'Widening the web': the latter years and afterlives of Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-2000)
1981 as a protest against Cold War plans to site American Cruise missiles there. Their non-violent direct action, horizontal organising tactics and long-term collective living produced a movement which challenged patriarchy and militarism in tandem and grew into a wider movement which was pacifist, feminist, environmentalist and largely queer; the women in the English countryside were supported by an international solidarity network and inspired a wave of women’s peace camps. They often conceptualised this as a spider’s web with the camp at its heart.
For previous scholarships and popular commemorative initiatives, Greenham is iconic of early 1980s feminism. Drawing on archival materials and personal testimonies, this paper offers a new history of Greenham activism from the mid-1980s until 2000. This was characterized by heterogeneity and ambivalence, but elements of the movement continued to diversify and forge new connections, ‘widening the web’. In particular, I show that Greenham was at once a vital antecedent to and an ongoing element of the supposedly ‘new’ environmentalism of the 1990s. The personal narratives also raise questions about apparent failure, grief, and feminist memory. The paper suggests that a focused study of feminist activism offers a lens through which to re-examine wider issues for 1980s and 1990s Britain.
Freya Marshall Payne is an Orwell Prize-winning writer and doctoral researcher based at the University of Oxford. She is primarily interested in oral history, life-writing and activism, and her DPhil explores women's experiences of homelessness and precarious housing in England c.1980s-present.
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