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Women Against War
It Started With ‘Lysistrata’

By Judith Mahoney Pasternak

thens, 411 BCE: With the city-state depleted and exhausted by the long and costly Peloponnesian War, Athens nevertheless took time out for a theater festival. The hit of the festival was a hilarious, groundbreaking and very topical farce: “Lysistrata,” in which the comic genius Aristophanes depicted a sex strike for peace by the war-weary women of Athens.

By 411, the war extended far beyond Greece’s Peloponnesian peninsula, where Athens’ enemy Sparta ruled. All across the Aegean Sea, Athens’ brilliant and powerful navy was building an empire—and it was not building gently. Five years earlier, in 416, the navy had besieged the tiny island-state of Melos, slaughtered every adult Melian man and sold the women and children into slavery. The next year, in 415, Athens’ leading dramatic playwright Euripides debuted “The Trojan Women,” a pointed tale of the end of the Trojan War and its tragic consequences for women and children, especially—but not limited to—those on the losing side.

So “Lysistrata” wasn’t the first antiwar play. It was, however, the first play about antiwar organizing—and it stood Euripides’ vision on its head. If women were victims of war, said “Lysistrata,” perhaps women should do something about war. It took the imagination of a genius to picture such a thing, for although Athens was nominally a democracy, women were not part of the body politic; they were the virtual property of their fathers or husbands or brothers or sons. The women of Sparta had more freedom.

No one took Aristophanes’ hint. There was no peace; Athens lost the war a few years later. (A note to empire builders: Barely a dozen years elapsed between the massacre at Melos and the destruction of the walls of Athens under the whips of Spartan overseers.) Yet it was the Attic culture that prevailed in the West—including its gender ethos. Women remained segregated from political life for the next two millennia, and Euripides’ tragic vision, not Aristophanes’, continued to reflect the harsh reality: For all those thousands of years, women and children suffered the terrible consequences of wars they hadn’t made.

Flash forward two-and-a-half millennia to the spring of 2003 CE. The United States was about the enter the second phase of a war that had already been costly and threatened to be long, perhaps endless. It was also the most unpopular war in history, with opponents across the globe protesting by the millions. No longer excluded from the body politic in much of the world, women were prominent in all of those protests, but nowhere more than in the Lysistrata Project: On March 3, women-organized groups in 59 countries around the world held 1,000-plus more-or-less simultaneous readings of Aristophanes’ still-relevant comedy in the hope of inspiring even more mass resistance to the war.

Two World Wars
The Lysistrata Project, initiated by Kathryn Blume, was a long time coming. After the fall of Athens, the ideal of democracy took a long rest in most of the West. But it surfaced again in the 18th century, and with it, this time, came the new notion of women’s equality. By the mid-19th century, as more and more Western monarchies either gave way to or made room for increasing degrees of rule of and by the people, women in the United States and Europe were becoming more and more prominent in movements for change—first for the abolition of slavery, then for women’s equality, then for socialism, labor unions and peace. With slavery still in force in the United States—the only developed country with a substantial population of color—those early activists were predominantly white; even after Emancipation, few African-Americans were in a position to be politically active, and those who were were largely concerned with the continuing dire conditions of Black life. Thus, by the end of the 19th century, women, mostly white middle-class women, formed the solid core of antiwar activism.

Women would be the backbone of the largely white (with some notable exceptions) organized opposition to every particular war of the next 100 years. Women were the backbone—but rarely at the head. For the most part, they either toiled alone or toiled unsung, except in those groups that had “woman” in their name. When they worked apart from organized groups, however, they got plenty of notice—much of it critical. In 1914, on the eve of World War I, the Russian socialist Rosa Luxemburg wrote and spoke widely in Germany in favor of conscientious objection. Before the war ended, Luxemburg served a prison term for her activism and then became one of the peace movement’s martyrs—she and her lover Karl Liebknecht were murdered while in police custody. In 1915, with the war raging, Hungarian labor organizer Rosika Schwimmer came to the United States to plead for U.S.-sponsored mediation to bring peace. Instead, in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson brought a declaration of war to Congress; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the House, voted “no.” Rankin’s election to Congress—when women still did not have the right to vote in the United States—garnered headlines; her vote against war got more. (In December 1941, another “no” vote made her the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars.)

WRL Founder Jessie Wallace Hughan, 1942. WRL/Swarthmore Peace Collection.

