Women Work for a Nuclear-free Future

In Australia they may be members of FANG (Feminists Against Nukes Group), in Japan, of the "Resist the Nukes Come What May Women's Group." In England they come out to see the two woman dance team "New-Clear Women". In Germany they have climbed trees to block the site clearing for a major nuclear facility. Under a variety of banners, and as non - affiliated "concerned citizens", women world-wide are expressing themselves against the dangers of nuclear power. From Middle town, Pennsylvania to Tokyo -· they are revealing themselves through their work. And their numbers appear to be growing all the time.

'While women have increasingly discovered their own oppression in Western Europe and the United States, in Australia and elsewhere, they have also learned to recognize themselves and to speak for the oppression of others ... There has been much consciousness raising among the women, among the new brave women in a brave new world, because political issues become personal, and personal issues become political. The women I have seen in Sidney and Hiroshima, the women I have seen in Ireland, rising against an atomic state as a symbol of male culture, and the women I met in the United Nations on the disarmament march two years ago, and also the women I met during my campaign for the German "Green List", have shown to me that there is a hope even though it's ten minutes before doomsday. Because women, in fact women who were apolitical before, are rising up and fusing the antinuclear and peace movements with a vitality and creativity never seen before ... "

Petra Karin Kelly, ecology candidate
in the June 1979 elections for the first
European Parliament, from a speech
given in Vienna, October 1979.

Over the past few years, and especially since the accident at Three Mile Island, nuclear power has come to be understood as a problem affecting all. If you're not a "nuclear neighbor", waste trucks may pass through your community, or you may some day suffer from the fallout of a nuclear weapon fashioned with plutonium from a commercial nuclear plant. The nuclear future certainly appears grim. And where ever we are, we're paying for it already, whether through our tax dollars or our utility bills.

We all stand to be affected, but in the case of radiation, some are more affected than others. In this case, the "some" are women. The bearers of children, primary raisers of off. spring, caretakers for those born deformed or incapacitated by genetic damage -- women have a lot at stake in this issue.

Motivated in large part by the health dangers of nuclear power, women across the U.S. have become over more active in the fight against the atom. Actually, opposition to atomic radiation is part of our own history. Back in 1961 women began demonstrating, writing letters and collecting their children's baby teeth for analysis of radioactive strontium uptake. They were concerned about scientists' warnings of dangerous radioactive fallout. And they acted. Their work in that period culminated in the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty which ended U.S. and Soviet above-ground nuclear weapons testing. Now women are taking action against the health and safety threats posed by the "peaceful" atom.

One woman ended up by giving her life. Plutonium worker and Union activist Karen Gay Silkwood was killed in November 1974 in a "mysterious" car crash. She had spent months gathering information about safety violations in the Kerr-Mc Gee plutonium fuel rod fabrication facility in Cimmaron, Oklahoma. Her car was evidently run off the road  as she drove to meet a New York Times reporter and official of her Oil, Atomic and Chemical Workers union to give them the results of her research. A recent court case ended with a $10 million damages award to Karen's children because of the company's violations of her civil rights. People across the country -- women especially -- remember Karen's bravery every November with vigils, rallies and community dinners that have grown over the years in number and size.

On the community level, women have long been active in legal fights against nuclear plant siting. More recently they have been involved in the planning and carrying out of non-violent direct actions at Seabrook, N.H., Diablo Canyon, Calif., and elsewhere. Everywhere women are involved in public awareness efforts, educating their communities on the dangers of atomic energy and the peaceful solutions that can take care of our energy problems.

In Minnesota and New York State, farm and other community women have been in the forefront of fights against massive power line construction that ruins productive farmland and causes environmental and health problems. In Tennessee, Chatanooga housewife and businesswoman. Jeanine Honicker has spent several years pushing a court case against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Her suit demands that all Nuclear plants be closed- now- because of their proven dangers to public health.

Most women's activities on energy do not make headlines. But they do make sense. Last summer for example, several young mothers in western Massachusetts decided to do something in their own communities to oppose nuclear power ·· both plants and weapons. Unable and unwilling to journey many miles to attend massive demonstrations elsewhere, they felt that the strongest thing they could do was to take a stand int heir own towns. They began weekly vigils at local town commons. There, local residents would gather with their children for one hour every Sunday, with banners and signs.

