Jo Freeman’s Review of Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI

Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI           

by Judy Gumbo

New York: Three Rooms Press, 2022, 

333 pages with a ten page photographic insert

 

 

It’s also an inside story of someone who was present for several eye-catching events.  YIP stands for Youth International Party – with Party meaning party party and not political party.  Officially founded on December 31, 1967 by a few friends in a New York City apartment, Yippies used street theater and satire to oppose the war in Viet Nam, promote cannabis and generally raise hell.  In those days, the war was hot and the counter culture was blooming.

 

Judy’s name wasn’t Gumbo in 1967, when she walked into her Toronto bedroom and found her first husband in bed with another woman.  With an ABD (All But Dissertation) in Sociology, Judy soon flew to California and for all practical purposes never went back to Canada.  Berkeley became home base, though for the next fifty years she lived all over the country and protested all over the world.

 

The child of Canadian members of the Communist Party, she soon found herself in the middle of Yippiedom.  Early in 1968 she walked up to two handsome young men on the UC Berkeley campus and introduced herself.  One of them (a hunk with blond curls) became her life partner  despite several side trips into the arms of other men.

 

Moving from authoritarian Communism to semi-anarchistic yippiedom, Judy was still a woman in a man’s world.  She discovered that “Yippie men talked; Yippie women listened.” (p. 66)  As was true in the larger society, it didn’t matter how brilliant your ideas or how creative your actions, a woman’s status depended on the man she was related to.  Her Stew Albert was the best friend of Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as well as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.  He made her an automatic insider.

 

Indeed, it was Cleaver who gave her the name Gumbo.  She finally blew up when he called her “Mrs. Stew” one too many times.  After a long pause, Cleaver said “then, I’ll call you Gumbo.” (p. 44)  Gumbo is okra stew.

 

Thanks to these connections Judy found herself on the inside of Yippie actions, often doing the clerical and support work but always observing closely. She displays a fine eye for detail as she describes what they wore and what they ate, as well as what they said and did.