Women's Struggles within the American Radical Pacifist Movement

Abstract

Pacifism and peace activism are often stereotyped as the domains of nurturing women acting upon their maternal instincts to end war and thus protect the children of the world. Exploring the history of female radical pacifists with a focus on gender, however, reveals a much more complex set of dynamics that mirrored cultural forces pervading society at large. Their language was not always that of motherhood. From the 1940s through the 1970s, women also used the rhetoric and symbols of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ to frame and justify their pacifist protests. Nor was their activism always celebrated. Instead, whether as ‘brothers’, ‘mothers’, or ‘sisters’, women who acted on the front lines of struggle repeatedly confronted a political culture that celebrated male heroism and masculine militancy, and cast women in secondary supporting roles. In critical ways, the culture of the peace movement thus mirrored the gender dynamics of the very culture of militarism it sought to undermine.