CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How Leftist Male Supremacy Birthed the Women’s Movement

Anita Hoffman and Nancy Kurshan burning judges robes after the Chicago 8 verdict, 1968.

The women’s movement sprang into the world from 1960s and 1970s leftism, a leftism that was, not to put too fine a point on it, blatantly male supremacist. Men on the left back then generally regarded women’s liberation as bourgeois feminism – they were wrong, but seeing what’s happened with contemporary identity politics, their leeriness was perhaps, only perhaps, prophetic. Putting that issue aside, however, leftist men at that time were, for the most part, horribly sexist, as activist and well-known Yippie Nancy Kurshan, who lived for years with the even more famous Yippie Jerry Rubin, makes clear in her fine, new memoir, Levitating the Pentagon.

“My journey has also been about becoming a woman with a voice…through some difficult relationships with men, the male-dominated Movement, and the transformative yet anxiety-producing challenges that feminism presented to me.” Kurshan first portrays the year 1968 from a feminist perspective, because when Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis were subpoenaed in October 1968 to appear before HUAC, surprise! NONE of the female organizers of the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention protest were called to testify. That’s how little women on the left counted as far as HUAC was concerned. So these women conducted a public hex on HUAC, ending with the line that Hu-Wacky judges “dare conduct a witch-hunt without real witches. They have created Subpoena Envy.”

But the memoir does not by any means zoom in solely on the women’s movement. Kurshan was a leading anti-Vietnam War activist and, in the decades after the 1960s, worked tirelessly with prisoners, also struggling for 15 years to end long-term solitary confinement, working for Puerto Rican independence and rights, more recently battling climate change and for climate social justice and for other such causes. Yet some of her most compelling narrative covers the 1968 Chicago convention and what’s been called the infamous police riot there, but........

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