Peace Caravan Pauses for an L.A. Petition

The Peace Caravan was in town last weekend.

The Coachman-model Chevy van, decorated with peace slogans and outfitted with pamphlets, posters, petitions and paraphernalia relating to international feminism and world peace, has been on the road since May, 1984, making its way around the towns, villages, shopping centers and cities of the United States.

Alice Wiser, from Canada, and Simone Wilkinson, from the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, picked it up in Grand Rapids, Mich., two weeks ago and have been driving it on its most recent leg, its first time in the West.

Disparate Group

They stopped in Los Angeles for the weekend at the home of Jo Giese Brown and Barry Brown in Pacific Palisades, having talked about peace on the way from Michigan, they reported, with such divergent groups as Ranchers for Peace in Wyoming and Radical Lesbian Separatists in Southern California.

At the Browns, they spoke to a disparate group of about 50 women and a dozen men, many of whom are active in local peace or disarmament groups.

Wiser and Wilkinson, and Los Angeles poet Deena Metzger, who introduced them, are associated with Feminists International for Peace and Food, a 35-member group of women from 17 countries. They call their organization a “feminist peace think tank” and said it is financed by an anonymous group of wealthy women, among them a Texan, who have created the Fund for the Remembrance of Martyred Women (such as 9 million witches persecuted during the Middle Ages, they said).

The members, Wiser said, “are radical feminists working hard to make sure things happen.”

They lived up to that description at the gathering Friday night, as they described who they are, how they came about, and what they are trying to do.

For example, they were circulating two petitions for peacekeeping projects. One, designed “to get women into the negotiating process,” calls for the United Nations to recognize that the women of the world represent “a global nation in exile” because they are “systematically excluded from all of the political and economic power structures of the existing nations.”

They are calling for full status as a nation within the United Nations with representation in all its organizations.

Without Weapons

The second, recognizing the United Nations’ “40 years of failure to bring about world peace,” asks the U.N. to fund a women’s peacekeeping team without weapons or uniforms that would go into the world’s troubled areas and maintain peace.

Once they obtain 150,000 signatures, they will present the petitions to the U.N. General Assembly, hopefully in time for its 40th anniversary celebration in Geneva on Oct. 24. If not, then perhaps March 4, on International Women’s Day, Wiser said.

How seriously do they take these petitions that seem, regardless of their merits, almost fanciful?

“Of course, they’re useful for consciousness raising around the world,” Wiser said. “But you only go into something believing you’re going to do it. You don’t go into it for a symbol.”

The Feminists International for Peace and Food make considerable use of symbols. This is the same group that erected the peace tent at the University of Nairobi at the recently concluded forum for non-governmental organizations on the end of the U.N. Decade for Women.

Deena Metzger, Sissy Farenthold, the Texas attorney and former Democratic Party activist, and Sonia Johnson, the Mormon dissident, were among those from the group who operated the activities in the tent at Nairobi. Their symbolic gestures and very real exchanges among women over volatile issues were combined. Such topics as the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and U.S. policies in Central America, were debated.

Metzger described the activities that went on in the tent to the group in Pacific Palisades. The Feminists International, she said, were thinking of pitching other tents in such trouble spots in the world as Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Gave Up Practice

Alice Wiser, a Quaker active in a group called Friendly Nuisances that advocates more equality for women within the Society of Friends, said she gave up her practice as a psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada, to work for peace.

Married to a physics professor, and a mother and grandmother of an adopted, multiracial family, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of London, where her research concerns “How Women Make Peace.” About giving up her practice and separating herself from her family for long periods, she said, “We love each other so desperately, we love the world so desperately, that we have to take desperate measures.”

Several years ago, she said, she met with a small group of American women, some of them Quakers like herself, who found themselves wondering what kind of peace treaty the women of the world could make. They read the existing peace treaties and quickly concluded “the reason why people were not signing these treaties was that they were not written to be signed, not written to make peace.”

The women, who eventually expanded to become Feminists International, decided to write their own peace treaty and went to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Conference in Geneva in 1984 to do so. The conference ended with the work incomplete, and at that point their wealthy Texas benefactor invited them to Texas as her guest to complete the treaty.

They went, Wiser said, and the result is not a treaty but “A Call for Courage to Women Everywhere,” copies of which were being distributed at Pacific Palisades.

Based on the underlying belief that all violence is connected, whether it is rape or war, the document calls for disarmament and an end to the cycle of violence, and the establishment of peace through practical daily experience such as nonviolent conflict resolution, respect for the Earth and its creatures, and ethical use of science and technology.

As Simone Wilkinson explained it later, “There is a link between the violence that takes place at home and war. Nuclear weapons are just a manifestation of a wrong way of thinking.”

Wilkinson told the group that her work for peace had been associated most closely with the women demonstrating and living at Greenham Common in England, site of the U.S. military base where cruise missiles are deployed.

Ordinary, Uninvolved

She was an ordinary, uninvolved woman raising her two children on the Isle of Wight, she said, until the day that she saw her children watching something on television intended for adults. “Protest and Survive” was a government program advising the public what to do in the event of “international tensions,” that is nuclear attack.

Horrified as she watched the government speakers tell her to erect a shelter by leaning four doors together, and covering them with cloth, and then to stock them with a two-week supply of food, water and blankets, her life changed on the spot, she said.

“I didn’t bring my children into the world to push them under four doors and watch them die,” she said.

An unsmiling woman, her mouth drawing her face downward, she said of herself, “I’m sometimes horrified by what I see. I’m weighted down,” she said, and also described at times an acute loneliness for her children.

Having seen that television program, she said, she was depressed, and crying about the house until her husband in desperation told her to join a peace group if she was so concerned. She did so and found them too complacent and ineffectual. Then she heard about Greenham Common.

Forty women, not hippies she said but “40 British mums and grannies,” had walked 120 miles from Cardiff in Wales to the base, then chained themselves to the fences there, slept on the ground, risked arrest or assault. . . .

She went there, stayed for 10 days and returned to her home long enough to tell her husband, she said, “I’m going back tomorrow. I’m going to live there. You’ll have to manage somehow.”

Marched, Trespassed

She lived there. She marched, trespassed, demonstrated, and was arrested and jailed. She even stood for election against Margaret Thatcher in the last election, she said. As the hallmark of her campaign, she said, she went to an entrance to the Underground (the subway) and erected that four-door shelter the government had advised for civil defense. In front of it she placed a sign associating that kind of housing with the re-election of Mrs. Thatcher.

Of course she did not win, she said, in one sense of the word. That sense she termed patriarchal. But, she said, she talked to many people. And one Conservative Party member told her that while he voted for his party, Wilkinson had disturbed him enough that he was going to raise questions at the next party meeting. That was a significant win for her, she said.

Her overall message to the group in Pacific Palisades, as was Wiser’s message, was to urge people to become active and do something.

People used to ask her if she wasn’t frightening her children, she said, with her preoccupation over nuclear weapons and rape.

Just the opposite, she counseled everyone with similar reservation.

“The person my children trust most in their world is out there now doing something about it.”