Jane Alpert

Jane Alpert

Jane Lauren Alpert (born May 20, 1947) is an American former radical who conspired in the bombings of eight government and commercial office buildings in New York City in 1969. Arrested when other members of her group were caught planting dynamite in National Guard trucks, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy, but a month before her scheduled sentencing jumped bail and went into hiding.

After four and a half years of wandering the country working at low-level jobs under false names, she surrendered in November 1974 and was sentenced to 27 months in prison for the conspiracy conviction. In October 1977 she was sentenced to an additional four months imprisonment for contempt of court, for refusing to testify at the 1975 trial of another defendant in the 1969 bombings.

During her fugitive years, Alpert saw that the radical left was in decline and began to identify with radical feminism, mailing a manifesto to Ms. Magazine, along with a set of her fingerprints to authenticate it. That document, Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory, denounced "the sexual oppression of the left" and detailed her conversion from militant leftist to radical feminist.

Alpert attended Swarthmore College, majoring in Classics and graduating with honors in 1967 after developing an interest in radical politics. She did graduate work at Columbia University but dropped out after the 1968 student uprising. She wrote for Rat Subterranean News, a New York City underground newspaper and became involved with the Black Panther movement. Her autobiography Growing up Underground was published in 1981.