Maternalist Responses

The “girls” that said “yes” to the guys that said “no” were playing up aspects of existing gender systems that cast men as highly sexualized beings—so sexualized, in fact, that they would risk imprisonment for draft evasion to potentially have sex.

Sometimes the sororal and maternalist themes could be subtle. In their 1965 statement “For a Ceasefire in Vietnam,” the Berkeley Campus Women for Peace condemned the use of biological and chemical weaponry and the war’s oppression of peasants, indiscriminate killing, political corruption, excessive cost, and nuclear potential. Yet, to make these arguments, which were common political critiques, the Campus Women for Peace used the testimony of Mai Thi Chu, a Vietnamese woman. The Campus Women for Peace’s statement quoted Chu, who testified that she had seen how the use of chemical and biological weapons had affected women, children, and old people. “I have seen children with swollen faces and bodies, covered by burns,” Chu reported.

This statement is complex. It projects a gender-neutral position as a rela­tively straightforward political critique of the war, no different from statements that might have been issued by male-dominated organizations like Students for a Democratic Society or the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.²⁵ Yet gendered assumptions are woven throughout the statement. We are meant to be shocked that women and children—that is, innocents—are dying in Vietnam. Mai Thi Chu’s testimony reifies the idea that women, like children, are helpless victims in warfare and that killing them is more barbarous than killing men. At the same time, though, the statement chal­lenges existing gender systems in privileging a female voice. The Berkeley Campus Women for Peace seemed to want to both empower women and galvanize them to action by helping them identify with Vietnamese women as women—as sisters and fellow mothers. Whether embracing or challeng­ing gendered assumptions, though, the subtext underlying the statement is that war is not something that women do—they suffer as innocents or they speak out against it.

Other women pushed this assumption in very explicit ways, claiming that there was a universal difference between men and women and that difference lay in women’s alleged natural aversion to war. Valerie Clubb, a member of Missoula Women for Peace, explained her antiwar activism in almost genetic terms. “Oh, I have had an instinctual feeling for peace, for peaceful relations between people, even without the fear of war and death and so forth.”²⁶ May McDonald, another Missoula woman for peace, was convinced that if women around the world would just join peace groups, wars would cease to happen.²⁷ At a 1972 “Women’s Hearing on the War in Vietnam” in St. Louis, panelists and audience members heard a number of women speak to specific issues related to the war. Testifying during the hearing, Eda Houwink argued that war was “exclusively a male activity.” Men, Houwink argued, “declare the war, they plan the war, they pass the laws to finance it.

For many women, this instinctive aversion to war was rooted in their identities as mothers or, at the very least, as potential mothers. Many female protesters began their activism only after they became mothers. A number of the members of Missoula Women for Peace recalled coming to oppose the war out of concern for their own children. May McDonald remembered becoming “more and more alarmed [about the Vietnam War], especially as I had three sons who would likely—very, very likely—be inducted or drafted, and I thought it wasn’t enough to condemn it verbally, I should do something about it, politically in every way that I possibly could.”²⁹ This justification for opposing the Vietnam War—to protect one’s sons—seems not to have been an argument many men offered publicly, perhaps because men were assumed to possess the higher-order thinking skills of logic and critical analysis; the assumption was that men would challenge the war politically (that is, rationally). Fear for one’s children was an emotional and instinctive response to war suitable for the sex defined as being primarily emotional in nature. Moreover, the masculinity of fathers would to some extent have been tied up with the willingness of their sons to go off into battle. A son who eschewed his martial responsibilities indicted a father as a failure.

Maternalist protesters considered their identities as mothers key to stop­ping the war. “Being a mother,” Anniece Allen, another witness at the Women's Hearing on the War in Vietnam, explained, “I am concerned with life in general.” Although Allen was a psychiatric charge nurse by profession and might, therefore, have critiqued the war from a mental health perspec­tive, she explained her opposition to the war in biological terms and sought to reach out to the female audience by emphasizing their shared roles as mothers. “Women are giving birth to children every day,” Allen noted.

This maternalist approach to opposing the war is best exemplified by Women Strike for Peace (WSP), the phenomenally popular antiwar orga­nization. Founded in 1961, WSP coalesced after thousands of women responded to a call by a group of Washington, D.C., women to publicly protest nuclear testing. Although its ranks included working women, WSP’s public face was that of the housewife and mother. By 1966, WSP had come to focus on the situation in Vietnam, engaging in a number of protests conducted, according to the participant-historian Amy Swerdlow, “in the name of outraged motherhood.”³² Emblematic of WSP’s maternalist or motherist agenda was the organization’s slogan during its draft-resistance marches: “Not My Son, Not Your Son, Not Their Sons.”

