'Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change -- these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about.' Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, begins with this list of issues excluded from liberal feminism in favour of a 'lean-in' complicity with capitalism's continued investment in global inequalities (front flap). Reading this list reminded me again of Greenham's commitment to an intricately woven web of motivations behind the apparently single issue of nuclear disarmament: 'cuts in public spending in social services and healthcare', (free) 'nurseries and playgroups', 'better pay for public service workers', defending and improving the quality of social housing were all part of the struggle as they stood 'against the sickening waste and mismanagement of money, skills and resources invested in the arms race' (Fran De'Ath, March 1982, in Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenham Women Everywhere, Boston: South End Press, 1983, p. 33). Many of the women who marched from Cardiff to Greenham in the summer of 1981 had experience of organising in socialist and Marxist groups, trade unionism, campaigns against gendered violence, and for social housing. Questions of housing in particular featured heavily both in the consciousness and daily lives of Greenham women, many of them already living in squats at the time of their involvement with the camp. Internationalism was a key feature of the camp, regularly hosting international delegations of women peace and/or anti-nuclear activists, and sending delegations to other camps and women's conferences across both sides of the iron curtain. The ecological consciousness of Greenham Common is yet more widespread and informed its ethos, its day-to-day operations, and nearly all of the media and artefacts (posters, newsletters, etc.) that the peace camp left behind.
Like much of feminist theory and practice now and in the recent past, the women's peace camp at Greenham Common represents a mix of intersectional failures and successes. Although 'privilege' wasn't a current term at the time, there is evidence that Greenham women were conscious of some of their privileges, including ableism, and put their privileges to work. For example, in Whatever you Want (Channel 4, Episode 6, 13/12/1982; BFI Reuben Library), a young stayer spoke of her capacity to live outdoors in winter as her personal contribution to the struggle: she said she wasn’t qualified to run for Parliament but was strong enough to camp out in the cold. Home-owners made their properties available as bases of operations, and to offer respite to stayers.
Race and class were regular topics of discussion at the camp and within its networks but were not always adequately addressed let alone resolved. This post brings together some key documents that discuss and critique questions of race in reference to the Greenham Common peace camp and women's peace activism more broadly.
IMPORTANT!!! PLEASE READ
As part of our commitment to creating and affirming life, peace and growth, personally and collectively, we must act as transformers of energy.
We will not return violence with violence, or death energy with killing anger.
Instead we will burn our rage to songs and strength to Greenham Common.
We understand that there is no safety to be found in the possession of weapons, and we will not carry them. We know that our only real safe place is our power, and that our power is born of and nourished by the peace we keep. This cannot be taken from us or used against us, as can a knife, mace or gun. The only way we lose our power and thus open ourselves to danger, is by becoming careless of the peace in which it is rooted, by letting it slip away. We will tender with great care our peace and our power throughout the day.
We will come to Greenham Common with clear and focussed [sic] spirit, as ourselves, with each other. We will not bring alcohol or drugs with us.
While we cherish the spontaneity and randomness essential to the brilliant diversity of life, we also know that in large groups chaos creates a confusion which can undermine our focus and diffuse our energy. We agree that we will move with an awareness of the effects which our motion might create. We will walk and ride and dance, but we will not run. We will pass, carry, bring and build, but we will not throw.
We will not cause harm, either verbally or physically, to any person or other living thing.
Especially, we will not verbally abuse those police officers, messengers and office workers who have few options in choosing their occupations, due the economic realities of sex, race and class in this country. We will not direct our furry, which the generals – the destroyers of life – deserve, against our sisters and brothers who suffer this destruction.
[MayDay Rooms, London. GC/GK/1/1982/1-37, document no. 7. With handwritten note on top ‘Distributed at 12 December action at Greenham’]
This statement, distributed in advance of the Embrace the Base action involving approx. 30,000 women, captures the non-violent commitment of the peace camp while also pinpointing some of the ways in which it relies on white middle-class privilege, particularly in its attitude to the police. Contemporary environmental movements such as XR, which has been compared to Greenham Common, have been criticised for similar intersectional shortcomings and specifically white privilege.