Many women, however, thought that the fight for peace required its own organizations. In 1915, several hundred women, many of them active in the fight for suffrage, met in the Hague to try to end the World War and prevent future ones; the organization they founded became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, with veteran social-reformer Jane Addams as its first president. In 1916, New York City feminist and intellectual Crystal Eastman organized the American Union Against Militarism (which eventually metamorphosed into the American Civil Liberties Union).

A year after the war ended, U.S. women got the vote; now they were, at least theoretically, full partners in the political life of this country. Over the next decades, antiwar sentiment had its ups and downs. In the aftermath of the devastating “war to end all wars,” pacifism became almost fashionable. The Wilson administration pushed the League of Nations and European pacifists and supporters of WWI conscientious objectors founded War Resisters’ International. In 1923, pacifist-schoolteacher Jessie Wallace Hughan and her colleague Tracy Mygatt founded WRI’s U.S. affiliate, the War Resisters League.

But as fascism gained strength in Germany, Spain and Italy during the ’30s, opposition to war became problematic for many in the left movements that had provided crucial cadre for peace groups. Nevertheless, minister Richard Sheppard was still able to draw tens of thousands of men to join his Peace Pledge Union; he started it for men only, but pacifist writer and former WWI nurse Vera Brittain helped open it up to women as well; Myrtle Solomon, one of the women who responded, later became the first woman to chair War Resisters’ International. In the United States, journalist and Catholic convert Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in 1933; created as a lay ministry to the poor in the midst of the crushing Depression, the movement would make critical contributions to U.S. pacifism as well.

Antiwar organizing on both sides of the Atlantic got a boost when Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in 1939—the pact brought Communists back into antiwar work in force—but when Germany had second thoughts and attacked the Soviet Union, pacifism fell to its lowest ebb since before the first World War. But the women who opposed war were in it for the long haul, and many of the groups they founded in the early part of the 20th century survived World War II to gain increased strength and membership during the Cold War. (One measure of the vitality of the antiwar movement and women’s work in it is the fact that WILPF, the Peace Pledge Union, the Catholic Worker movement—and, of course, War Resisters’ International and the War Resisters League—are all still alive and still resisting war.)

Moms Against the Bomb
World War II ended with the unleashing of the atomic bomb, which could kill more people—including more civilians—from further away than any weapon that had ever existed before; the world would live in its shadow for the rest of the century and beyond, with the Cold War keeping the threat honed to a razor-sharp edge for nearly five decades. That threat would have a profound influence in the relation of women to war.

The first half of the century had seen a steady increase in women’s participation in public life. After World War II, however, a confluence of forces conspired to send them back to home and hearth, a conspiracy that would in short order give birth to what became known as the Second Wave of Feminism. Yet it was precisely in their role as mothers and nurturers that Western women—in particular, U.S. and Canadian women—found the new face of war newly threatening: European mothers had been carrying their children to bomb shelters since the creation of aerial warfare in World War I, but the air-raid siren was a sound no U.S. or Canadian mother had ever heard or expected to hear. Now civil defense drills reminded them all the time of the danger their children were in.

The drills and the danger roused them to new goals, new organizations and new ways of organizing. Opposing a specific war or even conscription in general was no longer enough—the antiwar movement had to agitate for détente and disarmament and against nuclear weaponry. By the late ’50s, Marj Swann and Erica Enzer in New England were pouring enormous energy into the Committee for Nonviolent Action, for which peace agitator A.J. Muste organized an early civil disobedience action in Omaha; Swann served jail time for the action (as did Muste). In 1960, Canada’s Thérèse Casgrain formed Voice of Women to protest her country’s entry into the deadly club of nuclear-armed nations. A year later, in the United States, Dagmar Wilson helped create Women Strike for Peace, which took up such specifically “mothers’ ” issues as the contamination of dairy products by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing. In Britain, veteran pacifist Dora Russell, née Black (she had been married to the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell), was one of the founders of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (also still-extant today). Periodic Cold War flareups—like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the edge of Armageddon over the presence of Soviet missiles 60 miles from U.S. soil—kept the peace fire burning.

