Perceptions of ‘Peace Women’ at Greenham Common 1981–85: A participant’s View

Abstract

Think of the image: ‘a young woman cherishing peace’. What comes to mind? When I reflect, try as I will, I cannot avoid images of domesticity. She sits with a child on her lap or playing at her feet. She sews, she knits, she cooks, she plants and harvests, she makes music. Utterly reasonable of course, for all these activities are incompatible with war: peace requires some kind of home and stability. Domesticity is equated with peace, woman with domesticity and therefore with peace. If I try to shake free of this image and see ‘peace woman’ in another light, the image that comes to my mind immediately is of a woman being like a man. She springs out: Pallas Athena in shining armour, Joan of Arc, an Amazon, a Nicaraguan woman in battle fatigues.

Any woman from anywhere in the world can come, go, return; and be welcomed. No questions are asked. There is no hierarchy, no structure. There is no distinction of race, creed, colour, money, age, class or nationality. These unpretentious women in their beat-up warm clothes, have become a world-wide symbol and model for countless ordinary people who also say NO. (Martha Gellhorn, Observer 12 February 1984)

Sue Hanson, a sprig of a girl from Mid America’s Heartlands, believes she is more liberated than any of the Greenham Common women on the other side of the missile fence — both literally and ideologically. Lieutenant Hanson, a bespectacled blonde, is the only woman in the Cruise programme in Britain capable of obliterating Leningrad at the touch of a button … ‘My face will never be as lacking in makeup as theirs, … I’m a liberationist not a feminist’.

It is also predictable they will be deeply upset to discover that the operator in control of Cruise is a mature life loving young woman who cherishes peace just as much as most of us. (Brian Vine, Daily Mail, June 1984)