It is worth pointing out that although racial and class privilege may have originally informed women's decision to join Greenham, the experience of the protest at and in support of the peace camp (particularly experiences of arrest, imprisonment, and the court process), served to change many of the protesters' attitudes towards the police and the criminal justice system, as Sasha Roseneil's research demonstrates (Disarming Patriarchy, Open University Press, 1985, pp. 153-155). In the words of Susan Lamb, 28 (at the time of interview), stayer: 'It was like walking into the lion's jaws, finding out that it wasn't a democracy. That was a shock to me, and that there is no justice. And that is was as bad as we all thought, and worse.' (ibid, p. 154)
Discussing the failures of mainstream feminism to contend with questions of race and class alongside gender, Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe identify the women’s peace movement as a prime example of universalising Eurocentrism and even parochialism. At the same time, feminist pacifist activism held the promise of breakthroughs through the realisation of media bias and the experience of police brutality.
The best example of this [inability to deal with race and racism] is in the women’s peace movement. They’ve got all the openings there – the uranium mining in Namibia, the nuclear testing that’s been going on on the Aborigine’s land, the police powers to brutalise people on demonstrations – yet they can only see the anti-nuclear issue in terms of protecting their own backyards. It’s as if they’ve just discovered imperialism, and they’re only worried about it because it threatens their particular lifestyle. They say they don’t like violence, but there are a lot of other forms of violence around they’ve never bothered about before now. Seeing your child slowly starve to death is violence. Rotting in a South African jail is violence. Poverty is violence.
There are some good things coming out of the peace movement though. I think a lot of white women are beginning to wake up. When they get kicked around by the police and check the media’s version of events, they begin to see what Black people have to face every day of their lives. And when they get thirty days in Holloway for being assaulted, and find that nearly half of the women inside are Black it forces them to confront the realities and to start making links. That’s the point at which any allegiances will be made between Black and white women. Until then, it’s all rhetoric.
Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Verso, 2018). Expanded edition of the original (Virago Press, 1985), with a foreword by Lola Okolosie and and afterword by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, Suzanne Scafe and Heidi Safia Mirza, p. 175.
Wilmette Brown, Black Women and the Peace Movement, 2nd expanded edition (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1984). First edition published by the International Women's Day Convention, August 1983.
Wilmette Brown's involvement at Greenham Common was both influential and profoundly controversial. Before Greenham, Brown (b. 1946, Newark, NJ) was active in the US civil rights, anti-war, and Black Panther movements in the US. She is co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework (1975; now Women of Colour in the Global Women's Strike) and has since been active in the King's Cross Women's Centre. Now renamed Crossroads Women's Centre, this cluster of feminist and anti-racist groups in North London (originally in Euston, currently in Kentish Town) started life as a squat in a heavily squatted neighbourhood in 1975.
In addition to Brown's eponymous essay, the second and expanded edition of Black Women and the Peace Movement includes an edited transcript of 'Across the Divide of Race, Nation and Poverty', a speech delivered by Brown at a Bristol meeting, attended by 150 and organised by a group of black and white men and women (p. 13). Brown identified the women's peace movement as an important site of feminist anti-racist struggle. The book outlines some of the ways in which 'peace' as an seemingly obvious and apparently universal demand fails to account for let alone begin to address the legacies of imperialism and racism in global racial capitalism and militarism. Such shortcomings aren't unique to the women's peace movement but reflect the failures of white feminism. Brown argues that in prioritising the right to safe and legal abortion and access to labour markets for themselves, white feminists sacrificed the potential for a truly global women's movement in favour of their own careerism and 'success' in (what we would now call) neoliberal terms. The demand 'to pay women not the military' that 'Black welfare mothers' share in common with Virginia Woolf can only be satisfied if all of women's work is recognised as work and therefore gets fairly remunerated, including crucially the care work of social reproduction (esp. pp. 41-50).
