Meet Women Strike for Peace who rallied together to protest against the Nuclear Testing during the Cold War.
Meet Women Strike for Peace who rallied together to protest against the Nuclear Testing during the Cold War.
Guess what? The music is back! Listen to the end to hear the original song Two Minutes to Midnight.
Case 4: Maralinga and Nuclear Testing in Australia During the War (Mentioned in the episode)
Cold War Song Children of the Dust
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All music written and performed by Kelly Chase.
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to History Detective, a podcast where I delve into the past to uncover the mysteries of history and then I explore how that story might be reimagined through song. This is Case 28: Women Strike for Peace.
The Cold War is one of those topics that is generally taught in a Modern History class, and it went for a very long time, more than 40 years, and it only ended in the late 1980s, so you would think that there would be a bit of scope to include some women in the text books. Not so. They were definitely there, but you just have to dig a little to find them. So today, I would like to introduce you to a women’s organisation who protested against the use of Nuclear weapons during the Cold War, Women Strike for Peace.
If you are not familiar with the Cold War, in its simplest form, it was like a 40-year-long staring contest between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States. Both sides would flex their nuclear weapons and try to race each other to be the first into space. It was also quite the propaganda war. This is the period when many of the villains in the Hollywood films were Russian and Western pop and rock stars were banned in Russia. It is called a ‘Cold’ war because no actual fighting on each other’s soil, however, wars did happen in other countries as a result of this capitalist/communist ideological war.
But the scariest thing for the general public was the ultimate power and destruction that the afore mentioned nuclear weapons could potentially cause. Children in school were instructed to “Duck and Cover” in case of a nuclear explosion, and popular culture was flooded with books, songs and films that imagined what might happen in the case of a nuclear explosion. America even had a fallout shelter program that was supported by President Kennedy and people were urged to buy prefabricated fallout shelters, scientists did question the efficacy of these shelters against a nuclear attack. The program was eventually dropped and after 1961, 600 fallout shelter companies filed for bankruptcy. If you are up for some YouTubing, I highly recommend watching both the Duck and Cover- Bert the Turtle video and the quirky “Fallout Shelter” pop song by Scott Peters, I will pop a link to the both of them in the show notes and on historydetectivepodcast.com.
It felt like the leaders were sitting there with their fingers poised above their big red buttons ready to go MAD. MAD stands for Mutually Assured Destruction. Basically, if you push your nuclear button, then we will press ours and we will all go down together. If you would like to hear more about the testing of nuclear weapons, I have an episode from season one called Nuclear Testing in Maralinga Australia that you can listen to. In the United States between 1951 and 1958, around 100 nuclear weapons tests were conducted in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site, but they also tested nuclear weapons in Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico and Mississippi and in the Pacific Ocean.
Because of this looming threat, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created something called the Doomsday Clock in 1947. The time in 1947 was set to 7 minutes to midnight. This was a metaphor to represent how close the world was to global catastrophe.Sometimes the hand moves closer to midnight and sometimes it moves further away. On the 20th of January they announced that it the Doomsday clock currently sits at 100 seconds to midnight.
I realise that is a lot of context, but it is important to set the scene for the role that Women Strike for Peace played.
The Women Strike for Peace movement, started with 6 women meeting in their living room in September 1961 and three months later it resulted in more than 50 000 women marching in 60 cities across the United States with the rallying slogans, “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race” and “Pure Milk, Not Poison.” These women were united by their concern for the safety of their children from the dangers of nuclear fall-out from the testing being done in the states. Newsweek reported on the protests of the day and said, “They were perfectly ordinary looking women.”
These days you might think that drumming up that kind of support for a cause is easy with our access to social media, but social media did not exist back then, so these women spread the word the old-fashioned way, chain letters. One leader would send a letter to someone she knew who would then organise a meeting in her local area and send more letters out. But sending letters costs money for the paper, envelopes and postage, and these groups had no funding, so often bowls would be placed on the tables and the women who attended the meetings would donate what they could, whether it be money they were given for their birthday, or maybe they went without for a week so they could donate.
One of the women who was responsible for starting Women Strike for Peace was Dagmar Wilson. In the book “We Made a Difference”, fellow protestor writes that Dagmar Wilson was not previously an activist and had only every been on the Parent Teacher’s Association in her community. But when she heard from scientists about the dire threat that nuclear testing posed to their children, she was compelled into action. She was inspired by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell who had been arrested and put in jail for anti-nuclear civil disobedience.
Some of the protest activities included, picketing places like the White House, the Pentagon and the United Nations, but they also wrote letters to legislators and had smaller local protests. One group put on masks and white overalls and dumped bags of simulated nuclear waste in front of the Department of Energy in Washington DC. Another time, a group hired a fallout shelter and took it to a shopping centre to hand out leaflets about how these shelters were ineffectual.
So, all of this anti-nuclear activity got the attention in the FBI and they began surveillance of many of the women. They also drew the attention of the HUAC, or House of Un-American Activities Committee. This committee was created in 1938 to investigate people who they thought had ties to communism and were partaking in rebellious activities and being disloyal to America.
These women were deemed such a threat that the House of Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed 14 women who were involved in the Women Strike for Peace, including Dagmar Wilson. The only problem was that 3 of the women called up, were not even in Women Strike for Peace and were a part of different peace organisations. Now this hearing was meant to determine the amount of communist infiltration that there was in the women’s organisation. These subpoenas were meant to strike fear in the hearts of these women, but that is not how it went down. Firstly, they rallied around the 3 women who were not even a part of their group and gave them their full support. The women insisted that they had nothing to hide and 100 of the women wired the commissioner volunteering to give their testimony at the hearing. The committee refused this offer implying that they were not interested in finding out information and more interested in smearing their reputation. There were also reports of between 300 to 500 women turning up to the hearings and when the first woman, a retired schoolteacher, stood to give evidence, they all stood with her in solidarity.
She testified, “I don’t know, sir, why I am here, but I do know why you are here, I think…because you don’t quite understand the nature of this movement. This movement was inspired and motivated by mothers’ love for children. When they were putting their breakfast on the table, they saw not only the Wheaties and milk, but they also saw strontium 90 and iodine 131.”
All of the women testified with honesty and wit, and the headlines read “It’s Ladies Day at the Capitol: Hoots, Howls and Charm.” And “Peace March Gals Make Red Hunters Look Silly.” When Dagmar Wilson was on the stand, she protested that was not the leader and there was no hierarchy in the organisation. Additionally, she said that the organisation was open to anyone of any political persuasion. The prosecutor asked her, “Would you knowingly permit or welcome Nazis or Fascists?” and her reply was, “If we could only get them on our side.”
This hearing had the opposite effect of what the House of Un-American Activities Committee intended. It brought even more media attention to Women Strike for Peace and other women saw these pictures of ordinary women with their children in tow peacefully stating their case and the organisation continued to grow. These women could not be deterred and Women Strike for Peace continued until the 1990s where they spoke out against US intervention in Latin America.
Now I would like to play you a song that I wrote which was inspired Women Strike for Peace. It is called Two Minutes to Midnight.
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.
Little boys with big toys
Making noise and starting fires
Big boys with killer toys
Making the stakes higher
Anything that you can do
We can do it better
Anywhere you want to go
We’ll get there faster
Cause it’s 2 minutes to midnight
The world is counting down
2 minutes to midnight
Put your weapons down
The future isn’t something
That we can borrow
We can save today
We can save tomorrow
From those
Little boys with big toys
Making noise and starting fires
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Next time on History Detective, we will meet Rosa Billinghurst who did not let her disability stop her from becoming a Suffragette.
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