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8

From “Ban the Bomb” to “Stop the War”: Women Strike for Peace (1961–67)

White youth may have been politically disengaged at the beginning of the Sixties, but others saw storm clouds gathering—radioactive ones. In downtown Los Angeles, on November 1, 1961, 2,000 women gathered outside the State Building, carrying signs that read “Ban All Atomic Weapons.” After speeches, they marched silently to city hall and then to the Federal Building to present officials with petitions. Their leaflet posed the question, “Who are we?” It answered, “We are housewives and working women.” It said they were part of an organization called “Women Strike for Peace” (WSP).¹

Sister demonstrations took place that day in dozens of cities, but L.A.’s was by far the largest. A first-person report describing how the event had been organized appeared in London’s Guardian: “An old friend rang me up,” Sophia Wyatt wrote. “She said she was sending me some literature which was the most exciting thing she had ever heard.” The friend asked her to “pass it on to the neighbors, talk to my friends, and be a darling and give her a lift on November 1st. When I started to ask who and what, she cut me short. There were no names; it was not an organization; would I just read it and come.”

So she did—but first, she said, “I changed into a respectable dress, hauled my one and only hat out of mothballs and put on gloves.” The demonstration was big; when they marched from the State Building to city hall, Wyatt wrote, they were “eight deep in a line stretching for blocks and blocks.” Along the march route, “a blossoming of faces appeared at every window to the uppermost storeys of the surrounding buildings, as the police halted all traffic.” She asked a woman on the march, “What organization do you belong to?” The woman laughed and said, “I don’t belong to any organization. I’ve got a child of ten.”²

The women’s march was a response to the discovery of deadly radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes in milk from dairies in western states. At the time it was believed that this was the consequence of a huge Soviet hydrogen bomb test and the resulting radioactive cloud that drifted eastward across the Northern Hemisphere—and that cows had grazed on pastures where radioactive rain had fallen. (New studies, decades later, found that American detonations from 1951 to 1961 were the major source of the radioactive plague, which produced thousands of cases of cancer in communities “downwind” of the Nevada test site.) Thus the marcher’s banners read “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race.”

Their leaflets denounced both sides: “We appeal not only to our own government, but especially the Soviet Union.” One sign declared, “The Soviet 50 Megaton Bomb Is an Outrage against Humanity.” Of the new Kennedy administration (secretly racing toward the invasion of Cuba and the edge of nuclear Armageddon), the demonstrators made three major demands: an immediate cessation of nuclear tests, “concrete steps to be taken at once toward worldwide disarmament,” and “immediate allocation of as much of the national budget to preparation for peace as was being spent in preparation for war.”³ As for the women’s “strike,” it was essentially Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for the nuclear age. Women were urged to “suspend” their traditional roles as housewives and mothers in order to advocate for a test ban and “appeal for the future of mankind.”⁴

At the rally following the march, a succession of women speakers emphasized the urgency of the moment. “Mrs. Wallace Thompson” chilled the crowd as she described the effects of a ten-megaton bomb targeted at the spot where they stood. “It would level every building in a circle 14 miles across … More horrible than the blast would be the firestorm … All those in fallout shelters would be suffocated … 100 miles in any direction from where we now stand, everyone who did not find shelter would be dead within five days … Fallout comes later.” So, she concluded, “we are done with mere lip service to disarmament and co-existence. We are prepared to back up our demands with our votes. Though, goodness knows, unless we hurry we may not all be around for the next election.”⁵

State Attorney General Stanley Mosk—the liberal Democrat whose career was later derailed by LAPD Chief Bill Parker—also spoke at the rally, trying to defend the Kennedy administration. He read a message from Governor Pat Brown: “Your demonstration today serves as an expression of public support for our President’s determination to achieve a just peace through early and purposeful negotiations.”⁶ Actually, what they were expressing was the more like the opposite: a criticism of Kennedy for failing to move faster toward banning atmospheric testing and indeed all nuclear weapons.

