Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI
by Judy Gumbo
Three Rooms Press £11.99

IN THE male-dominated world of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Stew Albert, Bill Ayers, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and the Berrigan brothers, women like Judy Gumbo, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis and Bernardine Dohrn were personalities whose commitment was worthy of imitation.

The inspiration they provided went with me — as a high school pupil for US military dependents in Frankfurt am Main, Germany — to the anti-war protests I attended organised by German leftists and pacifists to coincide with the 1971 May Day actions against the war in Washington, DC and elsewhere around the US.

Gumbo’s is a joy to read. It is also an important and significant addition to the history of what is now known as the sixties. Part memoir and part confessional, it is mostly a history of the period told by one of its primary participants and instigators.

She describes her childhood in Toronto as a daughter of communists; her impresario father who brought Soviet film to Canadian audiences and her frustrated mother who worked on the Canadian communist party newspaper.

A tragic but important aspect of her mother’s life was her alcoholism. After leaving home, Gumbo describes a rather standard trajectory for many women of her generation looking for something besides whatever version of June Cleaver their mother provided.

She headed to the US and ended up in a San Francisco Bay Area milieu that would introduce her to leftist political activist Stew Albert, the man who would become her lifelong friend and oft-time lover.

It was this chance meeting (when she also met Jerry Rubin) that would help define her political and cultural commitments for years to come. Perhaps most importantly, it would place her in the apartment on New Year 1967-68 that saw the birth of Yippie (Youth International Party).

This New Year’s gathering is where Yippie Girl truly begins. Gumbo recounts the friendship with Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver while she considers the sexist elements of both relationships and the underlying sexism of the movement and counterculture in general.

As she chronicles her exploits, she discusses the ego conflicts and gender battles between the people she worked, lived and played with, always keeping the political struggle at the center.

One somewhat surprising revelation in Yippie Girl is Gumbo’s amorous relationship with Vietnamese poet, writer and diplomat Do Xuan Oanh, who translated into Vietnamese many American novels, including Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

After meeting each other in Canada when Vietnamese revolutionaries invited US anti-war activists to a discussion, the two carried on their relationship in person and through the mails for decades.

This is a superb and delightful book. Intimate and comprehensive in its telling, Yippie Girl stays true to the politics of the radical left of the sixties while reflecting on its mistakes, successes and tragedies.

Gumbo’s writing shows a depth that expertly expresses the personal and political calamity of the sixties with a sensitivity found more often in fiction. It resounds with anger, sadness, joy, even fear and an attitude displayed best by her words to the Chicago police at the end of the chapter on the Chicago police riot in August 1968: “Fuck you, motherfuckers.”

This is an abridged version of a review that first appeared in counterpunch.org. Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: [email protected].