After months of consciousness-raising, they had decided that “the Brigade was playing upon the traditional female role in the classic manner. Interspersed among the crowd were approximately 500 young feminists, who, in a controversial act of defiance, decided to symbolically bury “Traditional Womanhood” at the protest. Congress, a pacifist, who had voted against both world wars.

They called themselves the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, in honor of the first woman elected to the U.S. to demand the immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. On that day, about 5, 000 women peace activists from two generations gathered in Washington D.C. That tradition was dramatically challenged on Januby American young feminists. Still, the tradition of women protesting as mothers persisted. Like so many other women of their generation, they argued that women’s special life-giving and preserving role as mothers gave them a unique right to seek universal disarmament in the 1920s.īetween the early years of the 20 th century and the 1960s, union activists and socialists often based their opposition to war on their view of themselves as workers or revolutionaries. In the United States, for example, Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams founded the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915, which eventually became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Throughout history, women have often leveraged their legitimacy and status as mothers - or even as grandmothers - to protest war and violence.

The world split open by ruth rosen