[NYTr] Women Lit the Fire That Burned Draft Cards

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Womens eNews - Oct 1, 2007
http://www.womensenews.org


Women Lit the Fire That Burned Draft Cards 

By Louise Bernikow
WeNews historian 

Oct. 15, 1969: The role of women in a massive anti-war demonstration
was obscured in the public view, but they played a critical role in the
movement to end the Vietnam War. 

(WOMENSENEWS)--By the fall of 1969, 40,000 U.S. citizens had died
fighting in Vietnam and public opinion to end the war was strong.
Activists called for a national "Moratorium Day" on Oct. 15, 1969, to
pressure President Richard Nixon to pull out of Vietnam.

Events that day--the largest expression of public dissent seen in this
country at the time--unfolded on many levels. Street demonstrations
took place in Washington, D.C., on college campuses and in churches.
The media focused on men like Dr. Benjamin Spock, convicted the
previous year for counseling draft evasion; Rev. Martin Luther King;
Sens. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern; Catholic priests Daniel and
Phillip Berrigan; and spokesmen for the campus-based Students for a
Democratic Society.

But the anti-war organizing was also being done by women of several
generations and many political persuasions. Opposition to wars has
always been part of women's history: Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day
march for peace filled the streets of Boston after the Civil War. By
the 20th century, Women's Strike for Peace had evolved out of the
anti-nuclear movement into a visible force against the Vietnam War.
Among its founders, and quite visible on Moratorium Day, was New Yorker
Bella Abzug, soon to be elected to Congress, where her first official
act would be to demand a date for withdrawal from Vietnam. In 1972,
Abzug would demand Nixon's impeachment for "defying the will of the
people to end the war."

As night fell in the capital city on Moratorium Day, 15,000 people
carried candles around the Washington monument, led by Coretta Scott
King, identified by the press, in the custom of the times, as "Mrs.
Martin Luther King."

Although young men captured the camera's eye as they burned their draft
cards, much of the work of organizing draft resistance was done by
women. Singer Joan Baez performed protest songs everywhere with a
banner behind her that read: "Girls say yes to boys who say no." In
Greenwich Village, the Peace Center, directed by writer Grace Paley,
organized and counseled scores of conscientious objectors willing to go
to jail rather than serve in the war.

Arrested with the Berrigan brothers for actions that included pouring
blood and napalm on selective service records of men scheduled to be
drafted was former nun Mary Moylan, who later went underground with
them.

Eugene McCarthy's failed campaign for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1968 attracted many younger women who went on to become
lifelong activists. In student groups, females were confronting a
system where, in the parlance of the time, "men made policy and women
made coffee."

Behind the men standing at the microphones as the day's events were
televised, an emerging mainstream national women's movement was visible
if you knew where to look.

[Louise Bernikow is the author of seven books and numerous magazine
articles. She travels to campuses and community groups with a lecture
and slide show about activism called "The Shoulders We Stand On: Women
as Agents of Change." She can be reached at louise at womensenews.org.]

For more information:

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom:
http://www.wilpf.org/

War Resisters' League:
http://www.warresisters.org/

Julia Ward Howe, Mother's Day Proclamation:
http://www.peace.ca/mothersdayproclamation.htm