The front page of the Times’s “Metro” section the next day was emblazoned with a photo of the 2,000 women demonstrators—but the accompanying article was mainly a soapbox for Mayor Yorty to fulminate against Communist deceptions: “Let us not be duped by Communist-inspired groups who try to make us feel a sense of guilt and shame just because we insist on the nation’s interest.” Chief Parker also criticized the marchers: “There undoubtedly were many fine people duped into thinking they were doing something constructive, but this type of revolution against constitutional authority serves the Soviets well.”⁷

But who were these revolutionaries? That“Who Are We?” leaflet, signed by twenty women, said: “We are just ordinary people—teachers, writers, social workers, artists, secretaries, executives, saleswomen. Most of us are also wives and mothers.” WSP, moreover, had “no board, no officers, no real committees.” They were inspired, they explained, by the heroic civil rights activists in the South: “The sit-in strikers have reminded us, as the suffragettes did long ago, of the tremendous power for good in each single person. We hope you will add your individual strength to ours.” The organizers added that “most of us belong to half a dozen of the usual organizations: the PTA, Hadassah or the church action committee, or SANE, or the United Nations Association, or the WIL.”⁸

SANE and the WIL—those were clues. SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, was the first mass liberal organization opposed to the arms race and working for an international ban on nuclear testing. Founded in 1957, by 1960 it boasted more than one hundred chapters, including one in Hollywood (led by Steve Allen and Robert Ryan), and counted among its national spokespeople Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther of United Auto Workers, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. However, after the group was red-baited by members of Congress later that year, most of the leadership capitulated to the Cold War ideology they had been founded to fight. The group never really recovered. And there was one more thing: SANE was now run by men. The lessons of SANE were not lost on the women who left its ranks—not least the importance of noncompliance with the anti-communist requirements of mainstream American politics.

In reality, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WIL), founded by Jane Addams in 1915 to protest the First World War, was hardly one of “the usual organizations.” Indeed, it had opposed US participation in the Second World War, and it was one of the few organizations on the left to have protested the internment of Japanese-Americans. But, despite its female leadership and principled politics, the WIL also seemed part of an older pacifist tradition that was dwindling in significance. In her history of WSP, Amy Swerdlow, who was also an early member, explains that women left the WIL to join WSP because the new organization gave them “the space to initiate and engage in spontaneous direct actions … without interference from a national office.” And, she writes, “we saw ourselves as new, bold, and potentially successful. We believed we would accomplish what the WIL women had failed to do.” WSP appealed to WIL and SANE veterans for many reasons: it was “simple, pragmatic, nonideological, moralistic and emotional.”⁹ Moreover, she explains, the WSP expressed a deep moral outrage about the Cold War, which it combined with a playful rejection of male leaders’ claims to wisdom and knowledge. It was serious about doing politics in Washington, while also genuinely internationalist.

At that first demonstration in downtown L.A., the marchers were responding to a call from an anonymous small group of women in Washington, DC, led by children’s book illustrator Dagmar Wilson—herself a wife and mother. She had never been an activist, but she “had long been worried about nuclear fallout” and its effect on children’s health.¹⁰

If the Los Angeles chapter was a leader in recruitment and activism, it owed much to its remarkable and talented organizer, Mary Clarke. The FBI called her “the guiding force behind the Southern California WSP group,” and they were right about that.¹¹ By the mid Sixties she had traveled to Hanoi, Moscow, Beijing, and Havana as a WSP leader. According to her younger sister, June Solnit Sale, she had not been a political organizer prior to WSP, but was a wife and mother in 1961, just like the leaflet said, with two small children. But “it is not accidental that Mary was destined to be a peace activist,” Sale said. “It comes from our mother and father.” They were poor Jews in the LA ghetto of Boyle Heights; when Mary went to kindergarten, she spoke Yiddish but no English. But their father prospered, moving the family to Sierra Madre, next to Pasadena. “Our father was always active,” Sale recalled. “He was always very pro-union. In the mid-thirties I remember going to him with meetings of the Joint Anti Fascist Refugee Committee. He voted for Socialists. Mary didn’t go, but it was always there. It was in her bones.”¹²

