Women Strike For Peace

WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE. The grass-roots, participatory movement of American women called Women Strike for Peace (WSP) was born on 1 November 1961 as a radioactive cloud from a series of Russian atomic tests was passing over American cities and the United States was threatening its own resumption of atmospheric testing after a three-year moratorium. Worried about the effect of nuclear fallout on the health of children born and unborn, and fearful that the escalation of the nuclear arms race could lead to human extinction by accident or design, tens of thousands of women, in sixty communities from coast to coast, walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in an unprecedented day-long women’s strike for peace. This one-day action was the largest national women’s peace protest of the twentieth century.

In the process of transforming the strike into a national woman’s peace movement with one hundred locals, ten regional offices, and a network of contacts in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the women of WSP developed an innovative and feminine political style. It was characterized by an antihierarchical, loosely structured, nonorganizational format, and spontaneous direct action at the grass-roots level. WSP created a nonideological, maternal rhetoric that served the movement well. At a time when peace dissenters were characterized by the political establishment and the media as either “commies” or “kooks,” the image projected by WSP of respectable, yet militant, middle-class mothers wearing white gloves and flowered hats while picketing for nuclear disarmament helped to legitimize the movement’s radical critique of the Cold War. By stressing the way in which the men in power were undermining mothers’ capacity to carry out their assigned role of life preservation and moral guardianship, WSP was able to gain support for confrontations with such sacrosanct military institutions as the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and to win sympathy for its defiance of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which summoned the one-year-old movement to a hearing in December 1962.

WSP had, from its inception, rejected political screening and the exclusion of Communists and former Communists from the movement as a manifestation of outdated Cold War thinking. It is not surprising, then, that WSP did not cower before HUAC. Instead, it challenged the committee’s monopoly on Americanism, declaring that, “with the fate of humanity resting on a push-button, the quest for peace has become the highest form of patriotism.” When the chairman of the committee asked Dagmar Wilson, one of the five founders of WSP and its acknowledged spokesperson, “Would you permit Communist Party members to occupy leading posts in Women Strike for Peace,” she answered, knowing that she spoke for most WSP women: “Well, my dear sir, I have absolutely no way of controlling, do not desire to control, who wishes to join the demonstrations and the efforts that the women strikers have made for peace. In fact, I would also like to go even further. I would like to say that unless everybody in the whole world joins us in this fight, then God help us.”

To the follow-up question, “Would you knowingly permit or welcome Nazis or Fascists,” Wilson replied, “If we could only get them on our side.” The HUAC hearings on WSP did much to discredit the committee in late 1962. For the first time, headlines critical of the committee were featured on front pages of newspapers across the country, PEACE GALS MAKE RED HUNTERS LOOK SILLY, REDHUNTERS DECAPITATED, PEACE LADIES TANGLE WITH BAFFLED CONGRESS, and IT’S LADIES DAY AT THE CAPITOL: HOOTS, HOWLS, AND CHARM were typical.

At its peak, in 1963, WSP estimated that it had a following of from 100,000 to 500,000. But this was a figure that could neither be verified nor refuted as there never was an official membership list or dues-paying structure. WSP’s most successful campaign was for the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which the women supported as the first limited step toward nuclear disarmament. The movement then turned its attention to nuclear proliferation. In May 1964 WSP organized a NATO Women’s Peace Force demonstration at The Hague. There, women from the NATO countries, including eight hundred from West Germany, picketed a NATO meeting to draw attention to the dangers of a proposed multilateral nuclear fleet, which would have placed the fingers of German submarine commanders on nuclear triggers. WSP made headlines across Europe as one of its representatives, Ava Helen Pauling, was barred from entering the Netherlands for the demonstration, while the former Nazi general who had been involved in the bombing of Rotterdam was welcomed as a NATO official. While WSP never built a mass movement in opposition to the multilateral nuclear fleet at home or abroad, it mobilized opinion makers in every NATO country. The United States eventually abandoned the plan for a NATO nuclear fleet.

By the end of 1964, WSP was diverted from anti-nuclear organizing by the escalating war in Vietnam. For the remainder of the decade and until the United States withdrew from Vietnam, WSP was an active part of the anti-war coalition. Refusing to accept the government’s characterization of the people of Vietnam as their enemy, members of WSP made several trips to Hanoi, and arranged three conferences with the leading women of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of the South around the slogan “Not Our Sons, Not Your Sons, Not Their Sons.” WSP also played a significant role in the anti-draft movement, reaching across race and class lines to counsel more than 100,000 young men on their legal rights under the selective service system. The movement developed a statement of complicity with resisters, which offered not only moral but financial support. WSP women appeared regularly at induction lines, providing adult support to young men who refused to cross the line, and sat in at the trials of resisters to show the judges that “the women are watching.” In 1970 WSP was instrumental in electing its own national legislative chairperson, Bella Abzug, to the House of Representatives. Abzug ran as WSP leader and found that it was her long anti-war record that won her the election.

Most of the women who participated in WSP came from liberal to Left political backgrounds, having been pacifists, Quakers, anarchists, Socialists, or Communists in the years before World War II. Even those who blamed the United States for the Cold War exhibited a postnuclear sensibility that rejected all ideological and abstract justifications for nuclear brinkmanship. The women were powerfully attracted to A. J. Muste’s formulation of a “Third Camp” position that rejected both superpowers’ disregard for human rights and human life. “No Tests—East or West” was one of WSP’s most widely used slogans in the campaign for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

I. F. Stone, the independent radical journalist, proclaimed in 1970 that he knew of no anti-war or radical organization of any kind that had been as flexible and intelligent in its tactics, and as free from stereotypes and sectarianism in its strategy as WSP. He was, of course, blind to WSP’s political use of sex-role stereotypes. WSP built its movement on female culture. The participants were comfortable campaigning to save the children, but they had not yet learned to demand anything for themselves. Because its key women were socialized in the decades after the first wave of feminism and before the second, WSP had neither the consciousness, the understanding, nor the language with which to connect women’s secondary status in the family and the economy with their exclusion from political power.

What WSP did accomplish in the early 1960s was to bring progressive women into the arena of international affairs, from which they had been barred for over a decade by McCarthyism and the feminine mystique. WSP helped to transform the image of the concerned mother from private to public, and from passive to militant. As women in the United States have done many times in the past, WSP used traditional domestic ideology to turn it on its ear, to extend women’s influence from the nursery to the body politic.

Swerdlow, Amy. Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Women Strike for Peace Records, 1961-1996. Swarthmore College Peace Collection. https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/DG100-150/DG115/DG115WSP.html