Braving the Masculinist Antiwar Movement
Women who hoped to protest the Vietnam War faced at least two gendered obstacles. The antiwar movement focused primarily on the draft and, thus, on draft resistance, a reality that rendered women, who were automatically noncombatants, relatively unimportant.
But the draft-centric focus of the movement against the Vietnam War also transformed the tenor of antiwar protest itself. Newer antiwar activists, draft resisters, even pacifists, many of whom embraced the philosophy of nonviolence, began to cast their resistance in masculinist terms that rendered the culture of the antiwar movement very similar to what Marian Mollin described as “the warrior culture of military men.”4 Refusing the draft—that is, refusing to fight—carried with it the potential for emasculation. Since gendered assumptions connected masculinity with aggression, physical strength, and conquest, soldiering, or at the very least relishing conflict, was a key component of Western masculinity.5 In announcing their refusal to soldier, draft resisters faced the real possibility of being labeled cowards. In effect, they risked being associated less with men than with women, whom gendered assumptions painted as weak, vulnerable, nurturing, and passive.To minimize this potential, male draft resisters often constructed an androcentric and highly aggressive “resistance mystique,” which emphasized “[m]anhood, manliness, [and] virility.” This “unspoken agenda of masculinity,” Mollin argues, “ultimately created the most formidable obstacles for women” in the resistance movement.6 As the sociologist Barrie Thorne has contended, the resistance mystique “involved a highly sexualized, objectified definition of women (women, in this rhetoric, were usually referred to as ‘chicks'). The presence of women, defined as girlfriends, admirers, and bedpartners, was used to buttress an almost swaggering masculine role.”7 In effect, rendering women powerless within the resistance allowed resistance men to salvage their identities as men.
Pushing this further, sexism within the antiwar movement might have actually helped resistance men maintain their political clout in the public political arena.This created a resistance environment that was not all that woman friendly, making it very difficult for women to fully participate in protest. The story of women's subordination within the New Left, civil rights, and antiwar movements is fairly well known as is the connection between the sexist experiences of women in these movements and the emergence of second wave feminism in the late 1960s.8 But as Thorne has argued, the marginalization of women within the resistance was worse than that women experienced in either the student movement or civil rights movement because the centrality of the draft “more explicitly distinguished male from female participants and excluded women, even theoretically, from full par- ticipation.”9 Anne Weills, a participant in the Bay Area antiwar movement, remembered being frustrated at antiwar meetings. “Even if [a woman] said it well, half the time people would ignore you. Invisibility. That's what was so painful.”10 Jane Kennedy, a Catholic woman who felt compelled to speak out against the Vietnam War, remembered being disappointed by the gendered posturing surrounding plans to raid a local draft board. She characterized the arguing of some men as “a lot of bluster and bluff” that functioned to keep hidden men’s “own feelings of inadequacy and their own spots of vulnerability.”11
If this “bluster and bluff” kept men from exposing their vulnerability, it also kept women subordinated in the antiwar movement. As the sociologist Jo Freeman explained, “Men could resist the draft; women could only counsel resistance.”12 But by 1967, counseling resistance was not enough. The antiwar movement focused much of its energy on crippling the draft system through active protest, emblematized by the slogan, “From dissent to resistance.” Draft-age men publicly burned their draft cards to comment on the injustice of the draft itself and to signal their unwillingness to fight in Vietnam.
In one of the largest and most well-organized acts of resistance, some three dozen men turned in or burned their draft cards at Boston’s Arlington Street Church on 16 October 1967. One of those that burned a draft card was the Reverend Nan Stone, a Methodist minister attending Boston University’s School of Theology. Stone had convinced her friend, Steve Pallet, to allow her to burn his draft card but met with opposition from other protest planners. Although a seasoned activist, Stone had to work hard to be allowed to fully participate in activities planned by the New England Resistance. She continually ran up against gendered assumptions that left women with the domestic chores of resistance communities— what many routinely referred to as “shitwork”—while men planned and carried out risky protest actions. As Stone recalled, “I was never invited in to the inner circles, I had to push my way in.”13Besides burning draft cards, the antiwar movement was increasingly turning to even more radical actions that focused on the draft. By 1967, resisters had begun to use nonviolent direct action to physically disrupt the Selective Service System. This usually took the form of raiding draft offices and destroying actual draft files, inhibiting the government’s ability to call up draftees. The 1968 Catonsville Nine raid in Maryland typified the new tactic. In that action, nine Catholic activists, including priests Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, carried hundreds of draft files out of the Catonsville draft office and burned them with homemade napalm. The raid itself would baptize the Catholic Left and catapult the brothers Berrigan to international notoriety. As their biographers and friends pointed out, the Berrigans became the desperadoes—a very masculinist term—of the Catholic Left.14 Although two women, Marjorie Melville and Mary Moylan, participated in the Catonsville raid, they found it difficult to assume leadership positions. As one historian has argued, “the masculinist behavior and rhetoric [of the secular antiwar movement] dovetailed with the patriarchal and hierarchical underpinnings of the Catholic Church” to create a Catholic resistance community in which men “were cast as the true resisters” and emerged as resistance leaders.15
As Marjorie Melville and Mary Moylan's participation in the Catonsville Nine raid makes clear, some women eagerly participated in the destruction of draft files, which was very much against the law and almost always prosecuted. Draft-board raiding became a way that noncombatants could show how seriously they opposed the war.
