Lynne Jones (ed): Keeping the Peace (Women's Peace Handbook 1), Women's Press, 1983, £3.60.
Keeping the Peace is a collection of accounts by women in Britain, the USA, Western Europe and Japan of their involvement in actions for peace: the women who threw blood and wove threads around the Pentagon, the Babies Against the Bomb lobby of Parliament and the Oxford Mother's March, the Greenham Common Peace Camp, and the 45-year old campaign by the Shibokusa women against the occupation of their land by the Japanese and US armies who subsequently encouraged prostitution and forcibly evicted them.
Women's opposition to war is nothing new. In 1870, women protested against the 'pastime of princes' on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, and in 1889 'Lay Down Your Arms' by Bertha von Suttner was a bestseller, translated into 27 languages. Women opposed the First World War and in the 1950s mailed their babies' teeth to Congressmen to protest against the effects of radioactive fallout.
Why organise seperately as women? Some felt compelled to act because of their traditional roles as mothers, or wanted to be assertive peacemakers (Women for Life on Earth), to devise [illegible] to find new ways of involving women, or to discover feminist working processes and analysis.
Many feminists were initially reluctant to become involved in the peace movement, because they saw it as reinforcing the stereotype of woman as mother and conciliator, or because they were accustoming themselves to the use of violence as a necessary part of liberation. Many sought the positive satisfaction of helping other women through campaigns around abortion, rape and childcare, issues which mixed groups tended to ignore and which seemed likely to produce more tangible results than taking on the monster of the nuclear establishment and international politics.
The women at Greenham Common discuss the exclusion of men from the camp: their presence would provoke more violence from the police, they would be upset by women being mistreated, the authorities should be obliged to deal with women, the women want to find their own strengths and assert themselves. The camp gives its residents energy and confidence, they feel they are making a positive physical statement, they want passers-by to question why the women have foresaken their normal lives, they ask the construction workers what they think of men who built Hitler's gas chambers.
Some of the campaigns are specifically feminist with analyses of the relationship between women's oppression and nuclear technology and violence, others steer well clear of any identification with the women's liberation movement. However, this is basically a handbook for practical action and there is little political analysis. A major feature is systematic, detailed advice on the organisation of marches, peace camps, blockades and street theatre, and on setting up groups.
SUE JESSUP is an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement and the Labour Party.