The vigil idea spread quickly. By late summer '79 there were weekly vigils in seven area towns. The early organizers wrote up a leaflet to encourage others to vigil in their communities.

Nuclear power is also being seen and understood as a feminist issue. The past year has seen an increase in organizations of women opposed to nuclear power.

This fall I spent a month traveling in western Europe, speaking with activists in the anti-nuclear and environmental movement there. Everywhere, I found women involved in all aspects of the movement; as candidates of ecological parties, as grassroots organizers, as feminists concerned with the impacts of a variety of ecological issues on society, community, human health and safety.

I was a lucky to be in Vienna on November 5th, the first anniversary of the vote. The occasion was marked by a huge party/meeting, with lots of excellent no-nukes music and short speeches. Before the meeting I spoke with Christina Orovics, a graduate student and local activist from the Tyrol. In this northern part of Austria by the German border, where snowcapped peaks offer stupendous views and attract lots of tourists, voters went 65% against the nuclear plant. Tyrolians are threatened by the largest twin nuke planned for Germany, · Rosenheim, just across the border. Christina said that stiff local opposition made actual plant construction look ever more remote. She was encouraged by the ability of Austrian German nuclear opponents to work together to stop this project of clear international importance.

West Germany and France have the biggest nuclear industries in Europe. The West German and French governments are financially involved with and politically support an electro-nuclear future. Nuclear plants are built at home and exported abroad. The atom is a key part of both French and German foreign policy.

In Germany, opposition to nuclear power by women comes from two different social groups. Firstly, we find the local, mainly farm women who have responded to the threat nuclear power poses to their children, families, land and vineyards.

A tradition of strong action against nuclear power was set by local women and men from the agricultural area bordering the Rhine river in southern Germany, right across from France and just north of Switzerland. These local people opposed the construction of a nuclear power plant in the little town of Wyhl for four years, from 1971-1975. They petitioned and demonstrated. But their actions failed to halt government and utility plans. Finally direct action was the only possible solution. It was the locals who began a site occupation in February 1975, and who supported and sustained a continuing occupation that led to an eventual suspension of construction (although
the actual suspension was due to a positive decision in a court case, which is now being appealed).

In a town not, far from Wyhl, I spoke with Nina Gladitz, a young film-maker whose powerful hour-long documentary " Better Active Today than Radioactive Tomorrow" tells the story of the Wyhl occupation. Here Nina speaks of the role of women in the fight:

"In the last few years I have had a tendency to be a little bit 'chauvinistic' as a woman. Against men. Because it really impressed me very much to see how the peasant women -· just like an eruption, like a volcano -- how they learned and saw their power. It's like you're trying to cover a boiling thing, and you can't do it all the time,  sometimes the cover comes off. There's that same power inside women. A power like men have, but perhaps a little bit more because they have different experiences. They don't have these different experiences because they are better. They are forced to have this other experience. And that is a part of their strength. And so the women were more important, they had more endurance, they were more radical. more militant. And if there is a discussion about a solution, a political solution, the men can more easily compromise. The women cannot. I think that's a result of their education, how they're raised. What a woman should be, or how a female child should be. Because of this, I think, I really believe that they have a better political sense. They understand better what's going on and therefore they are not as naive as the men are. That's true. The men are mainly really naive in a political struggle. And they have to go through all the steps of learning: that you are betrayed, and then you start again, try it again. And the women have a lot of that experience in their daily lives. So it's not as easy to get a compromise out of a woman, if she's become politically aware, as from a man. So I feel like it's a joke in our history, that in a male-dominated society they try to put down the women but by doing that, they teach the women political awareness, which is perhaps much more harmful for them than they thought or wished."

A grassroots movement of spirit and determination similar to that experienced at Wyhl is now fighting the  West German government's plans for massive spent fuel reprocessing and waste storage plant in the rural town of Gorleben in northern Germany on the  East Germany border. The Gorleben project would be the  largest nuclear facility in the world. A combination on of strong citizen opposition, scientific criticism of all aspects of the plan, and a delay in immediate need for the reprocessing part, have led the government to delay construction plans. However, preliminary site clearing is going ahead. The area, said German activists, "looks like a concentration
camp." Surrounded by high walls and layers of barbed wire, workers are beginning test drillings and building a helicopter landing pad -- security is obviously primary these days in nuclear-related construction!

