User:Schnickelfritz66/Women Strike for Peace

Bibliography

• • This is a peer reviewed article in Feminist Studies from JSTOR, so it should be a reliable source. It covers our topic of the WSP in depth and how the leaders of the organization went about using their voices during the Cold War.
• • This is a reliable source from JSTOR. A snippet of the impact of the WSP during the Cold War and protesting nuclear strikes.
• • This is an article from the university's online library, so it should be a reliable source. It covers our topic, specifically when the WSP interacted with Vietnamese unions.
• • This is an article from the university's online library, so it should be a reliable source. It covers the history and lasting impacts of the Women's Peace Movement.
• • This article is from the University of London's School of Advanced Studies online library, so it should be a reliable source. The article analyzes the WSP and the changes it brought domestically in the 1960s.
• • This is a book from our university's library, so it should be a reliable source. It covers women's involvement in environmentalism during the Cold War
  • • This is an academic journal from JSTOR, a reliable source that goes into the history and purpose and history of the Atomic Doom Towns that were part of the Nevada Test site.
  • • This is a source from the Atomic Heritage Foundation and goes into the nuclear testing that happened, tourism, and the test site today, which helps our article especially in the sections explaining the reasoning behind the WSP.
  • • This is an academic source from JSTOR on more of the radioactive fallout and the Nevada testing site and the health risks that came along with it.

Article Draft

Lead

“About 50,000 women…” instead of “around 50,000 women…”

“Nearing the height of the cold war in 1961,...” instead of “In 1961, "Nearing the height of the Cold War….”

Get rid of the quotations in this sentence: The protest helped "push the United States and the Soviet Union into signing a nuclear test-ban treaty two years later". and fix it to "The protest helped push the United States and the Soviet Union to sign a nuclear test-ban treaty two years later."

Article body

Actions

Create a paragraph title: split up “Actions” paragraph starting at “The group consisted of mainly….” and separate that section into a paragraph titled “Notable Members” to go more in depth on the names mentioned in previous paragraphs. Something describing the specific demographic of women who were the majority involved.

“In 1962, the members of the advance party of Women Strike for Peace met with Gertrude Baer, who at the time was the secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Geneva at the Seventeen-Nation Disarmament Conference.” slightly changed to “Members of the advance party of Women’s Strike for Peace met with Gertrude Baer in 1962, who was secretary for the Women’s International League For Peace and Freedom(WILPF) at the time during the Seventeen-Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva.”

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

"From the beginning of the Women Strikes for Peace in 1961, the FBI had the group under surveillance due to fear that communism had spread to the mothers of America." fixed from "From the beginning of the Women Strikes for Peace in 1961, the FBI had the group under surveillance due to fear that communism had spread to the mothers of America.

"Women Strikes for Peace released the information to the media before the HUAC could issue a press release, as the committee usually used the news media to discredit the organizations subpoena." changed from "Women Strikes for Peace released the information to the media before the HUAC could issue a press release, as the committee usually used the news media to discredit the organizations subpoenaed."

Actions

"In 1962, the members of the advance party of Women Strike for Peace met with Gertrude Baer, who at the time was the secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Geneva at the Seventeen-Nation Disarmament Conference. With their sights set on anti-militarism, they allied themselves with four other peace women's organizations: WILPF, Women's Peace Society (WPS, which was founded in 1919 by Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of the nineteenth century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison), the Women's Peace Union (WPU), and the National Committee of the Causes and Cure of War (NCCCW)." changed grammatically to "In 1962, the members of the advance party of Women Strike for Peace met with Gertrude Baer, who at the time was the secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Geneva at the Seventeen-Nation Disarmament Conference. With their sights set on anti-militarism, they allied themselves with four other peaceful women's organizations: WILPF, Women's Peace Society (WPS, which was founded in 1919 by Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of the nineteenth-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison), the Women's Peace Union (WPU), and the National Committee of the Causes and Cure of War (NCCCW)."