Thoroughly deserving of being re-read and re-evaluated, Brown's book anticipates the recent feminist foregrounding of gendered social reproductive labour paired with gendered poverty as the single most pressing feminist issue.
The magnified logo on the book cover is used in other critiques of Greenham's racial politics (including Amanda Hassan's, below), and is a modified version of the logo of Wages for Housework campaign, in which a woman's hand clutches USD and GBP banknotes, encircled by a female symbol. This changed logo adds the peace sign alongside the currency ones. Considering the content of Brown's book, the changed logo could be interpreted in different ways: either as marking an alliance between pacifist and materialist anti-racist feminist struggle; or, as an indictment of the peace movement's failure (or unwillingness) to target capitalism alongside militarism.
Cartoon by Cath Jackson in Breaching the Peace (London: Only Women Press, 1983), p. 33. A collection of papers most of which were written for a radical feminist half-day workshop 'The Women's Liberation Movement versus The Women's Peace Movement or How Dare You Presume I went to Greenham?', held at a Woman's Place, London, 10 April 1983. Other papers were reprinted from Catcall (Sophie Laws, 1981), WIRES, and The Merseyside Women's Liberation Newsletter (Margrit Shildrick, 1983).
Amanda Hassan, 'A Black Woman in the Peace Movement', Spare Rib, no. 142 (May 1984), pp. 6-8. Also available as a digital copy from the British Library.
Hassan shares insights from her simultaneous involvement in British and Guyanese politics, and reflects on the challenges of her engagement in peace and anti-nuclear movements (she was elected to the CND National Committee in 1983) including women's peace movements, despite their overwhelming whiteness and, worse, colour-blindness. She shares a painful incident that occurred at Greenham, also illustrated in a cartoon by Louise, 1984 (below):
I was holding on to the fence along with some other women (all white) and from nowhere a big burly policeman gave me a chop on my arms and sent me reeling into the mud. None of the other women who were also holding onto the fence got this treatment. When I commented on this, a woman said: 'Well, you're only picked on because you're short'. (I'm under five foot.)
Couldn't they see it was because I was Black?
Anyway, when I got home, I immediately rang my mother (which I usually do as she likes to know whether I've been arrested or not), to get the sympathy and understanding which I hadn't got from the women I was with, and which I presumed she would provide me with. But I was wrong. After hearing my story she said: 'This is the first of many blows you'll receive.' Only a woman who understood the struggle could have said that. (p. 7)
Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, 'Challenging Imperial Feminism', Feminist Review, no. 17 (July 1984), pp. 3-19.
In this germinal article, Amos and Parmar analyse their contemporary feminist theoretical canon, tracing both black feminist absences as well as 'the ways in which we as Black women have been made "visible" in such writings and the terms in which our experiences have been explained' (p. 3). They examine configurations of diversity and the assumption of whiteness as the norm against which others' differences are measured, feminist critiques of the family, sexuality, and finally 'Nuclear Power on the North London Line', in which women's peace activism and particularly Greenham Common are critiqued for their implicit and explicit nationalism, the assumption that nuclear war, rather than daily gendered violence, is the most immediate threat to women's lives globally, and the unacknowledged (white) privilege of non-violent direct action. The authors conclude that both mixed and women's peace activism must 'integrate an international perspective within their frameworks' (p. 17).
In 1987 the Yellow Gate at Greenham Common temporarily and unofficially established a separate identity from the rest of the peace camp, under the leadership of Wilmette Brown. The split was acrimoniously debated in publications including City Limits, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Time Out, etc., and is summarised by Sasha Roseneil in Common Women (2000, pp. 178-182) and Disarming Patriarchy (1995, pp. 95-96). For the Yellow Gate's perspective see Beth Junor, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp: A History of Non-violent Resistance, 1984-95, illustrated by Katrina Howse (Working Press, 1995).
