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Introduction
In 1973, Amy Swerdlow wrote a progress report about her ongoing research into antinuclear activist group Women Strike for Peace (WSP). As Associate Director of Women's Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and a former WSP leader, she offered a detailed analysis of the group's gender politics. Swerdlow described the ideological compulsion that guided WSP's founding as a "spontaneous expression of motherly concern," noting the essentialist attitudes of leading figures who described themselves as "housewives and mothers." However, Swerdlow also asserted that WSP's attempts to "liberate" women by drawing them into the political arena and its organizing "separately as a woman's peace group" made a "permanent contribution to the political aspect of the women's movement." Describing it as a "forerunner" to women's liberation, Swerdlow ultimately affirmed that WSP was "basically a feminist movement."1
This assertion would have surprised participants at demonstrations in the previous decade. WSP grew from modest beginnings in September 1961 to become one of the most successful social movement organizations in US history. Under the stewardship of children's book illustrator and peace activist Dagmar Wilson, WSP amassed thousands of supporters throughout the world and became a successful and influential part of the global Cold War peace movement. But despite Swerdlow's assertion, activists throughout the 1960s overtly stressed that they were not feminists. WSPers firmly rebuffed notions that their organization was a part of the movement for women's equality or political advancement, and instead elevated their status as "housewives and mothers" who simply wished to provide a stable world for their children.2 Although railing against the "male logic" guiding nuclear brinksmanship, Wilson assured the public that "we are not striking against our husbands. It is my guess that we will make the soup that they will ladle out to the children on Wednesday."3 The group consciously rebuffed associations with feminism and only embarked on public campaigns that would appeal to the "average woman" who, it believed, did not lobby or picket but "does worry."4
WSP as described by Swerdlow only emerged in the early 1970s. Encountering a new generation of feminist activists who attacked its "misplaced priorities," WSP became a very different group from the one that existed before.5 Its activists re-examined their assumptions about gender and...