THE WOMEN'S peace movement is a year old this week. The peace camp at Greenham Common itself has existed for considerably longer. But the movement really came to birth on 12 December last year when 30,000 women surrounded the perimeter fence and decorated it with photographs, letters, dreams and momentoes.
Even the most hostile sections of the popular press had to find something good to say about Greenham that day. And they've been trying to find ways to discredit the movement ever since.
It isn't just the popular press that has peddled misconceptions and confusion about the movement. It's also sections of the lett itsell. After the action last December some purists decreed that it was 'anti-feminist' women to hang nappies and pictures of their children on Greenham fence.
Not all women did that. But those who were there for the sake of their children renewed a consistent theme of the way that women have been drawn into movements and struggles.
Women in Russia started the 1917 revolution calling for bread and an end to war, because they cared for their starving children and dying sons. Even when the struggle was for women's own rights, for example the Suffragette movement, the testimony of many working class women indicates that they saw the fight as simply a first step to place themselves in a better position to improve the lives of their families and communities.
We should have no fear of this, either as feminists or as socialists, because in the course of the struggle other questions become posed How many suffragettes first forced their husbands and sons to take more responsibility because they wanted the time to go out and fight for the vote?
And in the Greenham movement perhaps the perience of Helen John best sums up the transformation in women's lives through engaging in the struggle at Greenham. left her husband and children live at Greenham because as she Socialist Action 9 December 1983 education.' Sarah van Venn, March 1982 Greenham the mass Photo:
at home, for their future.
that themselves a bad thing personal ex- posedly not feminist. many one hoary old argument.
Helen *The camp itself is a permanent reminder to the government that there are many people who don't want to be part of the nuclear arms race. We're not just a bunch of women sitting around a base.
thousands of people who don't want cruise missiles sited here. It seemed a strange kind of democracy that a deci sion could be taken without even parliament being consulted, let alone the public. I sensed this sick mentality all around me that was motivated not by the sacredness of life but by fear that was feeding the arms race. It seemed crazy to me that the government were pouring our precious energies, our resources, billions of pounds, into something that was for mass murder, instead of this money going towards our social services, our health and has explained, she cared for them.
She broke with her family to fight A parallel argument has been women-only actions are in supsocialist too 'You can't involve the unions in women-only actions' is Apart from the fact that this increasingly simply isn't true, it is also the case that our job as socialists is to argue We're speaking for in the unions why they should support such actions.
The record of the labour movement in this country on supporting the fight for women's liberation doesn't bear close examination. Undoing that bad history demands that the labour movement itself makes the first move.
The overwhelming majority of women still see themselves as hav ing no role in life outside work -bar changing nappies and cooking
Socialist Action 9 December 1983