{"id":1130,"date":"2013-11-08T11:39:36","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T11:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/?p=1130"},"modified":"2013-11-08T11:39:36","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T11:39:36","slug":"it-did-get-tiring-to-welcome-everyone-to-the-fire-politics-and-spirituality-at-greenham-common-peace-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/2013\/11\/08\/it-did-get-tiring-to-welcome-everyone-to-the-fire-politics-and-spirituality-at-greenham-common-peace-camp\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It did get tiring to welcome everyone to the fire’ – Politics and Spirituality at Greenham Common Peace Camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Here is a written up version of my talk at this year\u2019s Rest is Noise Festival<\/a> that was part of their weekend on politics and spirituality in the late 20th <\/sup> century. \u00a0I\u2019ve added a couple of thoughts as I went along based on contributions from the audience.\u00a0 One thing that really struck me throughout the other discussions during the day was the importance of the individual or \u2018the self\u2019, in both political and religious engagement through the period.\u00a0 The creative tension for me, was the ways in which Thatcherite individual resilience (Tebbit \u2018getting on his bike\u2019<\/a>) and post-punk \u2018any one can do it\u2019 seemed to weave together.<\/p>\n

Observing the 80s uncooked resources that relate to Greenham includes digitised interviews with four different women who were at Greenham<\/a>, included responses from the Mass Observation Project that offer contextual thoughts on transatlantic relations and nuclear weaponry<\/a>.\u00a0 As well as ephemera from other political activists<\/a> at the time.\u00a0 In terms of the cooked, education resource, Greenham covers a number of themes. What I\u2019m going to talk about today comes under two of them \u2018Family Values\u2019 and \u2018Activism and Identity\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 If you wanted to you could pull out a ready made teaching block on Greenham that would provide short edited clips of the oral histories, combined with popular culture and other documents.<\/p>\n

Greenham<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to suggest that the role of women in the peace movement at Greenham Common allows us to see how traditional roles are both contested and reinforced in gender politics.\u00a0 These were activists working through and beyond the faultlines of gender.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to try and represent everyone\u2019s experience at Greenham, as you\u2019ll see later on the very act of doing so would be at odds with the specificity of the camp. Instead I want to outline some lessons l\u2019ve learnt from Greenham.<\/p>\n

Greenham Common peace camp at an American airbase in Greenham, Newbury, established in late summer 1981. spontaneously after a 9 day peace march from Wales.\u00a0\u00a0 The camp was finally disbanded in 2000.\u00a0 During that time it became synonymous with a particular type of feminist peace politics.\u00a0 Collective living, turning the domestic – how the basics of everyday – eating, sleeping, cooking etc, are organised into a political act.\u00a0 particularly by performing them collectively and very publicly.\u00a0 Like reclaim the night, Greenham saw women taking up space as a political act.<\/p>\n

At an international level, taking up space was clearly a political act. The base had seen its ownership and status change with the shifting of the international stage. In some ways illuminating the changes in military power and need during and after WW2.<\/p>\n

The base originally became an airbase in 1941 as a satellite to RAF Aldermarston.\u00a0 It was taken over by the American airbase in 1942 and acted as headquarters for the invasion of North Africa in 1942 and was important in the planning and back up for the D-day landings.\u00a0\u00a0 It reverted back to the British Airforce in 1945, shortly afterwards it was closed down and returned to the local council.\u00a0\u00a0 When the cold war heated up it was returned to the Americans and was used to hold nuclear weapons on standby for immediate take off until 1964.\u00a0 Then in 1979 NATO responded to USSR nuclear missile build up by deploying intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe.<\/p>\n

In 1980 these were deployed at Greenham and at Molesworth in Cambridge. <\/a> So even without the camp, the base as a space represented the shifts of Cold War power play on the ground.<\/p>\n

In December 1982 30,000 women formed a human ring around the camp.\u00a0 at the \u2018Embrace the base\u2019 demo.\u00a0 Day chosen as the third anniversary of NATO\u2019s decision to deploy cruise missiles in Europe.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, on New Years day,\u00a0 a group of protesters broke into the base and danced on the silos. The event became a point of entry for women from across the country to engage with a political campaign that was also a lifestyle or identity.\u00a0 These two examples of tactics used demonstrate the ways in which women\u2019s gendered roles could be seen to bring something particular to the political form of the campaign; women\u2019s nurturing role, and the politics of pleasure.<\/p>\n

The model spread.\u00a0 There was a sister camps set up elsewhere, in my home town of Brighton for example.[1]<\/a> The camp gained\u00a0 International coverage and Celebrity support – Yoko Ono bought a small strip of land near the base that had a caravan on it women could use as a kind of respite, or safe-haven from the police.<\/p>\n

Initially there had been men involved in the campaign, 4 men had\u00a0 been among the 40 original marchers, but women rapidly felt that there should be a synthesis between their political analysis and the way in which their campaign was structured.\u00a0 In the end men were asked to leave and only return as supporters during the day and to help facilitate the support networks from the outside.<\/p>\n

Sasha Roseneil<\/a>,\u00a0 explained that the significance of this was not that Greenham was feminist because it was women-only, but that it became women-only because it was feminist.<\/p>\n

Greenham, and to an extent Upper Heyford, peace camps, took gender to a macro level – not just in terms of the significance it afforded gender, but in the way in which it acted as case study for the emerging political tensions in the 1980s.\u00a0 Different political structures, language and style were all seen through ideas of gender difference.<\/p>\n

There were different camps around the base all named after colours of the rainbow.\u00a0\u00a0 Each different identity, eg. Turquoise more new age and vegan, Violet more connected to organised religion.\u00a0 Green gate was exclusively female at all times and seen as more ideological or intellectual.\u00a0 . whereas one of the other gates allowed male visitors .\u00a0 Leading to a sense of collectivity despite difference as well as towards tensions as I will explore in a moment<\/p>\n

