Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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       From “Ban the Bomb” to “Stop the War”: Women Strike for Peace (1961–67)

      White youth may have been politically disengaged at the beginning of the Sixties, but others saw storm clouds gathering—radioactive ones. In downtown Los Angeles, on November 1, 1961, 2,000 women gathered outside the State Building, carrying signs that read “Ban All Atomic Weapons.” After speeches, they marched silently to city hall and then to the Federal Building to present officials with petitions. Their leaflet posed the question, “Who are we?” It answered, “We are housewives and working women.” It said they were part of an organization called “Women Strike for Peace” (WSP).¹

      Sister demonstrations took place that day in dozens of cities, but L.A.’s was by far the largest. A first-person report describing how the event had been organized appeared in London’s Guardian: “An old friend rang me up,” Sophia Wyatt wrote. “She said she was sending me some literature which was the most exciting thing she had ever heard.” The friend asked her to “pass it on to the neighbors, talk to my friends, and be a darling and give her a lift on November 1st. When I started to ask who and what, she cut me short. There were no names; it was not an organization; would I just read it and come.”

      So she did—but first, she said, “I changed into a respectable dress, hauled my one and only hat out of mothballs and put on gloves.” The demonstration was big; when they marched from the State Building to city hall, Wyatt wrote, they were “eight deep in a line stretching for blocks and blocks.” Along the march route, “a blossoming of faces appeared at every window to the uppermost storeys of the surrounding buildings, as the police halted all traffic.” She asked a woman on the march, “What organization do you belong to?” The woman laughed and said, “I don’t belong to any organization. I’ve got a child of ten.”²

      The women’s march was a response to the discovery of deadly radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes in milk from dairies in western states. At the time it was believed that this was the consequence of a huge Soviet hydrogen bomb test and the resulting radioactive cloud that drifted eastward across the Northern Hemisphere—and that cows had grazed on pastures where radioactive rain had fallen. (New studies, decades later, found that American detonations from 1951 to 1961 were the major source of the radioactive plague, which produced thousands of cases of cancer in communities “downwind” of the Nevada test site.) Thus the marcher’s banners read “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race.”

      Their leaflets denounced both sides: “We appeal not only to our own government, but especially the Soviet Union.” One sign declared, “The Soviet 50 Megaton Bomb Is an Outrage against Humanity.” Of the new Kennedy administration (secretly racing toward the invasion of Cuba and the edge of nuclear Armageddon), the demonstrators made three major demands: an immediate cessation of nuclear tests, “concrete steps to be taken at once toward worldwide disarmament,” and “immediate allocation of as much of the national budget to preparation for peace as was being spent in preparation for war.”³ As for the women’s “strike,” it was essentially Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for the nuclear age. Women were urged to “suspend” their traditional roles as housewives and mothers in order to advocate for a test ban and “appeal for the future of mankind.”⁴

      At the rally following the march, a succession of women speakers emphasized the urgency of the moment. “Mrs. Wallace Thompson” chilled the crowd as she described the effects of a ten-megaton bomb targeted at the spot where they stood. “It would level every building in a circle 14 miles across … More horrible than the blast would be the firestorm … All those in fallout shelters would be suffocated … 100 miles in any direction from where we now stand, everyone who did not find shelter would be dead within five days … Fallout comes later.” So, she concluded, “we are done with mere lip service to disarmament and co-existence. We are prepared to back up our demands with our votes. Though, goodness knows, unless we hurry we may not all be around for the next election.”⁵

      State Attorney General Stanley Mosk—the liberal Democrat whose career was later derailed by LAPD Chief Bill Parker—also spoke at the rally, trying to defend the Kennedy administration. He read a message from Governor Pat Brown: “Your demonstration today serves as an expression of public support for our President’s determination to achieve a just peace through early and purposeful negotiations.”⁶ Actually, what they were expressing was the more like the opposite: a criticism of Kennedy for failing to move faster toward banning atmospheric testing and indeed all nuclear weapons.

      The front page of the Times’s “Metro” section the next day was emblazoned with a photo of the 2,000 women demonstrators—but the accompanying article was mainly a soapbox for Mayor Yorty to fulminate against Communist deceptions: “Let us not be duped by Communist-inspired groups who try to make us feel a sense of guilt and shame just because СКАЧАТЬ