In 1960, the Voice of Women (VOW), Canada was founded from a mass movement of largely middle-class Anglophone women seeking desperately to end the threat of nuclear war. As the early 1960s unfolded, VOW Canada embarked on a series of national and international anti-nuclear campaigns, challenging Canadian foreign policy, ...
(Show more)In 1960, the Voice of Women (VOW), Canada was founded from a mass movement of largely middle-class Anglophone women seeking desperately to end the threat of nuclear war. As the early 1960s unfolded, VOW Canada embarked on a series of national and international anti-nuclear campaigns, challenging Canadian foreign policy, advancing nonaligned, nonpartisan, progressive strategies for peace, and reaching out to their ‘sisters’ in both friendly and ‘enemy’ nations. Laying claim to global motherhood, they joined a broadly based post-war transnational women’s peace movement and developed a significant international constituency. By 1965, VOW Canada had inspired the formation of autonomous branches in the United Kingdom and Japan, and hailed a growing membership throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Yugoslavia and Austria.
This paper focuses specifically on the founding of a Voice of Women group in the U.K .in 1962 by anti-nuclear British campaigner Judith Cook (1933-2004). Drawing primarily upon correspondence between Judith Cook and Dora Russell - a prominent British socialist feminist peace activist – as well as early VOW UK newsletters, and relevant VOW, Canada records, this paper explores several key issues arising for the fledgling group: 1) deep concern over bridging ‘two peace movements’ - one aligned with the ‘west’ and another with the ‘east’; 2) the creation of political and cultural space for women’s voices on peace and disarmament issues; and 3) promotion of multilateral and non-aligned approaches in national foreign policy through diplomacy and the United Nations.
Overall, it highlights some of the similar political challenges VOW UK shared with the Canadian VOW organization against a backdrop of varying geopolitical contexts in Cold War Canada and Europe. Like VOW Canada, VOW UK networked globally with progressive, leftist, communist and non-communist women while also confronting a hostile climate of anticommunism at home and even within their own ‘ranks.’
Finally this paper begins to assess the impact of cold war politics on VOW UK’s peace work within ‘mixed’ and ‘single sex’ British disarmament groups, coalitions, and transnational women’s organizations such as the Women’s International and Democratic Federation (WIDF). As some have argued convincingly, women’s organizations across the cold war divide ‘developed and utilized the discourse of motherhood and peace as a political tool’ to achieve progressive causes (Pojmann, 2011). However, an increasingly entrenched ‘Cold War paradigm’ (de Haan, 2010) served to undermine women’s transnational efforts to unify around ‘motherhood for peace’.
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