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.

Read more about Jane Alpert:  Early Life, Life As A Radical Leftist, Sam Melville, Mother Right (1974), Bombings, Relations With Members of The WUO, Surrender 1974, Growing Up Underground (1981)

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    Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?
    Jane Alpert (b. 1947)

    If the veil were withdrawn from the sanctuary of domestic life, and man could look upon the fear, the loathing, the detestations which his tyranny and reckless gratification of self has caused to take the place of confiding love, which placed a woman in his power, he would shudder at the hideous wrong of the present regulations of the domestic abode.
    —Lydia Jane Pierson, U.S. women’s rights activist and corresponding editor of The Woman’s Advocate. The Woman’s Advocate, represented in The Lily, pp. 117-8 (1855-1858 or 1860)

    Did all of us feel interested in bombing buildings only when the men we slept with were urging us on?
    —Jane Alpert (b. 1947)