Women Strike for Peace was organized in September of 1961 by a handful of Washington housewives in reaction to the Berlin Wall Crisis and the threat of impending nuclear war. The aim of the movement was to achieve complete and general world wide disarmament. Its platform to “recall humanity from self-destruction” called for women around the world to urge their governments to:
ban all atomic weapons testing, negotiate in good faith to put all atomic weapons under control of an international agency, take concrete steps toward world-wide disarmament, devote as much of the national budgets to preparation for peace as is now-being spent in preparation for war, use the United Nations, the press and all mass media for facts, not name-calling nor propaganda, develop the ability of the United Nations to keep peace and promote world law.
At its peak, the movement reached an estimated national membership of 500,000. Membership was strictly participatory; there was never a national membership list and there were no dues.
Women Strike for Peace (WSP) grew to consist of a network of loosely organized, independent locals in over one hundred cities throughout the nation. Although the main headquarters was located in Washington, D.C., there was little direction on the national level; each local was autonomous and free to set its own priorities. The main issues dealt with during the years that the records cover include radiation contamination, nuclear fallout shelters, admission of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations, unilateral disarmament, racial suppression in South Africa, and the war in Vietnam.
Women Strike for Peace attempted to call attention to the dangers of the arms race by staging events that would attract the news media. Under the leadership of Dagmar Wilson, founder of the movement, WSP received a good deal of news coverage, and became a subject of controversy. In one of its first actions, a nationwide women's strike was called on November 1, 1961, and as husbands supposedly filled in at home and on the job, their wives took to the city streets in protest of nuclear bomb testing. It was at this point that journalists first recast the “Lysistrata” theme by comparing the new women's peace movement with Aristophanes's female truce-makers. The comparison would be an enduring one.
In December of 1962 a House Un-American Activities Subcommittee called a number of WSP members, including Dagmar Wilson, to the stand in an attempt, as Sydney Harris put it, “to sniff out any possible Communist influence or direction within the group.” Ten women were subpoenaed, but over sixty volunteered to testify and hundreds came, some with their small children, to the Washington investigations, giving the meeting rooms a nursery-like atmosphere. When asked if they were Communists, the majority of the women took the Fifth Amendment. When Dagmar Wilson was questioned about the possibility of Communist participation in the movement, she declared she had no desire to control those who wished to join and that she would not prevent Communists from assuming positions of leadership. The movement received criticism for this stance, with many journalists writing that the women were “naive Communist dupes.”
Another confrontation occurred in late 1964, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Mrs. Wilson and two others in an investigation of their attempt to secure a visitor's visa for a Japanese professor who was a suspected Communist. When the three refused to testify in a closed session of the committee, they were found in contempt of Congress. As a consequence a new branch of Women Strike for Peace, the Defenders of Three Against HUAC, was formed to solicit funds for, and to publicize the plight of, the accused. A major portion of the records of WSP, the correspondence, ephemera, and newspaper clippings, relate to these two confrontations, and a great deal of the time and effort expended by the movement from late 1962 to early 1965 was concerned with the HUAC investigations.
Other activities documented in the records of WSP include a letter writing campaign to Mmes. Khrushchev and Kennedy in late 1962 that urged the two women to work for peace through influencing their husbands, and a journey made by fifty women led by Dagmar Wilson and including Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Geneva Disarmament Talks in April of 1962. There they met with representatives of the United States and Soviet delegations and presented petitions for peace. In 1963 the group began lobbying efforts against the Fallout Shelter Bill H.R. 2000, and giving support to McGovern's bill for conversion to a civilian economy. In May of 1964 representatives of Women Strike for Peace traveled to The Hague, joining European women in protest of the NATO plan to arm a fleet with nuclear missiles, and in July of the following year, WSP members traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia to have a “peaceful confrontation” with women from North Vietnam.
Women Strike for Peace focused its attention on Vietnam during the war years. It was one of the first organizations to establish a Vietnam Committee, which was actively involved in organizing demonstrations and educating the public about war atrocities such as use of napalm.
After the war in Vietnam, WSP resumed its anti-nuclear weapons campaign, but with less vigor than before due to factionalism and the splitting off of the more radical elements during the early 1970's. The movement is still active in many major cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Each city publishes its own newsletter and sends representatives to the national meeting held each year.
