Women's Collective Acts of Resistance

Peace and Anti-Nuclear Activism

Voice of Women started in Canada in 1960 to provide a means for Canadian women to unite and promote peace and disarmament, express resistance to war, and challenge the development and use of nuclear weapons. They wrote briefs and position papers and organized creative actions. For example, they collected children's baby teeth for the University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry to test for strontium 90 and monitor nuclear fallout. In 1967, members of Voice of Women went to meet women in the Soviet Union, a country deemed an enemy by their government. In 1969, they invited Vietnamese women to come to Canada for a cross-country educational tour; since Vietnamese women were not allowed in the United States, they held some meetings near the border to allow American women to come and meet the Vietnamese women. Voice of Women has accreditation at the United Nations.

Greenham Common, England, is now famous for the creativity and endurance of women who set up a camp at the military base to protest cruise missiles being stationed there. From 1981, women organized die-ins, climbed fences, danced on silos, wove giant webs around the base, and entered the base, once in a long snake cloth. Greenham Common women's ingenuity was remarkable, and their determination could not be squashed, in spite of constant evictions and imprisonment. On December 11, 1983, 50,000 women embraced the base, holding mirrors so that evil could reflect on itself. Theirs was an example of the transformative power of the imagination. They had two goals: opposing and protesting destructive forces and expressing a deep hope in human beings' capacity [Page 1480]for change. Anger and hope worked together in a creative ferment. By 1990, the cruise missiles had gone. In 2002, the women's peace movement dedicated a steel and stone sculpture enclosed in a garden as a historic commemorative site to symbolize the Greenham Common women's peace camp.

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