On 16 March 1965, an elderly Quaker woman walked along Detroit sidewalks she had known for almost 25 years.

As the Tuesday night traffic eased along, she stopped in front of a shop­ping center at the intersection of Grand River and Oakman Boulevard. For a good many of her 82 years, Alice Herz had been writing letters, begging her government to stop building nuclear weapons and, just as importantly, to stop threatening to use them.

Herz was the first American to immolate herself as an act of protest against war. Long concerned with nuclear proliferation, she had been particularly affected by the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, who had burned himself on the crowded streets of Saigon two years earlier. Quang Duc had chosen immolation to protest the abuses of Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in South Vietnam. With the help of the U.S. government, Diem had come to power in 1954 and had gradually become more paranoid and more hostile toward Saigon’s non-Catholic residents. Quang Duc and a number of other Buddhists in Saigon burned themselves to call attention to Diem's repressive government and its American backers. In a letter she left behind, Herz identified herself with Quang Duc, denounced Lyndon Johnson for contributing to an arms build up, and implicitly condemned his manipula­tion of the facts to secure congressional approval for expanding U.S. military activities in Vietnam.¹

Herz's protest was fairly exceptional among acts of American protest.

In wishing to protest war, Herz faced an uphill battle. As the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, American women sickened by the war encoun­tered an antiwar movement that had galvanized around the issue of the draft. Although a handful of intellectuals, policy experts, and religious activ­ists had prophetically begun to protest American involvement in Vietnam in the early 1960s, the American antiwar movement flared to life in 1965 as President Johnson increased draft calls. Suddenly, Vietnam mattered to many more people who now faced the very real and terrifying possibility that they or someone they loved might be shipped off to the jungles of Southeast Asia. As news reports about the brutality of the fighting, the futility of American strategy, and the questionable morality of American tactics began to filter back home, more and more young men and their families began questioning the legitimacy of the war and the justice of the draft. As a result, the draft became the axis around which the antiwar move­ment rotated. To demonstrate their opposition to the draft and the war, hundreds of young men began turning in or burning their draft cards, refusing induction, fleeing to Canada or Sweden, or opting for prison.

With the antiwar movement so focused on the issue of the draft, antiwar women confronted the decision of how best to register their discontent and bring about the war's end.

So how did women make their opposition to the war in Vietnam heard in a political and activist environment that marginalized their ideas and muffled their voices? As the historian Joel P Rhodes has noted, “More often than not, in the realm of protest women have relied on ingenious and covert tactics for mitigating against patriarchy and a misogynist culture.”² Gender frequently became the organizing principle around which women tackled the task of protesting the war. Said another way, American women drew upon their identities as women and their often shifting understandings of womanhood to protest the war in Vietnam. Women protested as mothers, wives, housekeepers, sisters, consumers, revolutionaries, race women, and more because their sex prevented them from speaking in purely political terms or from protesting as potential combatants, an identity marker crucial to the antiwar movement. In their protest, some women chose to reference traditional understandings of womanhood, what the historian Amy Schneidhorst labels as “pre-feminist gender norms,” while other women negotiated gendered identities with emerging race- and class-consciousnesses to articulate their opposition to the war.³ In each case, women faced the task of either transcending or manipulating existing gender standards to make their noncombatant perspectives heard in a cultural milieu that gave pride of place to political speech and combatant status.

This is not to say that the arguments and protest methods women chose were unique to women. Certainly, self-immolation was not an exclusively “female” protest tactic. My intent here is not to suggest that women always protested differently than men, but rather that women attempted to find ways to engage the war in Vietnam that were relevant to them and that were as effective as possible. Since identity is complex—one is not simply a woman but might also be black, wealthy, gay, urban, socialist, or Baptist—it would be misleading to suggest that gender alone dictated women’s responses to the war. Having said that, though, it is significant that wider societal assumptions about sex did often compel women to protest in certain ways and led them more frequently toward certain arguments.