Obedience is Freedom. Jacob Phillips

leaflets for this group asks ‘Why are we walking 120 miles from a nuclear weapon facility in Cardiff to a site for Cruise missiles in Berkshire?’ On the back was a picture of a baby born dead, killed by the radiation from Hiroshima, saying ‘This is why.’⁵ At least one key player in setting up the camp was a midwife. Welcoming and integrating mothers with children and babies was a sine qua non of it being a space for women, a place where the demands of motherhood could be genuinely welcomed by those upon whom such demands are ever laid.

      Natality informed the rationale for a distinctively women’s peace movement: ‘because I am a woman I am responsible’, said one.⁶ Dora Russell wrote that peacemaking is a natural extension of a feminine genius: ‘If differences are not to be settled by war but by negotiation, there must be more feeling for cooperation’, she says, and ‘[w]ithin a family, a wife and mother traditionally tries to reconcile differences’.⁷ She points out that there was a broad spectrum involved in the movement, including some who, like today’s dominant voices, considered a focus on procreative capacities to be symptomatic of male oppression. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that keeping our eyes firmly fixed on this episode makes it clear that a great many involved in Greenham Common would be unwelcome in feminist political activism today. They would be cancelled and endlessly trolled as conservatives or reactionaries.

      This side to Greenham is a story very few of its contemporary admirers are likely to tell. But, as Russell stated in 1983, ‘there are large numbers of women who felt compelled to act because of the traditional roles in which they found themselves’.⁸ The group Babies Against the Bomb was founded by Tamar Swade, who describes early motherhood as joining ‘a separate species of two-legged, four-wheeled creatures who carry their young in push-chair pouches’ and who occasionally ‘converged for a “coffee morning” or a mother-and-baby group run by the National Childbirth Trust’. At these gatherings, there would be ‘much discussion about nappy-rash, (not) sleeping and other problems pertaining to the day-to-day survival of mother and infant’. The thinking behind Babies Against the Bomb led directly from these most motherly of concerns – ‘Why not start a mother-and-baby group whose discussions included long-term survival?’ she asks. For ‘[t]hrough my child the immorality of this world … has become intolerable’.⁹

Understandings of womanhood in the world of Greenham, closely linked to femininity as procreative, cannot be explained away as internalized patriarchy or the unfortunate residue of past oppressions that we have now progressed beyond. It is difficult to imagine the Greenham Women responding positively if asked to redefine their women-only space in such a way that procreation is no longer inextricably bound up with their identity as women. Yet it is easy to imagine how the online discourse would condemn them as right-wing, religious cranks for having the audacity to set up what some might insist is renamed a ‘People with Uteruses Peace Camp’. Once these remnants of the past have come clearly into view, the horizon of the present is then altered. Today’s world starts to seem fuzzy and unreal.

      There is real a sense of freedom documented by these women who would not consider motherhood mere subservience, freedom from a gynophobic capitalism, which pushed motherhood to the periphery, away from the purportedly more serious, male-dominated workplace. The women’s bind to their infants – their unquestioning allegiance to their children – freed them from the inexorable self-centredness that prevents people from taking responsibility for the wellbeing of others. Once a binary is broken, differentiation is lost because the other side falls out of view. Viewing natality as subservience lapses into a surreptitious totalitarianism. Contemporary society values transience, optionality, re-invention. It fears permanent, unconditional attachment like that of parent and child. Then, living in a culture that dismisses unconditional attachment leaves people conditioned by self-attachment. The drive for self-fulfilment dominates. Disparaging the love more visceral than any other fosters a culture that is less responsible in ways extending far beyond child-rearing itself. A culture in which child-bearing is conditional on self-fulfilment is restrained from developing basic impulses of responsibility and care throughout. This is not to say that only those who have children exercise such responsibilities. It is to say that the degree to which natality is celebrated in a culture is a vital barometer of how responsible that culture is. Obediently accepting the demand of allegiance promises a more genuine freedom, more genuine than that pseudo-freedom that leaves people locked up in themselves.

Seen in this light, it is important not to explain away the inextricability of motherhood and womanhood for Greenham. It is spoken of as something that fostered solidarity between the women. Bodily reproduction, potential or actual, was assumed to be primarily a matter for women, something in which men participate in a very different way. It was not the only touchstone of solidarity, of course. Others included the threat or experience of sexual violence, particularly. This is always lurking in the songs, poems and writings of the women, like the legends of local men peering at them from beneath the brambles, and is often bound up with allusions to domestic circumstances, which led some of the women to ‘up sticks’ and live on the camp in the first place. But men can be victims of sexual violence, albeit far less often, with far fewer cultural apologias and never fostering male solidarity. Bearing the locus of the generation of life in conception, however, and gestating that life, giving birth to it and then suckling it – these were then implicitly assumed to be things men could not possibly do, without question. The exclusive priority of this allegiance of a mother to her child, over all else, meant that women, particularly, felt called to protest against the threat of nuclear war.

      For the threat of nuclear war felt terrible to those who had recently borne children into the world. Swade discusses one who was compelled to join the Peace Movement because ‘the mention of nuclear war conjures the waking nightmare of her children burning’. Another describes a recurring dream in which ‘the four-minute warning would come while she was at work’ so she couldn’t ‘cross town in time’ to get to her offspring.¹⁰ One woman, Simone Wilkinson, connects her decision to join the first march with an encounter she had with a Japanese woman, while pregnant with her second child. She was told that ‘when a woman was pregnant in Hiroshima, she was given no congratulations but people waited in silence for nine months until the child was born, to see if it was all right’.¹¹ Swade describes the newborn baby as a ‘creature whose every impulse is towards survival but who is so dependent for it upon others’. She goes on, ‘my immediate, instinctive reaction to nuclear war is in my capacity as a mother’.¹² The intensity of this inter-human dependence in motherly instincts thus fostered a belonging with any others under threat of nuclear war.

If motherhood could foster the wide-ranging concern for others that drove anti-nuclear protesting, it could even foster a belonging between the two sides that did actually enter into battle. These are the opposing sets of citizens; the women and their opponents in society at large.

      For example, the campfires burned at Greenham throughout the Falklands War. Battlelines intersected between the Peace Movement and those celebrating the ‘Gotcha!’ jingoism of ‘Our Lads’ vs ‘the Argies’. On 12 October 1982 there was a victory parade for the returning troops in London. A group of women decided to go, turn their backs on the parade as it passed them and unfurl a banner saying ‘Women Turn Their Backs on War’. An account of this action by Lynne Jones presents it as something not intended to be overly confrontational, as such. She says that the victory in the Falklands was a victory also for British ‘democratic liberties’ and these were lacking in Argentina, so the jubilant crowds could be expected to support that freedom of expression at the parade. Having found a spot along the route, Jones and her group of activists waited incognito among the people with their Union Jacks. She got talking to a mother of one of the returning soldiers. She addresses her account to this woman directly: ‘A plump, smiling woman, your hair freshly done, bright blue eyes, who came and stood right in the middle of our group.’ She goes on: ‘You chose us deliberately, you told me, because we weren’t too tall and you thought you could get a good view over our shoulders.’

They ended up talking a lot as they waited and the disguised Peace Woman helped the military mother with working her new camera. It had just been purchased so the mother could catch a memento of the proud moment her boy marched past