Vigils and Picket Lines

The stunning debut of L.A. WSP in November 1961 was followed by its steady expansion throughout Southern California in winter and spring 1962. This was recorded in the group’s news bulletin—La Wisp, four mimeographed legal-size pages—edited by Mary Clarke, who also typed and mailed it. That first issue included reports from all over the region: the South Bay chapter was holding a fund-raiser with Black folksinger Odetta; San Fernando Valley had organized a symposium on disarmament at Valley State; Santa Monica was running a “post card a day” campaign to President Kennedy; in the San Gabriel Valley, members were staffing “peace tables” in Monterey Park with literature on the futility of fallout shelters; Whittier had a bake sale; Santa Barbara had opened a Peace Information Center and was planning a demonstration “to coincide with those scheduled in New York and London”; and in San Diego, sixty-five people from WSP had demonstrated downtown for two hours—of which they reported, “public response cool, but interested.”¹³

The first newsletter also reported that the LA group had sent fourteen women to the state capitol in Sacramento, where they had joined 250 other WSP members from Northern California to protest the state budget allocation for fallout shelters. Plans were underway for a Mother’s Day demonstration with the slogan “Give Me the Gift of Peace.” And the organization was running a “Peace Education Lecture Series,” with weekly sessions: topics included “Communism, Capitalism, Socialism” with economist Stanley Sheinbaum, “Economics of Peace and War,” and “Bias in Mass Media.”¹⁴ Clearly the WSP was doing its homework—far beyond what the public expected of “wives and mothers.”

What followed the dramatic debut of WSP in L.A. was a long series of vivid public actions, many of which received coverage in the LA Times. January 1962: “Women Sail Balloons for ‘Peace Race’”—700 women released 4,000 balloons in Hancock Park, each carrying a call to the superpowers to end the arms race. March 1962: “700 Women Stage A-Test Protest”—a silent march from MacArthur Park to the Atomic Energy Commission offices on Wilshire near Vermont Avenue.¹⁵ April 1962: the day after Kennedy ordered the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, L.A. WSP conducted an all-day vigil at the Federal Building in downtown L.A., part of the organization’s nationwide “Milk Strike,” “to guard our children against the ingestion of thyroid-cancer-causing Iodine 131 released by nuclear explosions.” The “strike” was to terminate after the eighth day, “when the half-life of Iodine 131 is spent.”¹⁶

Then came July 1962: “Women in Bomb Protest at Las Vegas.” L.A. WSP had sent a bus full of demonstrators to picket the Nevada Test Site. They started, the newsletter reported, at “two of the flossiest, busiest blocks” of casinos in Las Vegas, where they pushed empty baby carriages with signs saying “Empty because of Stillbirth” and “Empty because of Cancer.” The response, according to the Times, was “rather negative,” but “three local women joined in the march.” The next morning they picketed at the gate of the test site for two hours, leafleting people on their way to work—many of whom accepted the leaflet.¹⁷ The group then held a vigil at the Nevada Test Site—a national WSP mobilization coordinated by Mary Clarke.

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the LA schools distributed pamphlets for parents about “Procedures to be Followed in Event of Attack,” WSP quickly mobilized 300 women and children for a march and silent vigil in Pershing Square downtown, carrying signs that read “Peace not Panic” and “We Don’t Want War.” And their focus extended well beyond L.A.; the organization announced that “several WSP members were leaving immediately for Washington by plane to seek an audience with President Kennedy.”¹⁸

At the height of the missile crisis, WSP broke out of the prevailing Cold War framework and appealed directly to Soviet women, with a telegram to three they had met two months earlier: “At this moment of peril, [we] ask in friendship that you plead with your government, as we are pleading with ours, to pull back from the brink of war and to seek just and peaceful solutions to the conflicts that divide our two great countries.” They got prompt replies, which were published in the next issue of La Wisp, including one from the president of the Soviet Women’s Committee: “Share your anxiety at dangerous situation, convinced our government will do its utmost to prevent war. Ready, together with you, to work for peaceful solution to the conflict.”

