Women Strike for Peace Topic Exploration

Dylan Deines

Dr. Brown

3/29/16

Topic Exploration

1)      “Women Strike for Peace” was a large group of woman who banded together in order to protest nuclear bomb testing during the Cold War. The group would later protest other national issues later in their history, such as the Vietnam War and later the Iraq-Persian Gulf War. The group lasted until the late 1990’s. I will be studying their early protest against nuclear testing during the Cold War, a protest that many have thought to have led to JFK signing the nuclear test-ban treaty.

2)      Identity is quite easy to distinguish in this specific protest, and therefore is tied to the protest in an obvious manner. The title of the group itself makes the protest directed towards woman, and their biggest voice of concern was to protect their children, thus making a majority of the women in the group mothers. “Composed of mostly white, educated, middle-class women, the WSP utilized the post-World War II female domestic roles of mother and wife to call women to advocate for peace for the sake of their children,” (Women Strike for Peace).

3)      The group utilized their identity to send a message to JFK, while physically using signs, mottos, and large volunteerism to make their voices heard. It is the sheer size of the protest (about 50,000 women stood outside the white house with signs advocating for peace) that made their opinion so strongly heard.

4)      My concern with the project is maybe the lack of sources I will be able to find, but then again I am just scratching the surface in the research aspect of the project. I think it will be interesting to link the women’s movement during the 1960’s with this specific protest and how the fight for equality is a bigger picture to the protest against nuclear testing. I also want to research how World War II effected women’s roles as domestic figures (World War II gave women a lot of power, confidence, and credibility because of their work in the factories and other male-led jobs while they were off fighting in the war). The identity and the connection is pretty obvious, so I don’t have much worry there.

Citation:

"Dorothy Marder Women Strike for Peace Exhibit." Dorothy Marder Women Strike for Peace Exhibit. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. <http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/Exhibits/Dorothy Marder/MarderExhibit1A_files/MarderExhibit1A.html>.