- When members of Women Strike for Peace (WSP) attempted to enter the atomic nuclear test site at Camp Mercury, Nevada, on July 14, 1962, to prevent the testing of an atmospheric atomic bomb, they were turned away. WSP had first surfaced eight months earlier when an estimated 50,000 women in 60 cities walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in an unprecedented national women’s peace action. Demanding “No Tests East or West,” “Pure Milk-Not Poison,” and “Let the Children Grow,” the striking women made national headlines. In the process of transforming their one-day strike into a national movement, the women of WSP developed an innovative political style, characterized by nonhierarchical structure, local autonomy, and maternalistic rhetoric. The WSP campaign for the test ban treaty of 1963 did not end nuclear testing or the arms race. Yet by demanding that women be included in all decisions concerned with life and death, WSP proclaimed that motherhood is political and that the human family is the whole world.
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