Abstract
In the late 1970s, as the anti-nuclear movement began its large-scale revival, an array of women’s protest collectives and activist organizations formed, aiming to offer feminist perspectives on the nuclear threat and define an appropriate activist response. These new groups built upon, extended, and challenged the legacy of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), formed in 1915, Women Strike for Peace, formed in 1961, and a host of other women’s organizations and feminist groups involved tangentially in peace activism, women’s liberation, and related activity. In the 1980s, some female activists situated their peace protests within political and legislative institutions, drawing a great deal from the successes of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Others, more radical in their approach, used ideas about militarism, ecology, and personal expression to oppose nuclear arms as merely one of a myriad of crises threatening women the world over. Mirroring the meeting of women’s liberation and radical feminism in the late 1960s, these very different strands of feminist thought—and their expression within the anti-nuclear movement—reflect how much second-wave feminism changed during the 1970s. They also demonstrate the significance of the rise of cultural feminism in the 1970s and the subsequent marginalization of radical feminists from the wider women’s peace movement.1
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Notes
See Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 284–86.
By a “politics of difference,” I am not referring exclusively to the difference between men and women, the subject of much historical and theoretical feminist scholarship—see Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)—but in a wider sense to differences within the women’s movement over the interpretation of feminism and the meanings of feminist activism. This was not an entirely new development; radical feminism had undergone a similar “eruption of difference” in the early 1970s, and “difference” continued to provoke debate among feminists in the 1980s.
See Echols A, Daring to Be Bad, Chapter 5; and Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (London: Virago, 1987).
Melissa Haussman has suggested that WAND combined, “perhaps unwittingly,” the liberal feminist method of reformism with cultural feminism’s ideas about biological determinism, in that “women differ inherently on some values from men, including being more supportive of peace initiatives.” Melissa Haussman, “From Women’s Survival to New Directions: WAND and Anti-Militarism,” in Teamsters and Turtles?: U.S. Progressive Political Movements in the 21st Century, ed. John Berg (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 104.
On older women’s activist traditions, as they relate to peace activism, see Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), Chapter 2.
On radical and cultural feminism, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad, Chapter 6; Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, 1996), Chapter 4;
and Sara Evans, “Beyond Declension: Feminist Radicalism in the 1970s and 1980s,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 52–54.
For an interesting discussion of these issues, see J. Zeitz, “Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s—Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 4 (2008), 673–88.
This became known as “ecofeminism.” For an authoritative study on ecofeminism as a feminist theory and as a political movement, see Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Of course, the variety of motivations for women joining the anti-nuclear movement was enormous, but for an interesting ethnographic study, see Ginger Hanks-Harwood, “‘Peacing’ It Together: Recruitment, Motivation, and Social Critiques of Peace Activist Women in the United States in the 1980s” (Ph.D. diss., Illif School of Theology and the University of DenverColorado Seminary, 1991).
Anne Marie Pois, “Foreshadowings: Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and the Ecofeminism/Pacifist Feminism of the 1980s,” Peace and Change 20, no. 4 (1995), 442.
Ynestra King, “Toward an Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology,” in Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. Joan Rothschild (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), 127.
Gwyn Kirk, “Our Greenham Common: Feminism and Nonviolence,” in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics, ed. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 117.
Quoted in Annie Popkin and Gary Delgado, “Mobilizing Emotions: Organising the Women’s Pentagon Action—an Interview with Donna Warnock,” Socialist Review 12, no. 3–4 (1982), 37.
Jan Clausen, “Women and Militarism: Some Questions for Feminists,” Off Our Backs 11, no. 1 (1981), 6.
See, for example, Rhoda Linton and Michelle Whitham, “With Mourning, Rage, Empowerment and Defiance: The 1981 Women’s Pentagon Action,” Socialist Review 12, no. 3–4 (1982), 15–16.
Sociological research on emotion in social movements is illuminating here. For some excellent insights, see Erika Summers Effler, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
and Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Tina Managhan, “Shifting the Gaze from Hysterical Mothers to ‘Deadly Dads’: Spectacle and the Anti-Nuclear Movement,” Review of International Studies 33, no. 4 (2007), 643.
Tacie Dejanikus and Stella Dawson, “Women’s Pentagon Action,” Off Our Backs 11, no. 1 (1981), 2.
See Richard Ellis, “Romancing the Oppressed: The New Left and the Left Out,” Review of Politics 58, no. 1 (1996), 109–54.
See Helen Caldicott to Sherri Arden, February 25, 1982, Helen Caldicott Papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney (hereafter Caldicott Papers, ML), Box 12, Folder 2 (MSS 5451); and Helen Caldicott, A Passionate Life (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1996), 115.
On the idea of a “female consciousness” or innate women’s sensibilities in matters of war and peace, see Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue, Chapter 1; Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), Chapter 5; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Women, War, and Feminism,” Nation June 14, 1980, 723–24.
Ynestra King, quoted in Dejanikus and Dawson, “Women’s Pentagon Action,” 2. On Caldicott’s ideas about gender difference, see Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, rev. ed. (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986), 235–45.
Micaela di Leonardo comments that there was such little distinction between feminist and nonfeminist uses of maternal imagery in the anti-nuclear movement. Micaela di Leonardo, “Morals, Mothers, and Militarism: Antimilitarism and Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 11, no. 3 (1985), 602.
Noteworthy histories of Greenham Common include Sasha Roseneil, Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995);
and Sasha Roseneil, Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham (London: Cassell, 2000).
Loraine Hutchins, “Seneca: Summer of Action and Learning,” Off Our Backs 13, no. 9 (1983), 3; Ann V. Sorenson, “Impressions From 18 Hours at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice,” August 3–4, 1983, 2, Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice Records, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter WEFPJ Records), Box 10, Folder 437.
Holly Zox, part of a personal statement at her trial for criminal trespass at the Seneca Army Depot, November 21, 1983, quoted in Mima Cataldo et al., The Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice: Images and Writings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 53.
Doremus, “Proposal,” 4. Doremus was most likely referring to Joreen , “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 285–99.
On lesbianism at the WEFPJ, see Louise Krasniewicz, Nuclear Summer: The Clash of Communities at the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 67–71, 149–50.
Sue Guist, Peace Like a River: A Personal Journey across America (Santa Fe, NM: Ocean Tree Books, 1991), 157.
See Lois Hayes, “Separatism and Disobedience: The Seneca Peace Encampment,” Radical America 17, no. 4 (1983), 57;
and Judith McDaniel, “One Summer at Seneca: A Lesbian Feminist Looks Back in Anger,” Heresies 5, no. 4 (1985), 8–9. McDaniel argues that the “positive energy” of the Encampment’s activities was necessarily erotic and sexual and could only flourish without men.
Ellen Willis, quoted in Ynestra King, “Feminism and the Revolt of Nature,” Heresies 4, no. 1 (1981), 12.
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© 2014 Kyle Harvey
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Harvey, K. (2014). Personal Politics: Radical Feminism, Difference, and Anti-Nuclear Activism. In: American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432841_4
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