Unlike younger female activists interested in draft resistance, WSP-ers successfully engaged in draft resistance largely because they adhered to middle-class femininity during their protests. Describing a 1962 WSP pro­test, the New York Times reporter Jeanne Molli noted the presence of moth­ers, grandmothers, and “the more formidable appearance of mothers-in-law,” with all the visual imagery created by such a turn of phrase.³³ In her study of the Chicago branch of WSP, Amy Schneidhorst noted that “women activists who projected a lady-like, middle-class motherly image felt they would be more readily accepted by the women they hoped to recruit and less likely to be attacked by officials.”³⁴ Thus, WSP-ers marched dressed in coats and pantyhose and often carried nonthreatening (feminine?) symbols such as flowers, white doves, shopping bags printed with peace slogans, and even their own children.

Maternalist protest, however, transcended simply emphasizing women’s reproductive capabilities. After condemning men as natural war-makers, Eda Houwink challenged the female audience at the Women’s Hearing on the War in Vietnam to commit to a kind of “global housekeeping” and change the social order to prevent war. The “global housekeeping” Houwink called for echoed themes drawn upon by maternalist protesters and reformers since at least the nineteenth century. Although historians have correctly demon­strated that the confinement of women to the private domestic realm inhib­ited their political participation, they have also recognized that women’s power within the home increased as men assumed identities as public, politi­cal beings. Assigned the responsibilities of nurturing children and creating moral environments for families, women eventually entered the public fray on the grounds that society, like a disheveled house or an unruly child, needed a woman’s moral authority and organizational skills.³⁵

Maternalist protesters in 1960s America continued to use this line of reasoning, arguing that women were natural peacemakers not simply because they bore children but because they created and managed the home environment. As Florence Johnson of Missoula Women for Peace explained, although women might not face induction, they could help others to resist the draft through their domestic roles. “As mothers, as wives,” Johnson argued, “in helping create a happy home life, we encourage compassion and concern for others,” which, according to Johnson, could foster “sound mental health and world peace.”³⁶ Lois Barrett, testifying during the Women’s Hearing in St. Louis, chastised women for socializing sons and husbands to grow up “believing this myth about how they must wage war to protect their women and their homes.”

Let us raise our sons in such a way that they will not be the dirty workers for a few powerful men.

Other maternalist protesters developed protest tactics that drew upon women’s traditional roles as cooks. Along with writing letters to elected representatives and joining in area peace marches, the Missoula Women for Peace held bake sales and rummage sales to educate the public about what was going on in Vietnam. Sandra Perrin remembers shrugging off her hus­band's exasperation to bake cookies for one of the organization's many antiwar bake sales. “[M]y husband was wondering at one point, ‘Sandra, what are you doing? Another batch of cookies for the Missoula Women for Peace?'” But Perrin and other Missoula Women for Peace believed that the cookies enticed people to come over to the organization's table and peruse the group's antiwar materials, perhaps playing on the old adage “The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.”³⁸

Along with mothering and cooking, the standards of female domesticity charged women with the task of shopping for the family, a role consistent with women's alleged instinct for nurturing and their responsibility for keeping house. Even at the nadir of female domesticity, American women had always worked as household financial managers. In the strictly patriar­chal antebellum South, white plantation mistresses were expected to man­age the household budget and keep the cupboards well stocked.³⁹ In the immigrant households of the industrializing North, working children and husbands turned their checks over to the mother or wife. As the historian Elizabeth Ewen explained, immigrant women “had to secure... goods in the marketplace—and since the wife was the center of the household, it was her responsibility to manage the conversion of wages into necessities.”⁴⁰ Women in 1960s America remained crucial to the consumer economy and played increasingly important roles in economic decision-making in the household.⁴¹ Antiwar women recognized their economic roles as sources of power and sought to capitalize upon their consumer identity to protest the war in Vietnam.

One organization that neatly combined a maternalist and consumerist approach to protesting the Vietnam War was Another Mother for Peace (AMP). Founded in 1967 by a group of women in Beverly Hills, California, AMP adopted many of the same maternalist positions as WSP as demon­strated by its popular slogan “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” As an AMP mailer explained, “We who have given life must be dedicated to preserving it.”⁴²

Yet AMP pushed beyond appealing to women as mothers to appeal to them as consumers. AMP sought to encourage women to use their power as consumers to challenge the war in Vietnam in two ways. Unlike WSP, which was not centrally coordinated and focused primarily on marching, draft counseling, and acts of civil disobedience, AMP centered its activities on raising awareness through the sale of posters, patches, jewelry, pins, tie tacks, stationery, and peace cards emblazoned with its slogan. Although, theoretically, anyone could buy these items, AMP literature targeted women, using phrases such as “just in time for holiday gift-giving.”⁴³ AMP sponsored card campaigns, which encouraged consumers to purchase boxes of cards to send to politicians in Washington, D.C. The organization’s “Peace by Christmas” campaign, for example, planned to flood Washington with Christmas cards that urged elected officials to stop the war. In its Mother’s Day campaign, AMP sold at least 20,000 cards that made their way to the Capitol.⁴⁴ Through their purchasing of peace paraphernalia, women could harass congressional war-makers and fund AMP’s effort to stop the war.

