accomplished by a group What lessons should we learn for today? I think the anarchist movement should stay close to the principles of One of the first things that attracted me to anarchism was that instead of I also think that we are now seeing the beginning of the end, especially What made you come back to Anarchism/NEFAC? In the spring of '99, while I still subscribed to it, I read an article in Interview by
Sophia Smith Collection: North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists North_Eastern_Federation_of_Anarchist_Communists Another interview with Eve: http://www.thestudentunderground.org/old_website/print.php?ArticleID=185 related 16beaver events/posts: |