The Winter 1987-1988 Newsletter from the Yellow Gate explicitly focused on the issue of racism at the peace camp. It included numerous articles by Katrina Howse: 'Racism', which drew parallels between the refusal of male activists to believe rape victims at the Molesworth mixed peace camp and Greenham women's unwillingness to deal with their own racism; and 'Witch Burning' (pp. 18-20), which compares the marginalisation of Brown and women from the King's Cross Centre at Greenham to the persecution of witches in 17th century England.
The cartoon above brings together deflections of racism at the peace camp, some of which still ring uncomfortably familiar 33 years later.
Ulrike Wöhr, 'Reimagining Greenham, or the transnationality of the nation in activist women’s narratives in 1980s Japan', in Clare Midgley, Alison Twells, and Julie Carlier (eds.), Women in Transnational History: Connecting the local and the global (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 54-74.
In her contribution to a collection of essays on women, history, and transnationalism, Wöhr begins by reminding the reader that, while transnational encounters often mark a space where 'subjectivities constituted by binary paradigms and generic concepts pertaining to culture, gender, nationality and race' are 'rearticulated and modified' (p. 56), transnationalism offers no guarantees against stereotypes, about both one's own or other communities. In the case of women's anti-nuclear peace movements in Japan, contradictory concepts of gendered 'Japaneseness' were rhetorically mobilised, and such concepts were often shaped within transnational communications seeking to articulate both differences and similarities among women across the world.
Rather than ignoring questions of national, cultural, and racial difference, Wöhr argues that such questions 'proliferated' at Greenham (p. 61), as well as being inscribed with the desire to move beyond difference (p. 66). Wöhr tracks how such issues are played out in the activity and representations of Hiro Sumpter, a Japanese woman living in England and Greenham camper who toured Japan in the summer of 1984 to talk about Greenham, screen the film Carry Greenham Home (Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, National Film and Television School, 1983), and liaise with autonomous women peace activists across Japan. Wöhr concludes that Greenham's emphasis on difference did not serve to 'reiterate the Japan/West binary' but to 'establish an imagined community of Japanese women' (p. 65). Despite its historical significance, the under-representation of Hiro's activity in the archives of Greenham is symptomatic of the peace camp's failure to sustain and promote such transnational networks, and of Greenham scholars' omission to adequately document and analyse them (p. 69).
In the context of my study of art and visual activism at Greenham, Wöhr's indictment of the widespread use of photographs from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by peace activists seems particularly pertinent (see esp. note 101, where she cites Paul Boyer's 1995 article). The circulation of such images of death and suffering for European audiences remains highly problematic despite its apparent good intentions (to avert similar disasters from being repeated), particularly as it is not accompanied by an awareness of peace activism within Japan. My research takes such considerations into the field of art and visual activism and contextualises them in more recent debates on the ethics of deploying images of death and suffering of subjects who are likely to be construed as 'other' to their audiences, including photographs of the drowned 3-year old refugee Alan Kurdi (2015) and artworks responding to it, from performances to street art, and the controversy around the painting by US artist of European heritage Dana Schutz of the deformed face of African American teenager Emmett Till (Open Casket, 2016).
The predominance of humanist universalism within peace movements, including women’s anti-militarism and anti-nuclear activism (which was overwhelmingly though not exclusively pacifist), presented obstacles to intersectional analysis and to the acknowledgment, let alone rectification, of inequalities among women. In visual culture, this universalism facilitated the circulation of images of what I term ‘the bearable unbearable’, intensely moving images geared to mobilise their audience to act rather than stun them with grief. On the surface, such images cultivate a sense of responsibility through staging retrospective witnessing of the atrocities that they portray; in practice, what keeps them from devastating their audiences and allows them to -- hopefully -- function productively are the layers of historical, geographical, civic and social distance between the subjects portrayed and their spectators.