Weatherman
Stern attended the SDS National Convention in Chicago in June 1969, where the organization's members split into various factions. At the convention there was great discussion of the Weatherman paper and arguments amongst the various chapters of SDS and other activists such as the Black Panther Party erupted throughout the meeting. When Weatherman split off from the SDS, Stern joined Weatherman. After the convention Stern went back to Seattle and began to prepare for Days of Rage which would take place in Chicago, on October 8–11, 1969. Stern worked to recruit individuals to join Weatherman for Days of Rage riots. Stern joined the Seattle Weatherman collective, where her extensive use of drugs, provocative style of dress and habit of supporting the collective by topless dancing earned her enemies among the group's more solemn female leadership. She was expelled after five months because the leadership distrusted her inability to function anonymously within a group and her unwillingness to give in to the group's regular tyrannizing "criticism–self criticism" sessions.
According to Maurice Isserman's review of Stern's 1975 memoir,
| “ | Stern... makes it painfully clear that her own self-loathing and self-destructive bent had much to do with her joining Weatherman (she made one suicide attempt as a child, another in her Seattle days and eventually succumbed in 1976 to a combination of drugs and alcohol that may have constituted a final successful attempt). Stern, who privately thought of herself as "Susan Stern Sham" while projecting a miniskirted and leather-jacketed image of tough sexy femininity, confessed in her memoir to being "obsessed with death and dying.... I fantasized about shootouts with a dozen pigs, killing some of them, and finally getting killed myself.... I had to die with meaning." | ” |
Read more about this topic: Susan Stern