Protest, too, was also no longer enough. More and more, the resistance to war involved civil disobedience. As early as 1948 five U.S. pacifists—Ernest and Marion Bromley, Maurice McCracken and Wally and Juanita Nelson—began refusing to pay that part of their income taxes that financed the war machine, becoming the founders of the modern war-tax resistance movement. In the late 1950s, the peace movement escalated its tactics and followed the civil rights movement of the U.S. South in the use of mass civil disobedience. Under the leadership of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker movement continued to emphasize issues of war and peace, working alongside members of WRL and other peace groups. Day, along with WRL’s Ralph DiGia and others, was among the leaders of a series of civil defense civil disobedience actions in which protesters defied the law requiring people to take shelter during civil defense drills. One of the protesters was a Greenwich Village writer and mother named Grace Paley, who a decade later would emerge in the leadership of the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War.

By the time the U.S. public realized that the nation was engaged in a shooting war in Vietnam, organizations like WILPF, Women Strike for Peace and the War Resisters League were ready to coalesce with student groups, civil rights activists and what was left of the Old Left (the three categories were not mutually exclusive) into the nucleus of what would be the most massive antiwar movement the country had ever seen. Women were increasingly prominent across the spectrum of resistance, from the outspoken New York City representative to Congress Bella Abzug and actor Jane Fonda, eventually dubbed “Hanoi Jane” by pro-war hawks, to folk superstar Joan Baez (who earned the wrath of the embryonic Second Wave women’s movement with her remark that “girls say yes to boys to who say no” to the draft), to young far (New and Old) Left activists like the Weather Underground’s Bernardine Dohrn and the California Communist-turned-fugitive Angela Davis.

Women Against Daddy Warbucks shred stolen draft files in Rockefeller Plaza, NYC, July 3, 1969. Coco Pekalis.

Within the pacifist world, too, WRL women were making ever more creative contributions: New York activist Norma Becker served as the main organizer for the Fifth Avenue Peace Committee, which held one of the earliest mass protests against the war, actor-spouses Judith Malina and Julian Beck were turning the power of their Living Theatre to antiwar propaganda, Grace Paley was traveling to North Vietnam and writing about her travels, and pacifist and civil-rights activist Barbara Deming was articulating new theories of nonviolence that would eventually midwife a specifically feminist pacifism. Amid all the mass protests against the war, five “Women Against Daddy Warbucks” including the late Jill Boskey broke into a number of New York City draft boards in 1970 and destroyed files as the Berrigan brothers had done in Maryland.

Yet there remained one antiwar activity from which women were apparently barred: Only one woman had held the chair of a peace group that didn’t have “women” in its name—Norma Becker was the Chair of WRL. Only one other would until almost the end of the century.

Women, Feminism & Resistance
In the late 1960s, as U.S. opposition to the war and the fierce resistance of the Vietnamese people made the war increasingly untenable, another movement was rising that would alter, perhaps forever, the dynamics of women’s resistance to war around the world. The Second Wave of feminism grew in part out of the increasing awareness by women in the antiwar movement of the ways in which they were relegated to subordinate roles; its impact on the antiwar and corollary movements is incalculable. The movement gave birth not only to a quantum leap in women’s leadership but also to feminist-influenced organizing models, styles and content and arguably to other movements. It can be said, indeed, that from the early 1970s on, the ever-widening range of women-led actions and campaigns and feminist-influenced processes resembles nothing so much as a great multi-centered web of resistance, one nexus of which began with the women’s movement in the United States; today it extends across the globe.

Increasing solidarity among women peace activists led to a 1975 War Resisters’ International decision to hold a gathering the next year specifically for women peace activists. The decision was bitterly controversial—many in WRI refused to believe that women should meet separately at all—but it helped to realize a conscious feminist presence in WRI that has lasted for nearly 30 years. Both the human rights and environmental movements, parts of which merged with the antiwar movement as they grew, also owed much to feminist perceptions of the earth and the human community. Not coincidentally, women, many of them peace activists, emerged in the leadership of both. In 1976, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan founded the group that eventually became the Peace People in Northern Ireland; a year later, in Argentina, Renée Epelbaum and other grieving women began silent vigils as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to protest the disappearance of their children and other family members under the military dictatorship. In Chile, Roberta Bacic led nonviolent actions protesting the murders and disappearances of the Pinochet dictatorship; Bacic later served on the Chile’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is now on the staff of War Resisters’ International in London.

In the United States, activist Mandy Carter became the key organizer for the 1976 Continental Walk for Disarmament and Justice; she would later staff two regional WRL offices and today combines working for lesbian and gay rights and against racism.

