Eve Hinderer papers

Eve Hinderer was born in New York City, August 25, 1947. During her first year at City College of New York, she was introduced to socialist and other left-wing groups. At the same time her life at home with a verbally abusive father had reached a crisis and at the age of 17 in 1965, she became a runaway. She eventually went to live with her godmother in Daytona Beach, Florida. There she experienced her first bout of mental illness. After three months she returned home and to school, but after about a year she was suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and was ready to enter therapy for the first time. At that time, she had become involved with the New York Federation of Anarchists. "In its' emphasis on personal transformation as the starting point for revolutionary theory and practice, anarchism resolved my conflict between the left's concern for justice and the libertarian emphasis on the individual. I took refuge in the tenets of anarchism..." She also became active in the nascent women's movement in the Fall of 1967 and was a founding member of New York Radical Women in New York until the summer of 1968, when she organized a second consciousness raising group with Judith Duffett. While she was traveling around the country that summer, new women continued to join the group including feminist Robin Morgan. By that Fall, a new and much larger group continued to meet at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office on East 11th street in New York City. Hinderer soon after dropped out of the movement, feeling strongly about the importance of small-group interaction as an organizing tool. In 1971, she joined the emerging gay liberation movement, becoming active in the lesbian separatist community in New York's lower Manhattan. She withdrew three years later, acknowledging her bisexuality. Hinderer received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in 1985. She has survived recurring bouts of mental illness. She currently lives in Newburgh, N.Y.