March on the Capitol Build Up

The Women’s Strike for Peace organization wasn’t a unified one, and they had no known leaders and were completely unknown in the American political scene before the capitol strike on November 1st. The women of WSP were responding to several women in Washington D.C. who were unnerved by how much the nuclear arms race was speeding up. The women sent messages from Washington through word of mouth, and telephone calls to friends and contacts from church, already established peace organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) across America to cease their normal daily activities and join them from their own homes in a one day strike to end the arms race. Each strike in each city depended solely on what the women were willing and able to do with different laws and regulations across states.

Nevada testing sites and effects of the experiments

The Nevada Proving Ground came to be where the United States perfected their nuclear weaponry. The spot located a mere 65 miles north of Las Vegas replaced the Pacific Islands as a testing ground for these weapons. Coined as an “outdoor laboratory” and an “experimental landscape”, several government sponsored activities took place there. “Doom Towns” were constructed with mannequin families to test these weapons on.

The WSP protested in part because of the effects of the particles and debris that remained in the air after years of nuclear testing. The radioactive affects after World War II were said to be the first global environmental issue in both scale and potency of the “post-war era”, said by historian John McCormack. With more than 120 official weapon tests in the Pacific and Nevada, depositing immense amounts of radioactive debris which caused levels of ionizing radiation to slowly increase over time. The nuclear arms race made the world more radioactive. The debris spread onto things like food and drinks and in the very air we breathed, causing cancer and birth defects. People were ignorant of the possible health risks and would have picnics at high points near the testing site to watch government experiments. Exposure to radiation and the effects it had on civilians and the unborn were a driving force for the Women’s Peace Movement to strike to end the nuclear race and stop this rising environmental issue as it was harming the innocent.

Baby Tooth Survey

The Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information initiated the Baby Tooth Survey. This was a plan to collect 50,000 baby teeth per year, in order to test them and provide a record of how much strontium-90 children in the surrounding areas were taking in. The concentration of strontium-90 is considered the most hazardous form of atomic debris.  Participants were asked to mail in the baby teeth of their children in order to participate. Parents were so concerned by the extensive nuclear testing in the atmosphere and the resulting radioactive product that they were very likely to participate in the survey and send in their children’s teeth. One piece of evidence that raised concern was that the milk from around the area had some of the highest results when it came to containing strontium-90. “Pure Milk Not Poison” became a common slogan and concerns about the milk led to boycotts and use of powdered milk as a substitute. The results of the survey were clear when it was shown that when testing teeth from children that had been bottle fed, the strontium-90 content increased from 1949 to 1953, but then increased very rapidly between 1954 and 1955, which coincided with the major nuclear testing that began in 1953.

Post - 1960s

“In Los Angeles, in 1965 and 1970, the Women Strike for Peace Movement, headed by Mary Clarke, published a cookbook that Clarke inspired.” edited to “The Women’s Strike for Peace published a cookbook in 1965 and 1970, which were inspired by Mary Clarke.”

Notable Members

Add mentioning of Amy Swerdlow

Amy Swerdlow, helped organize the movement and was a founding member who later went on to write the book: Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s, which was published by the University of Chicago press in 1993.

Structure

"The Women Strike for Peace's structure is characterized by a nonhierarchical, loosely structured "unorganizational" format that gives nearly total autonomy to its local chapters, and uses consensus methods. Some of the local chapters rapidly became very strong groups in their own right. This structure was created due to the red-baiting other peace organizations, such as SANE and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had experienced." developed to "The Women Strike for Peace's structure is characterized by a nonhierarchical, loosely structured "unorganizational" format that gives nearly total autonomy to its local chapters, and uses consensus methods. The women saw male leaders as "less agitated, more deliberate, and more slowly moved to action", which provided a structure to avoid. Some of the local chapters rapidly became very strong groups in their own right. This structure was created due to the red-baiting other peace organizations, such as SANE and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had experienced. The red-baiting was known reduce the effectiveness of organizations due to the damage it did to their reputations. The WSP relied on bold actions fueled by the women's fierce emotional commitment and they used marching, picketing, and other creative displays to achieve their goals."

"The Women Strike for Peace's structure is characterized by a nonhierarchical, loosely structured "unorganizational" format..." changed slightly to "The Women Strike for Peace's structure is characterized by a nonhierarchical, loosely structured "unorganized" format."