Poetry for Parliament: The Women’s Peace Write Campaign

In January 1985, a call went out for Canadian women writers to stand up for world peace and nuclear disarmament by sending literature to the government. Called the Women’s Peace Write / Rites des femmes pour la paix, the campaign was rooted in the conviction that women writers should mobilize their craft in opposition to nuclear weapons. Not long before, in 1983, Margaret Laurence, whose name is perhaps the first to spring to mind when considering connections between Canadian literature and anti-nuclear mobilization of this era, expressed a similar conviction (Gerry 218, 224–28; Stovel 325–27). In “My Final Hour,” Laurence unequivocally states, “the question of disarmament is the most pressing practical, moral, and spiritual issue of our times” (189). She goes on: “I believe that as a writer … as an artist, if you will … I have a responsibility, a moral responsibility, to work against the nuclear arms race” (195). For the contributors to the Women’s Peace Write, acting on this “moral responsibility” took the form of a concerted effort to send pro-peace literature in the mail weekly to all Members of Parliament while the House of Commons was in session over the course of an entire year. My essay aims to describe how this campaign came to be and to provide some literary analysis of its contents. How did this activist project emerge? What are the features of its literary corpus? What kinds of teachings and consciousness raising did it aim to offer to its imagined audience, the Members of Parliament serving under Brian Mulroney?

I learned of the existence of the Women’s Peace Write when I came across a copy of the assembled texts in the Women and Words archive at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books Library.¹ I visited the archive with two undergraduate student research assistants who worked with me to comb through the many boxes that comprise the Women and Words fonds. Especially because the Finding Aid does not include item-level cataloguing of the boxes’ contents, there was the potential for surprise and discovery as we opened file folders, perused photograph negatives, scanned the headlines of old newspaper clippings, and even listened to some audio recordings. When I happened upon the texts of the Women’s Peace Write campaign, I was immediately intrigued. Although this was only a couple years ago, at the time, nuclear bombs were not making headlines as they are now. Compiled over thirty years ago, the Peace Write texts imagine nuclear threat in a late Cold War context; today, nuclear weapons come up in relation to Germany, Turkey, North Korea, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, and the United States. One can imagine that a similar literary campaign launched in our current political climate would have a multi-pronged pedagogical and outreach strategy, including a robust promotional media component, and thus be much more visible in the public sphere than was the Women’s Peace Write. Although the Peace Write organizers did plan some media coverage of their project, it was not, to my knowledge, particularly well known. Some of its texts were previously or subsequently published, as I describe in more detail below. But otherwise, its existence as an anthological text is mostly archival.² Although it is no doubt remembered by contributors and others who were aware of it at the time—and possibly even by some mps or House staffers—I had not heard of it in Canadian scholarly circles before coming across it in a box. Printed on eight-by-eleven-inch paper, the texts are held together by a black spiral binding and a blue card stock paper cover. Descriptors on the cover label the document “Women’s Peace Write / Rite des femmes pour la paix” subtitled “une campagne de textes pour les députés” and “a writing campaign to Members of Parliament.” Along with the mailing address for the West Coast Women and Words Society, the front cover also describes the document as “a calendar of selections for the weeks the House is in session, June...