After the crisis, WSP held a “symposium” where members reported on peace conferences abroad they had attended over the summer. Indeed, WSP was internationalist from the beginning, framing its argument around the notion that women of all nations shared an interest in a peaceful world in which their children could grow up. The LA organization sent a delegation to Japan in August, where a Mothers’ Congress had brought 20,000 Japanese women to Osaka to discuss the links among “the problems of civil liberties, civil rights, equality for women, and peace,” and then march through the center of the city “with banners flying.” Of the congress, Clarke told her LA colleagues, “to think that such a magnificent movement of women existed in Japan and that we were not aware that it had been in existence for 8 years, made me realize that … we must never allow ourselves to be isolated and to experience the feeling of being alone in our common cause.” Another member reported on the Voice of Women Meeting in September in Montreal, and another on the “World without the Bomb” assembly in Accra, called by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.¹⁹

WSP in L.A. had also sent representatives to Moscow in July for the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, with 2,400 attendees from 121 countries. The organizers’ call had a stellar list of signers: Anwar Sadat, Jomo Kenyatta and Che Guevara; Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer; Sartre and Neruda, Shostakovich and Picasso.²⁰ But the congress was also hugely controversial among peace movement activists in the United States and elsewhere. Because the Soviets were hosting, WSP ended up being the only American peace group to send an official delegation; SANE and the rest had declined. At the conference, moreover, WSP declined to join the delegates from eleven countries who signed a minority report that called the Soviet Union “obstructive” for rejecting proposals for inspection of nuclear facilities. Nor did WSP delegates join the twenty-five visitors who defied the Soviet hosts by distributing 10,000 leaflets in Moscow opposing testing by both sides, then marching to Red Square, where they unfurled a banner reading “No Tests East or West.”²¹ In a report that marked the organization’s first anniversary, the L.A. WSP delegates concluded that the congress showed “people from both major camps could work together toward securing the peace.”²²

The Subpoenas

As WSP began its second year, subpoenas from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) arrived. Ten of the organization’s leaders in New York were served with charges that the group had been infiltrated, led or controlled by Communists. Despite cracks of light in the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 and ’61, a HUAC subpoena remained a frightening document—unless recipients wanted to inform on friends and colleagues; that is, to be “rats,” “stoolies” or “finks.”

No one from L.A. WSP received a subpoena, even though the FBI had reported that “eight security index subjects were observed marching” at the first WSP demonstration in L.A.²³ (The “security index” was the FBI’s list of high-level radicals, mostly Communists, to be rounded up and detained in case of a “national emergency.”) But the LA group took the lead in the organization’s public response to the subpoenas. A full-page ad appeared in the New York Times West Coast edition on December 4, 1962, ten days before the scheduled hearing, bearing the title “Gentlemen: What Are You Afraid of?” “The women’s peace movement has struck fear into the hearts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” the ad declared. “We have been criticized for objecting to the contamination of the milk our children drink!”

To show how fearless they were, WSP members wrote the committee volunteering to testify publicly about their goals and policies—an unprecedented tactic in a world where leftists for more than a decade had done everything they could to avoid appearing before HUAC. During the hearings, seven L.A. WSP activists were interviewed on local and national radio and TV. “The response … was terrific,” La Wisp reported. Donations arrived in the mail “from San Diego to Portland.” One LA woman wrote: “Please add my name to your mailing list. I would be delighted to receive anything with the exception of subpoenas. I can never remember the Fifth Amendment, and the House committee on Un-American Activities evidently cannot remember the First!”²⁴

Meanwhile in Washington, Dagmar Wilson and other national leaders had gained the upper hand over the committee. The group packed the hearing room with noisy supporters; as leaders were called to testify, members presented them with roses. Wilson testified that in Women Strike for Peace, “nobody is controlled by anybody.” She said there was “absolutely no way” of eliminating Communists from the membership, and that she would not expel them even if she could—this at a time when Reds had been kicked out of other peace groups like SANE, as well as the ACLU. She concluded by remarking that WSP was run by volunteers: “This is something I find very hard to explain to the masculine mind.” The three HUAC members who conducted the hearing, according to New York Times columnist Russell Baker, “spent most of the week looking lonely, badgered and miserable.”²⁵

