Women Strike for Peace

Records of Women Strike for Peace - Women Strike for Peace was a movement of volunteer women working to stop the nuclear arms race. This collection features the records of the Washington, DC Chapter and Legislative Office. The files date from 1962 through 2002 and include correspondence, minutes, newsletters and an extensive subject file on topics ranging from Iran Contra to Nuclear Disarmament. Of note are copies of Women Strike for Peace's FBI files that they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/13/magas-revanchist-roots-a-tale-of-tropes/

CounterPunch
12/13/2023

MAGA’s Revanchist Roots: A Tale of Tropes
Signs that MAGA is enmeshed in post-Vietnam War culture begin with its namesake. Make America Great Again is an adoption of Ronald Reagan’s assertion that it was “Morning in America Again,” - the country was moving on from its Vietnam War nightmare.
Jerry Lembcke

Women had indeed played major roles in the antiwar movement. Women Strike for Peace initiated outreach to the Vietnamese people, sending representatives to Hanoi in 1965; scores of activists and celebrities followed in their footsteps in the coming years. But the climate of fault-finding that followed the loss of the war demeaned and even vilified women’s work for peace. Actress Jane Fonda who had gone to Hanoi in 1972 and met with imprisoned U.S. POWs was likened to the apocryphal Tokyo Rose of World War II notoriety, both figures invoking a litany of female perfidy beginning with the biblical Delila. Duplicity and stealth were staple tactics in those stories: Delila emasculating Sampson while he slept; Fonda presenting herself as a Hollywood seductress until unmasking as an anti-war warrior woman. In 2005 edition of the Comcast news show “It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle,” Mary Jane McManus, the wife of ex-POW Kevin McManus, was asked by the moderator whom she blamed for the U.S. defeat. It was forces at home, she said, who conspired to turn victory into defeat: the media, politicians, and Jane Fonda.[6]

"Members of Women For Peace showed up at the White House every Sunday for 8 years from 11 to 1 for a peace vigil. Such female antiwar groups often relied on maternalism, the image of women as peaceful caretakers of the world, to express and accomplish their goals. The government often saw middle-aged women involved in such organizations as the most dangerous members of the opposition movement because they were ordinary citizens who quickly and efficiently mobilized.” Wikipedia

Women For Peace in California

1962, 24 min., black/white
Founding Women for Peace 1962 Rent or Buy
In San Francisco, on August 6, 1962, Harvey Richards photographed the Women for Peace march to commemorate the anniversary of the U.S. dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Marching in a time of complacency and ubiquitous anti-communist media bias, these demonstrators received little or no publicity from the established media. Calling for “No More War”, protesters marched around an area in San Francisco equal in size to the area destroyed in Hiroshima by the bomb. Eva Helen Pauling spoke at the rally at Civic Center in San Francisco where the march ended. Alice Richards, one of the founders, and also spoke at the rally.