Tents Amid the Fragments: The Law at Greenham Common

The years-long women’s antinuclear protest in south-central Britain was a cause celebrated by E.P. Thompson, who after 1979 underwent a transformation from Midlands-ensconced historian and teacher to prominent anti-Bomb and anti-bloc activist. Greenham Common, however, represented no simple embodiment of his program. Many among the camp’s occupants lent effort in struggles elsewhere, especially the decade’s major strikes among miners and office cleaners. Women’s participation in these ventures—as much as the police persecution of the camp, which brought about its repeated dismantling—begs the question of whether Thompson’s “exterminism” denied a unifying materialist logic to the British security state, as the women in their tents did not. In this sense Greenham Common both evokes and departs from the trajectories of socialist-feminists in the United States at midcentury: in the face of their own persecution, some embraced pacifist or otherwise fragmentary politics, and others only grew more devoted to refining overarching analyses centering on the enmeshing of gender and exploitation. The camp thus urges us to consider how workers’ organization as explored in Thompson’s historical texts has weathered and shaped feminist projects, rather than see the two as distinct and conflicting lines of inquiry.