Ladies’ Voice

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Local women lead the way in promoting peace

03/06/03
by Cassandra Brown

As discontent grows over the impending war in Iraq, many search for a way to voice their dissent. Through various organizations and events, Santa Cruz women have taken a leadership role in the anti-war movement here and across the globe.
“Things have changed since the Vietnam Era, women are taking on more leadership,” says Sharon Delgado of Iraq Action Network and a longtime peace activist. “Different from then, both women and men speak up for a woman’s voice to be heard.”
This Saturday marks International Women’s Day, a day to honor women and the work they do (see Events, page 46). The first International Women’s Day was held in 1911, simultaneously coordinated in Europe and America. In the states, the largely female textile industry held strikes and called for female suffrage, better pay and working conditions. In Europe, women on both sides of WWI met in Switzerland and called for the end of war.
On Saturday, women in 60 countries are expected to stage strikes demanding an investment in “caring, not killing.” The annual global spending of $900 billion dollars of military money, mostly by the United States, could be used to provide essentials such as basic health care, nutrition, literacy and minimum income.
At least one local women’s group hopes to celebrate the day with a show of signs condemning war. Regina Falkner, a Santa Cruz resident and a new member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), wanted to act proactively to stop the war before it started. Since 1915, WILPF has been campaigning for peace and disarmament. The first Santa Cruz chapter began in the 1960s and has been active ever since.
Falkner thought that an easy way for people to express dissent would be posting anti-war signs on their front lawns. The members of the local WILPF chapter supported the idea and started a campaign to post a 1,000 signs countywide by International Women’s Day. The signs declare in red, white and blue that “Peace is Patriotic” on one side and proclaim “No War” on the other side.
Falkner hopes that the signs will allow a voice for the anti-war sentiment, that it will prompt dialogue between community members and encourage people to do more. “I feel so strongly that we need to voice our opinion, now. This [time] is one of the few chances we have to stop this war,” says Falkner.
It’s a Mom Thing
Others use more morbid images to protest war. One women’s group that has cropped up locally is Women in Black. Women in Black began in the 1970s, during the brutal dictatorship in Argentina, as a silent vigil of mothers of people who had disappeared dressed in black on the steps of the capital in Buenos Aires with pictures of their missing children. These women were largely given credit for discrediting the Argentinean government.
In the 1980s, women from Palestine and Israel started meeting and formed a Women in Black group, working together to stop the violence between the two states. Around the same time, a group of Women in Black formed in Serbia.
In Santa Cruz, the Women in Black, made up of members of Media Watch, have attended local vigils and marches to represent the women who will mourn the dead of war.
“There is a blind spot in our culture, women and men alike hesitate to put a gender on war,” says Anne Simonton, one of the organizers of Women in Black. “While not all men are involved in war, it has been initiated and fought by men for thousands of years. There is an inability to acknowledge that violence is male based statistics show it is a male endeavor. We need, as a culture, to figure out how we can teach men to be more empathetic, and to stop using violence as a solution.”
Simonton says the media, which is also dominated by men, fuels the rush to war by not showing the consequences of violence. She thinks with a concerted public effort, like the AIDS campaign in the late ’80s, the cultural norm that violence can be used as a solution could change very quickly.
A group called Another Mother for Peace is once again organizing. The group was active in the Vietnam anti-war movement. A local chapter is currently fundraising to help send milk and medicine to women in Iraq.
“Women are the silent victims of war; they are the collateral damage,” says Larissa Shapiro, a local organizer for the group. “I feel I have a physical connection to all other women in the world, and now, as a mother, to all the mothers in the world.”
Raging Grannies, another newly formed Santa Cruz group, is made up of women that dress up like grandmothers and protest war. The group is known to sing parodies, such as “How Much is That Condi in the White House?” to the tune of “How Much is That Doggy in the Window.”
Last year when Condoleeza Rice was the commencement speaker at Stanford University, the Raging Grannies of Palo Alto sang the parody. “The police tried to detain them,” says Alice Davis, a long time member of WIPLF and organizer of a local Raging Grannies Group. “But with a woman in a wheelchair and a bunch of older women, the cops didn’t want to look bad hauling them off and eventually gave up. There is power in weakness.”