The state’s version of HUAC, the state senate’s Burns Committee, tried to get into the act six months later, when they issued a report declaring that “subversives” and “Reds” had “infiltrated” WSP in Los Angeles. They conceded that the group was not a “Communist front,” but claimed that “the infiltration is clear and speaks for itself.” (Apparently the committee did not find out that Clarke had been a member of the CP until 1955.)²⁶ The committee report submitted as evidence one item: the lecture series the group had sponsored in L.A. the previous year. The problem? “Four of the lectures were devoted to a study of Russian communism as compared to … our own system of government.”²⁷ As evidence of Communist infiltration, that was pathetic. Still, it made page two of the LA Times.

The same page of that day’s paper reported on the WSP response. A member of the group’s local coordinating council, “Mrs. Kay Hardman,” reiterated Dagmar Wilson’s statement before HUAC, had “absolutely no way of eliminating Communists from WSP and would not if she could.” As for that lecture series, it featured “some of our finest scholars—from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara.”²⁸ That was the end of Sacramento’s red-baiting campaign against WSP in Los Angeles.

To Jakarta and Hanoi

On the larger issue of nuclear weapons, Khrushchev and Kennedy had been so shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis that they went to work on a treaty banning atmospheric testing. On August 5, 1963, they signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which meant WSP’s first goal had been achieved—less than two years after the group came into existence. On September 24, WSP members traveled from L.A. to Washington to witness the Senate ratification vote. L.A. WSP in particular had made the treaty a top priority, organizing a summer “campaign for 100,000 letters on the Test-Ban.” And the group understood the need to claim victory: the day after the treaty was ratified, WSP organized a celebration at the Federal Building in downtown L.A.

Kennedy himself gave credit to women for pressing for the Test Ban Treaty. When asked about women’s protest actions in an interview with editors of the top seven US women’s magazines—Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Parents Magazine, Redbook, and Women’s Day—he replied, “I would urge women to get into whatever groups they feel reflect their judgment as to how things ought to be done … it is very helpful to have a significant group of women working for peace in their communities.” Dagmar Wilson commented, “He has not exactly told them to join WSP, but he has told them to join something.”²⁹

The WSP newsletter’s report on the Test Ban Treaty celebration in L.A. was headlined “Don’t Get Too Comfortable.” The reality was that the treaty permitted underground tests, and Kennedy had begun underground testing in Nevada shortly after the treaty went into effect. At this juncture, the group announced a change in strategic focus: fighting fallout shelters and drop drills in schools.

Then came a banal-sounding sentence that turned out to be prescient: “A committee was set up to study the Viet Nam situation.” That was September 1963, when 16,000 US troops were in Vietnam and Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. It was more than a year and a half before the first national anti-war demonstration, called by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Washington in April 1965.

The Vietnam War transformed Women Strike for Peace, as was evident by the time of the organization’s second anniversary in November 1963. That month, the LA chapter joined a demonstration at the Ambassador Hotel against Madame Nhu, the notorious wife of the head of the Saigon government; the march had the slogan “Stop Organized Slaughter in South Viet Nam.” L.A. WSP also promoted a speech on Vietnam at the Music Box Theater by I. F. Stone, the radical journalist with the famous newsletter.³⁰

In March 1965, 200 WSP members, wearing black dresses and veils and carrying yellow roses, marched to the Western Union office downtown, where they sent a wire to Lady Bird Johnson: “We have appealed to your husband, our president, but he has not listened.” They asked her to intercede with him to “have Vietnam taken from the field of battle to the conference table.” They also wired the first lady a bouquet of yellow roses, which they said signified “life which we feel is being trampled on in Vietnam.” A month later L.A. WSP sent a delegation to the SDS-sponsored March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, while members at home joined a vigil sponsored by the SDS chapter at USC. (The first chapter in the state, it had been organized by the remarkable Margaret Thorpe, a graduating senior and the daughter of a railroad worker from Arcadia. Over the next year she would become a familiar face on Channel Nine, robustly debating future Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, as well as other members of Young Americans for Freedom.)

