Disclaimer: The following blog post is not a reflection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opinion on the below topics.
By Gabe Sanders.
A fundamental tenet of civil disobedience, which entails deliberately violating the law as a means of exposing injustice, is encapsulated by the following phrase: “If you always do as you’re told, then you don’t ever change anything.”[1] Roughly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall—a physical representation of the regime that fell along with it—these words found their way into a documentary about a peace camp that played a critical role in ending the Cold War. This camp was organized by British women on the airbase in Berkshire, England, known as Royal Air Force (RAF) Greenham Common, and civil disobedience would play a critical role in their triumph.
In 1979, after more than four decades of struggling with the Soviet Union for hegemonic power, the United States made an agreement with a handful of European nations to deploy 464 ground-launched cruise missiles across these territories. “15 times more lethal than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945,” these unfathomably powerful nuclear weapons were positioned by the US in this manner with the express aim of “prepar[ing] to escalate a conflict… before an adversary does.”[2] Understandably, this decision was met with considerable indignation and alarm by many of those living in the host countries. During the summer of 1981, dozens of Welsh women galvanized an effort to express their disapproval.
It began in August, with 40 demonstrators marching 120 miles from southern Wales to RAF Greenham Common, seeking to spark a public discourse about the 96 American missiles being sited on British soil.[3] To the group’s chagrin, their nine-day journey generated minimal media attention, so they made the spontaneous decision to build a camp on the perimeter of the base. Upon their arrival, a letter was issued to the base commander denouncing “the nuclear arms race and the dangers it posed to the planet,” and four of the women shackled themselves to the base’s fence, requesting “a televised debate with the Minister of Defense.”[4] Despite the initially dismissive response they received, publicity gradually increased, as did attendance.
By February of 1982, Greenham Common had officially been declared “a women’s space.”[5] This meant that men seeking to stand in solidarity were prohibited from sleeping on site but were allowed to join in the daytime action as a supporting cast. One attendee attributed this decision to the inflammatory presence of male protestors, who—despite their listlessness in performing tasks essential to camp maintenance—provoked violent responses from law enforcement.[6] By setting these ground rules, Greenham Common women were simultaneously diffusing tension and subverting gender norms in a manner that powerfully symbolized the parallel structure of their dyadic campaign: promoting the peaceful diffusion of interstate tension, and subverting the traditional dynamic between a nation and its people. The women of the camp, for whom “[t]he issue of nonviolence [was] central,” saw nuclear weapons as “a concrete metaphor for the pervasive ways in which we are organized,” including via the oft-patriarchal structure of activist spaces.[7] Attracting assenters of different classes and sexualities, from across the United Kingdom and abroad, this anti-nuclear feminist peace camp adopted a fitting mantra: “Greenham Women Are Everywhere!”[8]
The tactics employed by the demonstrators were creative and manifold. They would form blockades to stifle the progress of construction and affix to the outer fence tokens of peace and womanhood.[10] Among the coalition’s most potent and well-attended protest actions was an event that took place during the waning weeks of 1982. In a peaceful display dubbed “Embrace the Base,” more than 30,000 women joined hands and encircled the airbase—creating a physical representation of the way Greenham had “captured the imagination and the spirit of resistance and anti-militarism of so many women.”[11] This peaceful expression of mutual support and love stood in stark contrast with the 96 symbols of brute force and unadulterated power that would soon be contained within the confines of the base’s barbed-wire fence. The women had declared, in their own words, “[W]e will meet your violence with a loving embrace.”[12]
Just as powerful as the images of “Embrace the Base,” however, were those captured on the first of January, when several of the women ascended the fence and began dancing around the towers where the missiles would be stationed.[13] As trespassers, they were disobeying the law; as dancers, they were remaining civil. This departure from the convention that the female body be perceived as something in need of male protection allowed them to express their opposition to nuclear warfare, while embracing their femininity. By refusing to do as they were told, the Greenham women had again exposed the violence inherent in both militarism and patriarchy, as well as the vulnerability of the base itself. Meditating on her time at RAF Greenham Common, Ann Seller would later describe the way moments like these built the collective’s confidence that their fear and anger had “a legitimate place in the order of things” and thereby “destroy[ed] that order.” To “[allow] room for all those angers and fears,” they shared a commitment to “not violating persons.”[14] This conception of nonviolence would undoubtedly inform the evolution of the activists’ strategies.
The cruise missiles arrived in 1983, and as the violent power of the American government came to be concentrated within the mesh boundary of RAF Greenham Common, the Greenham women began to test the definitional boundaries of nonviolent resistance. In July, they decided that while “violating persons” was out of the question, inflicting physical force on military property could be considered an act of “creative nonviolence.”[15] Determined to “highlight the insecurity of the base,” the demonstrators approached barrier and used bolt cutters to sever parts of the fence, then entered.[16] This action, performed “under the gaze of the military police and soldiers,” reflected an understanding of “what constitutes violence and property [that had] shifted and deepened”— in Seller’s words, “Silencing a person is violence; pulling down a military fence is not.”[17] By the end of 1983, the enclosure had been pulled down so frequently that the Defense Minister drafted bylaws aimed at criminalizing the act of “cutting through the fence,” and the day these rules were enacted, “the Greenham women immediately broke them.”[18] Breaking down barriers, both physically and metaphorically, had become the camp’s signature move.
In 1984, a slew of attempts to expel the women once and for all was initiated, which created a constant threat of eviction and incarceration that compelled the camp to take a mobile form. As a result, media coverage diminished significantly. Fortunately, with a generous donation from renowned peace activist Yoko Ono, the Greenham women purchased land adjacent to the base in 1987, enabling them to “keep a caravan next to the base, where they maintained a space free from police intrusions.”[19] That same year, under relentless pressure from anti-nuclear activists across the world, including the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, President Reagen and General Secretary Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.[20] At long last, denuclearization had begun.
[1] Mothers of the Revolution, accessed October 18, 2023.
[2] Gwyn Kirk, “Why Women?,” Social Justice 46, no. 1 (155) (2019): 23–36.
[3] Ann Pettitt, Walking to Greenham (Honno, 2006).
[4] Margaret L. Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red: Feminist Rhetorical Invention and Strategies of Resistance at the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common,” NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 18–41.
[5] Kirk, “Why Women?”
[6] Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (Zed Books, 2007).
[7] Anne Seller, “Greenham: A Concrete Reality,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8, no. 2 (1985): 26–31, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346050.
[8] Kirk, “Why Women?”
[9] Suzanne Moore et al., “How the Greenham Common Protest Changed Lives: ‘We Danced on Top of the Nuclear Silos,’” The Guardian, March 20, 2017, sec. UK news.
[10] Margaret L. Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red.”
[11] Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red.”
[12] Barbara Harford and Sarah Hopkins, Greenham Common: Women at the Wire (Women’s Press, 1984).
[13] Mothers of the Revolution.
[14] Seller, “Greenham.”
[15] Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red.”
[16] Harford and Hopkins, Greenham Common.
[17] Seller, “Greenham.”
[18] Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red.”
[19] Laware, “Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red.”
[20] Kirk, “Why Women?”