Groups like AMP, though, also targeted women as consumers from a different angle. “If we are to believe the figures,” Alberta Slavin argued during the Women’s Hearing on the War in Vietnam, “women control and spend over 90% of the money in the economy. If women as consumers really want to end the war, we could conduct a devastating economic boy­cott.” She encouraged women to connect with each other and to stop shopping.⁴⁵ Housewife Mary Jane Badenoch proclaimed that she was will­ing “to live on nothing but necessities, to buy no new labor-saving or entertainment products and to let the companies who contribute to the war know [that she would] no longer succumb to their advertising.”⁴⁶ Ora Lee Malone condemned companies such as Whirlpool, Bulova Watch, Motorola, and General Motors for producing war-related materials. She understood that these companies valued women as consumers and felt women were in a position to compel them to help create a peaceful society. “As consumers,” Malone pointed out, “we can be very influential.”⁴⁷ One antiwar flyer pointed out that women’s consumer identities made them responsible for the war but could also be the key to stopping it. “Women, though we don’t carry guns, are as much a part of the war effort—and the society that makes wars like this possible—as are men.” The flyer announced a protest in which women would condemn war profiteering and pledge to “stop paying for the destruction.”⁴⁸

In a concerted effort to raise awareness of how women’s purchasing power fed the war machine and, conversely, could starve the war machine, AMP produced and distributed a film titled You Don’t Have to Buy the War, Mrs. Smith. The 1970 film featured former Miss America and AMP mem­ber Bess Myerson Grant explaining how many consumer goods manufactur­ers were also crucial components of the defense industry. Along with the film, AMP sponsored a letter-writing campaign in 1970 to challenge con­sumer goods manufacturers to abandon their roles in the defense industry. Calling on women to band together as consumers, the June 1970 AMP newsletter encouraged women to write to company presidents and board members and, in effect, scare manufacturers away from defense work.⁴⁹

While draft-card burning and draft-board raiding placed men at the center of the debate about the war, engaging the war from an economic perspective allowed women—a dominant force in the consumer economy— to speak with power. By addressing the war as consumers and as people who, often without their knowledge, helped equip the military, women could more fully participate in antiwar protest. Often, though, antiwar activ­ists baulked at moving away from combatant-centered protest. Jane Kennedy, who initially supported draft-based protest actions, remembered her frustration with her fellow protesters:

[W]e were talking about draft boards and I had made the point... that I could not see the value of staying just with draft boards, that we had to share the symbolic action, that it was not just draft boards that were culprits here. That the industrial people, those who made money out of things that soldiers used to kill other human beings with had to be coupled with draft boards to show the military-industrial complex kind of thing. That I could understand about the draft boards, but I simply had a wider horizon than that.⁵⁰

As a noncombatant, Kennedy's participation in draft-board raiding implicitly carried less weight than that of a male (that is, a potential com­batant). Eventually, Kennedy's group, which humorously adopted the name “the Beaver 55” (although there were only eight members), compromised and decided to protest in tandem the Selective Service and the military­industrial complex. In November 1969, the Beaver 55 entered the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan, a company that produced napalm, and scrambled magnetic tapes containing biological and chemical research. A week earlier, the group had successfully destroyed the draft records of 44 Indianapolis draft boards. The Beaver 55's decision to couple draft- and consumer-oriented protest reflects a recognition by the participants that the war was important to more than just those who served in the military. Noncombatants, among them women, were similarly responsible for the war's destruction and equally able to protest toward its end.⁵¹

Targeting Dow Chemical made a lot of sense to many women. Women were particularly angry about the American military's use of napalm in Vietnam and took the lead in public acts of protest against its manufacture and distribution. Many women recognized that the manufacture of napalm was intimately linked with their roles as consumers and homemakers. Donna Allen of WSP explained that the use of napalm galvanized women because of its horrifying impact, particularly on children. But WSP's Cora Weiss laid part of the blame on women themselves, who, through their roles as consumers, funded the production of napalm. As Weiss told the antiwar movement chronicler Tom Wells, “The guys who made napalm in Vietnam made something that you used in your kitchen everyday [Saran Wrap], so you could understand it. And what makes it stick to food is what makes it stick to babies.” With this knowledge, some women focused their public protest not on draft resistance but on napalm resistance. In May 1966, four women successfully kept trucks from distributing napalm for seven hours. They continued their protest in Alviso, California, where they were arrested for preventing napalm bombs from being moved from storage facilities to barges. Their actions prompted the town of Aviso to prohibit the company from storing napalm.⁵² As mothers, women were appalled by napalm’s effects on children. As consumers, they knew they could do something about it.