To avoid the sexism they encountered in many resistance communities, though, some women chose to develop their own resistance actions. Often this simply took the form of helping to raise awareness about the draft among draft-eligible men. The Berkeley group Campus Women for Peace, for example, distributed a leaflet that encouraged men to pledge to oppose the draft, an act that became prosecutable after passage of the Military Selective Service Act of 1967.16 Other women tapped into the draft resistance movement by signing resistance statements, helping to gather and turn in draft cards, offering sanctuary to resisters, or engaging in disruptive acts during the public trials of male resisters. For example, two women calling themselves “Women Too” disrupted the 1969 trial of a draft resister by pouring red paint on the courtroom floor and pouring red dye on the steps of the federal building in which the trial was taking place.17 Their decision to name themselves “Women Too” is telling. While the name played on the tradition of identifying draft resisters by the numbers of people involved in the action, it also implicitly referred to women's marginal political status. One can almost hear the women shouting, “Yes! We're angry, too! The war impacts us, too!” The name points to how the default identity of the antiwar protester in 1960s America was male.Even when women planned resistance actions by themselves, society seemed to want to recast the action in traditionally gendered terms. In July 1969, five women calling themselves “Women Against Daddy Warbucks” spent about three hours slicing through draft files, tearing out phone lines, and disabling the typewriters in a midtown Manhattan Selective Service office. When they were finished, they exited the building and began throwing the cut-up files up in the air in an almost celebratory fashion. In all, they managed to destroy about 6,500 1-A high-priority draft files.
Yet such was the public's identification of draft resistance with men that even the reporting of the raid by Women Against Daddy Warbucks cast men and women in traditionally gendered roles.
Despite having been planned and executed by women, the New York Times’ reporting on the raid chose to highlight the scuffle between nearby male antiwar activists and law enforcement officers. The Times described how “some men warresisters... attacked the Federal agents with their fists.” In the ensuing battle, both male protesters and male law enforcement agents tried to protect the females involved. “The F.B.I. men rushed their prisoners as quickly as possible to cover... [as] the agents around one pair [of female prisoners] beat off their attackers as they moved through the crowd.” Later male protesters attempted to “free [Kathy] Czarnik,” creating a narrative that cast men as liberators and women as victims in need of rescue.18
Women Against Daddy Warbucks had staged the action, in part, out of frustration with sexism in the larger antiwar movement and, in the words of participant Maggie Geddes, because the “draft affects men and women.” The women wanted to publicize how women helped to sustain the draft through their work in draft offices and their passivity about the “corporate military machinery.” But as Geddes asserted, “we aren’t playing that passive role any longer.”19 Yet, as the Times reporting made clear, few gave the women the credit for planning the raid by themselves. Jill Boskey, another member of Women Against Daddy Warbucks, remembered that when she was first arrested, the FBI agents tried to get her to name the men she was fronting for, and even men in the movement kidded the women about not having planned the action.20
As a result, some women draft resisters chose to engage in resistance activities in ways that actually emphasized their female identity; they decided to capitalize upon existing gender systems to protest the draft. For example, some women posed as sisters of inductees or as secretaries to gain access to military bases and disrupt the induction process. While male draft resisters could pose as draft registrants or preinductees, women’s noncombatant status made them conspicuous and visibly out of place among potential soldiers.
Ironically, antiwar women realized that their relegation to supportive or appendage roles in the American workforce and their status as noncombatants could actually work in their favor. The “invisibility” that frustrated some women in resistance meetings enabled other women to slip onto military grounds unnoticed or unquestioned, putting them in a position to disrupt the induction process and engage in consciousness-raising with draft registrants.21Women’s sexual identities also frequently factored into their resistance. Existing gender systems simultaneously cast women as both asexual and potential objects of sexual conquest. To lure draft registrants or even activeduty GIs into draft-resistance environments, resistance organizations often emphasized the presence of women at resistance-planned parties and events. In one instance, the New England Resistance publicized that it was planning a “huge, incredibly noisy, chick-laden” party, while another leaflet enticed GIs to an event with “beer and chicks and things.”22 Women, however, were not always passive players in the sexualizing of their roles in the antiwar movement. In perhaps the most famous example of women sexualizing their own participation in the resistance, many women accepted the slogan “Girls Say ‘Yes' to Guys that Say ‘No,’” although, as Barrie Thorne points out, many did so “with jest and ambivalence.”23