Signs and symbols of protest were the product of a womanhood against war.\u00a0 Spiders webs were woven out of wool in the fences representing the network of individuals, whose strength only comes from working together<\/p>\n

Using mirrors to symbolically reflect the camps evil back on the camp. and screw around with the security cameras.\u00a0 Collective singing brought together a chorus of individual voices and raised the spirits.\u00a0 Songs sung, like \u2018You Can\u2019t Kill the Spirit\u2019<\/a>, fed into long historical lines of folk song, or more contemporary anti-war songs adapted for the moment, as a form of political dissemination.\u00a0 So weekend visitors or visitors to the large organised events could take their songs back to their own communities, or in reverse bring their own heritage to the camp. Women chained themselves to the perimeter fence, reanimating the iconic protests of suffrage. Baby clothes, \u2018symbols of life\u2019, and pictures pinned to the perimeter fence demonstrated the women\u2019s stewardship for future generations, their constituency, and was meant to shame the men inside the base and policing the camp.\u00a0 The importance of Quaker involvement in the peace campaign fed into the tactic of non-violent resistance in the face of arrest or eviction, but also maintained the act of \u2018bearing witness\u2019 as religious and political practice.<\/p>\n

Taking a position of non-violent passive resistance, the acting out of women-centred peaceful politic, did not protect the women from attack.\u00a0 These women were also pilloried, attacked and ridiculed, often as middle-class, men hating lesbians.<\/p>\n

Women lived in tents, having learnt that semi-permanent dwellings, or benders, used by some travellers, were too difficult to dismantle when evictions came.\u00a0 It was much easier just to pick up a tent whole and take it with you until time came to repitch.<\/p>\n

Scores of women were charged with criminal damage. Long term effects of living on the camps could be exhaustion and burn out.<\/p>\n

There were concerted efforts to evict the women, most notably in 1984 as well as attacks by both locals and apparently by soldiers on the base itself.\u00a0 The practicalities of the camp count.<\/p>\n

There were Divisions and differences with in the camp.\u00a0 Sometimes these have been emphasised.\u00a0 The chorus of different women in the rainbow collective could descend into bitter disharmony in these harsh conditions.<\/p>\n

I just want to share with you three minutes from our cooked resource Cheryl Slack, talking about the camp. Interviewed in 1985 for the Hall Carpenter Archive<\/p>\n

https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/observing80s\/slack-cheryl-side-03-00-00-08<\/a><\/p>\n

So we can hear the different political approaches which spoke of more than adherence to policies or parties, instead they were statements of self. Who is like me? And how will these experiences change me? As well as the practicalities that reinforced those difference.<\/p>\n

We could take this to create a version of feminist praxis filled with splits and fissures. But for me the possibilities of embracing difference, a universality of difference, is one of the most trangsressive possibilities of Greenham\u2019s legacies. Or what we might call intersectionality.<\/p>\n

Notable is the specificity of the conditions of different camps.\u00a0 Different camps had different problems. Yellow camp was most like an urban waste land, beset with traffic fumes and noise but had its own water supply.\u00a0 Women in Orange camp were right up against the perimeter fence. This was not a rural idyll.\u00a0 It represents elements of building a utopian community in harsh muddy conditions.<\/p>\n

There were discussions over the specificity of experiences over race, for example,\u00a0 Yellow gate (in effect the main gate) was dominated by the Campaign for Wages for Housework.\u00a0 These women challenged what they saw as the white middle class assumptions of some of the of the activists. Despite the tabloid clich\u00e9s about lesbians in dungarees there were also considerable differences and discussions over sexuality.<\/p>\n

These discussions took place in a context in which Women\u2019s nurturing role was not seen as artificially constructed, it was the essential element of a distinct identity. Often summed up in the use of the term Wimmin.\u00a0 Or in strands of\u00a0 feminist separatism that saw feminism as a Spiritual force, linked to the earth<\/a>.\u00a0 But Greenham women also had ideological and practical links with women campaigning over the Miners\u2019 Strike, Northern Ireland and with other groups. Showing how motherhood and sisterhood were both global political bonds.\u00a0 (One audience member at the Rest is Noise festival, who had herself spent considerable time at the camp pointed out the high number of women who came to the camp from around the world (e.g South Africa, New Zealand, Australia) particularly the implications that these women brought with them political experiences from their home context, such as indigenous rights, or environmentalism.\u00a0 It struck me that once again the brought together the ideology of womanhood as the maternal guardian of the earth, and the practical skills and tactics from campaigning in a global context. It also attests to the women at the camps abilities to utilise their networks and webs to get the message out there, despite the mainstream press and media response).<\/p>\n

So for me, Greenham was a point at which feminist theory and women\u2019s activism met.\u00a0 There is a direct relation between the practice and analysis of women at Greenham and with the development of woman centred analysis of patriarchy as a macro structure.\u00a0 I\u2019ll close now, but I\u2019d just like to point out the two big lessons that I\u2019ve taken from Greenham. Firstly, that everyday experiences and practical conditions can emphasise difference. But secondly, that a web of difference can be truly life changing and transgressive.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Sam, Carroll, Brighton Women’s Peace Camp, 1983: Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Peace Movement<\/a> University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History<\/em>, 8, 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Here is a written up version of my talk at this year\u2019s Rest is Noise Festival<\/a> that was part of their weekend on politics and spirituality in the late 20th century. \u00a0I\u2019ve added a couple of thoughts as I went along based on contributions from the audience.\u00a0 One thing that really \u2026 Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[271,269,266,267,268,270],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1141,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions\/1141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}