POLITICS

by Joe Newlin

Throughout United States history, many groups and social movements have struggled to advance their respective versions of peace-oriented policy-making. They have offered various visions, pursued various strategies, drawn members from various walks of life, and appealed to various constituencies. They have also achieved various levels of success. All have sought to alter in some way the fabric of society, to change people’s attitudes and behavior in regard to policy. One group in particular, the anti-nuclear Women Strike for Peace (WSP), stands out by virtue of having been a movement on two fronts; while advocating for peace, it also served to somewhat obliquely address gender inequality.

Women Strike for Peace was formed as a gender-specific reaction to Cold War militarism. "As women," declared founder Dagmar Wilson, "we feel a peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war...we are especially the custodian[s] of life." Wilson left Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) because of the group’s failure to confront "mother’s issues" like the contamination of milk by Strontium 90, among other reasons. Eleanor Garst, another founding member, believed women to be more free than men to challenge deep-seated national policies, and was inspired to join the group by Carol Urner, whose peace activism was spurred by concern for protecting her son. For WSP, the maternal orientation was inseparable from the anti-nuclear.

In addition to portraying a maternal image, WSP promoted many gender stereotypes associated with the women’s "sphere." Wilson emphasized her role as a housewife in order to champion a type of person that was typically downgraded, even though she herself was a successful illustrator of children’s books, the result being that she was subsequently branded a political neophyte by the press. Coverage was often condescending, such as when the Los Angeles Times quoted self-deprecating comments made by the activists, or when the Washington Post placed a WSP story on the "For and About Women" page. However, this seems to have been as much a result of conscious strategy on the part of the women as of sexist journalism. Bella Abzug was

uncomfortable with the WSP tactic of promoting the stroller-pushing, maternal image, and repeatedly lectured the activists, to little avail, to transcend motherhood and realize their feminist heritage.

Because the group’s activism was based on the identification of maternal tendencies with politics, Women Strike for Peace can be seen to have been rooted in the model of women’s political participation that developed during the previous centuries. The prevailing view during colonial and revolutionary times was that a woman’s place was in the home, and this notion was shared by both men and women. In the home, women served society by promoting morality and virtuousness among family members, and by inculcating their sons with the values of civic-minded virtuousness that they would later bring to bear on the larger world. Thus women’s political participation was limited to the narrow confines of their homes.

In the 19th century, women’s sphere was expanded to include service to the community in areas such as education and social work. Women began to exert their influence outside the home, but their roles changed only slightly; they became, in a sense, mothers to the community. A woman’s place was in the home, but the home could be anywhere there were women and children. At the same time, more men became politically empowered as the last property barriers to enfranchisement were eliminated. With men’s increased political participation, parties and other political institutions became not just tools of influence but also bastions of masculinity. In contrast, a feminine mystique emerged that emphasized women’s "motherly" qualities and confined them to the non-political sphere. Etiquette manuals stressed that women were naturally weak, timid, and emotional, and therefore unfit for political life. A variation on women’s innocence, however, was their virtue, because of which they were too good for the dirty world of male politics, resulting in a glorification of women’s sphere. Women wanted to be separate from men, and femininity was viewed as a sort of aptitute that suited women for moral leadership; when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union advocated women’s suffrage, it claimed that it would bring the "higher, selfless [woman’s] nature" to electoral politics.

One can find several parallels between this "cult of true womanhood" and the values expressed by the WSP movement. The activists limited themselves mainly to direct-action protest tactics, at least in the beginning of the movement, steering clear of the electoral realm. The framing of the

Because of this non-threatening post, WSP was able to make several inroads into national politics. President Kennedy’s Science Advisor, Jerome Weisner, credited WSP, along with SANE and Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, for pushing the president to sign the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, and a RAND Corporation study declared that WSP wielded the potential to influence U.S. military policy. Local chapters effectively trimmed civil defense spending, and politicians such as California governor Pat Brown heaped public praise upon the organization. By the late 1960’s as WSP became more active in electoral politics, WSP peace committees in some New York districts functioned like Democratic caucuses. As if to underscore the effectiveness of WSP’s traditional feminine image, the Washington D.C. media declared that the movement had lost its influence following a 1967 demonstration in which activists confronted police and broke through barricades in a decidedly "unladylike" manner.

Perhaps the most striking example of how WSP was able to turn femininity into political power was the way in which it dealt with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1962. The witnesses lectured the committee on their duties to their families and the families of the world, and one even suggested that the movement was too loosely organized to be comprehended by men at all. The women greeted the witnesses with kisses, bouquets of flowers, and standing ovations. Press coverage was largely sympathetic, as the WSP leadership pushed the "motherhood under attack" angle. The protections afforded the WSP by the association between traditional female roles and the qualities of innocence and morality enabled the women to make a mockery of the same organization that had instilled fear in so many witnesses before them.

Women Strike for Peace occupied a transitional period between the end of the old model of women’s political activity described above and the emergence of second wave

feminism. As the new movement appeared with its younger generation of women, radical theories, and personal politics, WSP came under attack for perpetuating harmful stereotypes, or at the very least for seeming old-fashioned. A radical critic would likely argue that the women of WSP were at best victims of a repressive system of gender stratification that relegated women to second-class status; by failing to realize and articulate the injustice of their own circumstances, they perpetuated the sexist norms that required women to be selflessly devoted to the family, the community, society, anybody but themselves. To play the part of the neophyte, this view would contend, would simply reinforce the notion that women are helpless and that decision-making belongs in the hands of men.

This radical argument has merit, but to negate the achievements of WSP on these grounds raises another question. The question becomes one of how best to effect social change; is a change in ideology or attitude a prerequisite for behavioral change, or is it the other way around? That is to say, will a movement that aims its rhetoric at the roots of injustice be as effective at bringing on social change as one that seeks to empower individuals first and foremost, using whatever tools are at hand? The examples provided by history suggest that it is not imperative that a movement for social change begin armed with the most sophisticated theory. Implicit in the very existence of the WSP movement is the notion that the problem of militarism is a problem of masculinity, and that women’s political activity was limited in such a way as to make them sense a need for solidarity. These ideas were never fully articulated within the movement, but as the activists gained experience and insight they did develop an inchoate awareness of such radical themes. More importantly, they became empowered along the way to be effective in the traditionally male political sphere.

Women Strike for Peace became a political force and enabled many women to enter the political arena through a sort of reverse co-optation in which the traditionally repressive model of women’s separate sphere served as political cover for a movement that challenged the status quo. Because the movement’s women activists were able to pit one entrenched value, militarism, against another, the family and the women’s role within it, they were mostly impervious to criticism from the establishment. Historically, the movement straddled the boundary between the decline of the old model of women’s separate (and lesser) sphere and the emergence of second-wave feminism. Through a liberal approach to political activism, the movement empowered women as political activists as well as making tangible gains in the direction of its explicit goal, to promote more peaceful policies.