That spring, as Johnson unleashed B-52s against North Vietnam’s cities (“Operation Rolling Thunder”), Clarke, together with Lorraine Gordon, a leader of New York City WSP and coproprietor of the famed Village Vanguard jazz club, became the first members of the American peace movement to visit Hanoi. They had traveled to Moscow in May for the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the end of the war in Europe and took the opportunity to meet delegates from the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and from the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the South. The Vietnamese women already knew of WSP through the sacrifice of Detroit member Alice Hertz, who had set fire to herself in March to protest the carpet-bombing of the North.³¹ They urged the LA women to come see for themselves the destruction being wrought by the US Air Force. The two left immediately, flying from Moscow to Hanoi via Beijing. Historian Jon Coburn later called the trip “one of the most significant acts undertaken by WSPers during its history … [and] Clarke and Gordon demonstrated unique daring and courage in their expedition.”³²

In Hanoi, as Clarke recalled in a 1995 interview, they were “startled” by the massive program to build air raid shelters for the population, and deeply moved by meeting children in a Hanoi hospital who had been napalmed by American planes.³³ Their visit was unofficial, indeed secret, but they discussed with their hosts the possibility of a formal meeting between American and Vietnamese women in the near future. Pham Van Dong, the North’s Prime Minister, responded that it was too dangerous to bring delegates to Hanoi, suggesting Jakarta as a more suitable site.

Plans for the Jakarta meeting were publicized by L.A. WSP with appropriate fanfare. The announcement posed the question, “Why will American women go thousands of miles to meet Vietnamese women face to face?” The answer: “They go to give and receive hope and courage.” Mary Clarke headed the ten-woman delegation, which included Nanci Hollander of SDS, arriving in July for five days of talks with their nine Vietnamese counterparts, who were led by Nguyen Thi Binh—the stunning NLF leader who later became its chief negotiator. In the three months since the initial visit to Hanoi, 40,000 or so additional American troops had landed in the South, while the death toll from the bombing of the North had soared. The Vietnamese women not only described their experiences, but also gave WSPers a primer on how Washington and Saigon had caused the new war by abandoning the national elections promised by the 1954 Geneva Accords. Both sides considered the meeting an overwhelming success and arranged to maintain contact with one another—a relationship that eventually produced the joint Committee of Liaison, which organized contacts between American prisoners of war and their families back home.

The unprecedented meeting received much international applause. Stopping over in Tokyo on the way out, they were praised by peace groups and mainstream media for their audacity, while in Jakarta President Sukarno told them that Indonesia was honored to be the venue for “such a historic meeting.” In London on the way back, dissident Labour MPs brought them to the House of Commons for a discussion. However, when they got off the plane in Washington, they encountered a firestorm of criticism from both the press and the White House. The New York Times headline, true to form, read “10 Americans Join Vietnam Reds.” The article quoted the group’s official statement in Jakarta, which said the US was committing “military aggression” in Vietnam and “waging a cruel war against the Vietnamese people,” while using Vietnam as a “testing ground for new and more horrible weapons.” All of that was true, but the Times nevertheless reported that it “echoed Hanoi’s propaganda line.”³⁴

In Washington the returning delegation asked to meet with the president, but the White House declined—with a written note. They did meet with members of Congress, which had recently passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving LBJ open-ended authority to make war. The group was struck by the fact that members of Congress “appeared to know so little about Vietnam.”³⁵ They also met with White House officials, sharing with them the Vietnamese perspective on the war as a continuation of the struggle against French colonialism, and explaining that the Saigon government spoke only for the Catholic minority in the primarily Buddhist country. An aide to McGeorge Bundy (LBJ’s national security advisor) responded dismissively, telling them the only relevant issue was the Communist threat to Vietnam.³⁶