Feminism also nurtured (although it didn’t necessarily originate) anti-hierarchic models of structure and leadership that fed into antiwar and antinuclear actions. In 1977, those models made headlines when more than 2,000 activists organized into consensus-based affinity groups occupied the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire.

In 1979, the Australian pediatrician Dr. Helen Caldicott, working in the United States, published Nuclear Madness, which would become a handbook for both peace activists and antinuclear environmentalists. In 1980, 2,000 women went to Washington in the first all-women’s civil disobedience peace protest, the Women’s Pentagon Action, the tone and tactics of which were something new in the world; the next year, 3,500 of them went back and did it again.

Barbara Deming (right) marches in Seneca, NY, July 30, 1983. Dorothy Marder .

By that time, woman-led peace and human rights groups were a global phenomenon. In 1981 women in England started camping outside a U.S. cruise missile base in Greenham Common and informing the world when trucks left the base to deploy the missiles; the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Encampment lasted until 2000. In 1982, the California antinuclear activist Starhawk brought New Age spirituality into the mix with Dreaming the Dark, her book on witchcraft, goddess worship and activism. The next year U.S. women followed the Greenham example with a women’s peace camp outside a U.S. Army base in Seneca, NY (home of the first women’s rights convention); the same year, German Green Party peace and environmental activist Petra Kelly was elected to the German Parliament, and another year later, in 1984, New Zealand Member of Parliament Marilyn Waring started the movement that made her country a nuclear-free zone in 1984. In the latter part of the decade, a virtual explosion of talent brought women into the leadership of human rights struggles around the world. In Indonesia, Yeni Rosa Damayanti risked her life for solidarity with the people of East Timor (see NVA, January-February 1999); in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi took the same risks to lead nonviolent resistance to the ruling junta; and in Israel, a group of women in dressed in black began holding silent vigils in solidarity with the people of Palestine, starting the Women in Black movement.

The Gulf War and Iraq
In those years, the Cold War that had so colored world events for half a century was drawing to a close. But the collapse of the Communist states triggered a series of hot wars, and in the last decade of the century, former Yugoslavia shattered violently, giving rise to several nonviolent movements for reconciliation including a Bosnian incarnation of Women in Black.

The end of the Cold War also left the United States the world’s sole superpower. The first taste of what that would mean came with the first Gulf War in 1991. An antiwar movement sprang up immediately, with longtime New York activist Leslie Cagan playing a vital organizing role as the movement tried to deal with the new, short form of war. After the war came the brutal sanctions against Iraq, and, again, women’s leadership was prominent in the U.S. opposition, especially Kathy Kelly’s in the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness. Then, very late in the century, two little-heralded events suggested that there had been a sea-change in the relationship between and among women, war and peace when two longtime peace groups, War Resisters’ International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, elected women—Joanne Sheehan and Virginia Baron, respectively—to their top leadership positions. Myrtle Solomon had been WRI’s Chair in the 1980s, but having women at the helm of two such groups at the same time was unprecedented.

Then the century that had seen so much violence ended, and a new millennium seemed to offer new hopes for peace—until the terrible events of September 11, 2001, triggered George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” Within days of the tragedy, Amber Amundson, the widow of one of the dead in the attack on the Pentagon, had published a moving statement begging for reconciliation, not revenge. The Bush administration paid little heed, but in the following months Amundson and some of the other 9-11 bereaved had organized the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows (see page 16). And there were other woman-led peace initiatives: There was the Lysistrata Project, for one, and CODEPINK, an Internet-based “women’s pre- emptive strike for peace” (www. codepinkalert.org).

Last month some 500 activists from across the country met in Chicago to create the formal structure and choose the primary goals of a broad and diverse United Coalition for Peace and Justice (of which WRL is a founding member) to halt the Bush administration’s permanent war. Nearly half of the executive body they elected consisted of women.

Yet for all the changes, women activists continue to feel that they are often less visible than their male counterparts. The history of women organizing against war began twenty-five hundred years ago with a fantasy called “Lysistrata.” That history, no longer a fantasy, is a continuing one and is not ending with the Lysistrata Project—nor is the history of women’s fight for recognition of their efforts.

Nonviolent Activist editor Judith Mahoney Pasternak has covered women’s issues for more than 20 years. This brief outline of women’s efforts in the noble history of women’s and men’s resistance to war probably omits all too many heroes of peace.