Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978

4. Mothering Underground: The Home in Women’s Welfare and Peace Organizing

In 1959 Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev held the storied “kitchen debate” at the American National Exhibit in Moscow. Media crews assembled around the global antagonists, who were staged in a state-of-the-art suburban kitchen. In their banter, Nixon claimed that the place of “our housewives” simultaneously distinguished and united the Cold War camps. “Would it not,” he asked, “be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?”1 This event underscores how the home became ideological ground zero during the Cold War. Of course, not all women were content to regard the Cold War debate in terms of household appliances, nor did they imagine their kitchens as neatly contained domestic spaces isolated from worldly politics. Some women’s groups, for example, actively participated in civil defense exercises to prepare for nuclear war as a way of claiming greater “responsibilities and rights as citizens.”2 In contrast, the nascent group Women Strike for Peace • CHAPTER 4 • Mothering Underground The Home in Women’s Welfare and Peace Organizing Let’s tell them we don’t mean that they should kill other women’s childrentoprotectoursecurity;thatessentiallyotherwomen’schildren are like our own. And whatever the color of their eyes, we want them all to live and laugh, to fulfill their dreams. —Eleanor Garst, Women Strike for Peace A.F.D.C. mothers are the cause of slums and high taxes? Well, what’s that but a special version of the notion that Eve, and Eve only, brought sin into the world? Welfare isn’t the cause of high taxes. War is. Plus a lot of other things that poor women would like to see changed. —Johnnie Tillmon, Ms. • 105 • regarded civil defense as a “hoax” that merely instilled fear in children. WSP formed in 1961 when women across the United States went on a daylong strike to oppose renewed nuclear testing by the USSR, United Kingdom , and United States. The Los Angeles demonstration was the largest, with some four thousand women gathering in front of the State Building. They walked in silence to City Hall and then on to the Federal Building carrying signs that read, “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race” and “Pure Milk Not Poison.”3 Such evocative illustrations brought home the prosaic effects of nuclear war. The home was endangered by foreign policies that claimed to protect it, and WSP drew on their privileged positions 106 MOTHERING UNDERGROUND Figure 5. Women Strike for Peace pickets outside of the State Building, November 1, 1961. Reproduced by permission of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. as mothers to urge governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain to end the arms race. Asurbancrisisincreasinglyframeddiscussionsofraceandsocialchange in the latter half of the 1960s, activists created their own interpretations that challenged the militarized terms of debate and provided avenues for building coalitions across different issues. As we have seen in the previous chapter, WSP regarded their work with civil rights groups as an expression of their responsibility to create peace and freedom.4 The focus on economic conversion that WSP used to ally with civil rights organizations shifted as they formed new alliances with welfare rights groups. Women in the antiwar and welfare rights movements organized across racial and class lines to push back against the ways war-making undermined their homes and their children’s well-being. They repeatedly showed how war-making produced toxic spaces and militarized cities. Policy priorities that privileged war-making ignored the needs of cities and the people living in them, while young people’s protests against the violence of war and racism were met with more violence. Thus, women’s desires for their children’s futures situated the possibilities of “home” within a vision of livable cities. The histories of the welfare rights and peace movements are typically thought of separately for some of the same reasons, explored in chapter 3, that peace and racial liberation tend to be understood discretely. In considering mothering, class and race differences shape women’s relations to the home both as a material space and as a site of political appeal. Workingclass women have historically labored outside the home in order to sustain their domestic lives, and their appeals to the sanctity of family life did not carry the same political heft that the white...