After their return to L.A., Clarke and the other WSP leaders were “inundated with requests” to speak and received “fantastic, never before, coverage from the mass media”—including appearances on four TV shows and a dozen radio programs. They talked about their meeting with Vietnamese women at “churches, women’s clubs, colleges and universities, civil rights meetings, trade union meetings, teach-ins, and local demonstrations against the war,” including “many groups previously unreached by WSP.” The list included the first teach-in at UC San Diego, a talk at UC Santa Barbara and a debate at Long Beach State; appearances at many local Democratic Clubs as well as the state central committee of the Democratic Party; union groups, among them the American Federation of Teachers and the Garment Workers; and many Unitarian churches and Jewish groups.³⁷

Clarke reported that the NLF women had “traveled on foot for two weeks through unsafe territory and across borders at night to catch a plane to Djakarta.” “Many” of the Vietnamese women “spoke or understood” English. “We listened to many personal stories of tragedy and death,” she reported. “The leader of the South Vietnamese delegation had spent 3 years in jail at the age of 18 under the French, and 1 year when Diem came to power.” They described what Americans called the “strategic hamlet” program of moving Vietnamese peasants out of their ancestral villages into what “they described as ‘concentration camps.’” As for the American argument that South Vietnam was a “victim” of “aggression from the North,” the American women were told that their South Vietnamese counterparts “came back to defend their country.” As for the American claims that bombing aimed at military targets, “the North Vietnamese women brought considerable evidence of repeated bombing and strafing of hospitals, schools, churches, markets, bus stations, fishing-boats and villages.”³⁸

While they were winning national and international attention, WSP was also reasserting their distinctive twist on their status as women. The WSP version of “End the War Now” was “Bring the Boys Home for Dinner”—accompanied by a cookbook published by the LA chapter that same year, under the title Peace de Resistance. “Conceived by Mary Clarke, written by Esther Lewin,” and dedicated to Dagmar Wilson, “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer,” the book contained more than 150 recipes submitted by members. The introduction declared:

We women of WSP working for peace have walked thousands of miles, written plane-loads of letters to our president, our congressmen and the heads of our states. We’ve vigil-ed at the Federal Building; we’ve attended conferences of women like ourselves around the world. And at the same time, we’ve made hundreds of thousands of beds, changed a million diapers and cooked two million meals—not to mention the mountains of dishes we’ve washed.³⁹

The first recipe was for “Russian Borscht”; the second, “Rushin’ Borscht” (“make in 10 minutes in the morning before rushing off to your WSP meeting”). Others included “Albondigas Soup” (“Mexico’s contribution to the peace movement—all in one dish”), “Chicken Kiev” (“If this is Russian propaganda, we’re all for it!”), and Lime pie (“Neglected your family lately? All will be forgiven with this divine pie”). (It included a pint of whipped cream.)

The meeting with Vietnamese women in Jakarta in mid 1965 had come at a time when no one in Congress was calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam war, and when much of the peace movement was demanding “Negotiations Now” rather than “Out Now.” In this respect the trip constitued a huge step, with reverberations that extended far beyond the near-term media attention received by WSP. For one, it strengthened women’s standing to speak on foreign policy issues, usually the preserve of men and “experts.” They spoke first of all on the familiar ground, as women defending children—but now they added to this a knowledge of history that was lacking in government leaders. Indeed, the firsthand authority they gained from speaking to Vietnamese women enabled them to directly challenge the dominant US narrative of the Cold War, which portrayed Vietnam as a front of a worldwide battle between “freedom” and “Communist tyranny.” The WSP women could now counter that they had seen firsthand how the cruelty and destruction of this particular war was based on ignorance of its local origins and meaning.

They had a decade more of activism ahead of them, including draft resistance work, an official trip to Hanoi in 1967, a demonstration against Lyndon Johnson that brought a massive turnout to Century City that same year, and Gene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Through it all, they remained an all-female organization that openly rejected male political culture. They challenged the age-old claim that wars are waged by men to protect women and children, and instead proclaimed their ties with women around the world, including women in “enemy” countries.⁴⁰ Moreover, they remained an anti-hierarchical organization with impressive local autonomy. Their meeting with Vietnamese women in 1965 had made WSP, in L.A. and nationally, some of the most effective leaders of the anti-war movement.