After the Seventies: Greenham Common Women and Dreams of a Common Language

Twenty years after the founding of one of the most idealistic and long-running feminist anti-militarist campaigns, I reflect on the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp. Although the protests at Greenham Common Royal Airforce base were a movement of the 1980s, their controversial crossing of existing feminist and pacifist alignments shed light on the politics of gender, motherhood and the military that preceded them. Associated both with apolitical mothers fearful for their childrens lives and with radical feminism, the campaign also drew on a less obvious heritage of liberal feminism that was, in my view, important to the camps later success. Drawing in thousands more women than nearly any other feminist campaign in Britain at the time, it unexpectedly answered some of the needs of seventies feminists as well as providing a way into feminism for many others, eventually becoming far more radical than its original design. Ironically, anti-nuclear activity provided a holding point for a fast-dividing womens movement while looking forward to its more diverse political future.