Women in the Gorleben area have been strong in their opposition. They often initiate actions, like blockading trucks carrying construction materials by sitting in roads. Last
September, Gorleben women organized a picnic in area woods where drilling was being planned. As the picnic ended, more than a thousand people stayed in the forest: The next morning, para-military troops from the West German border police entered the woods. They began to cut down the trees that men and women had climbed in protest against plant construction. As people fell from the trees there were injuries and women were verbally and physically assaulted.

Gorleben women came to tell this story to the second large group of women involved in the fight against nuclear power in Germany -- the generally younger urban feminists. More than a thousand members of women's groups in sixteen West German cities had come together in Cologne for a two day (Sept. 15-16, 1979) "Women's Congress Against Nuclear Power and Militarism." The meeting was organized with the help of the major German feminist monthly Courage, which has devoted much space to the nuclear issue. The congress was attended as well by several women from Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the U.S., and England, representing peace,
antinuclear and ecological movements and parties. During panels and workshops, women discussed the implications of women and militarism, women's resistance against nuclear power, technology in the day to day life of women, and the new German Women's Party.

The nuclear issue is thus being addressed in many ways. Perhaps the most controversial is a "birth-strike" that is going on in northern parts of Germany. There women have declared that they will not have children until nuclear power plants and weapons are things of the past, because they feel they can't bring children into a world threatened by such dangerous forms of energy and "defense".

In France, feminist groups have for the most part been concentrating their political action against increased restrictions on abortion rights, But there is growing awareness among feminists of the nuclear issue, and in communities all over the country women are active in ecological issue. French writer Florence Dupont wrote an interesting piece called "Women and Ecology" in the French feminist magazine women in movement. Here is a brief excerpt:

"Women are willing  ecologists. According to estimates the green electorate (those voting for the ecology or 'green' party) ·11 be two-thirds feminine. The heroic names are
constantly emerging of those women who must be called 'resisters' for the environment. Because these women-one in the Alps against a highway, another near Vezelay protecting a basilica, elsewhere others opposed to cutting forest where children play-these women are resisting the invader. Worse, under the accusatory spotlight of the dominant progressive ideology, they want to conserve. They resist nuclear power plants, they resist the growing consumption of energy, the multiplication of domestic gadgets that 'liberate' women. Paradoxically, they oppose the agents of their emancipation: highways, factories that destroy the traditional patriarchal family in the country. Paradox? Historical abberation? Regressive politics? They resist urbanization when peasant women think most about fleeing the ancestral farm to melt, anonymous, into the city and there to live their lives.

"Certainly this resistance has its roots in the women's past and their real traces, those denounced as archaic. It was certainly the traditional role of women to be ecologists. For in our western cultural system women keep their function of assuring the rhythm and harmony of daily life: the preserves and the teas, the garden, the flowers, the chickens. They struggle each day so that the family eats on time, a coherent meal, in the place planned for it, with the appropriate gestures. They protect against dirtiness, disorder and despair born of filthy and torn times ...

"Women ecologists don't want to become emancipated women. Because the entire ecologist movement affirms that t rue liberation does not consist of suppressing all rules, all laws, all cultural framework, but on the contrary, rediscovering these. Not to reconstitute a lost universe, patriarchal and agricultural, but to construct a politically free society, that is to say self-managed, decentralized, at the same time that it is culturally structured, in other words multiplying the forms of life so that none is dominant. Political  equality, cultural plurality, the reverse of the present world".

Florence Dupont
author of "Pleasure & the Law"

The German activist based in Brussels, Petra Karin Kelly, was another number  of the "Green" slate last June. Petra has been active since 1970. Besides her burning interest in people's and women's  action against nuclear power and weapons, she has a concern with treatment of cancer in children. Following  the death of her youngest sister of leukemia, Petra, her mother and grandmother have worked hard on developing a plan for an alternative treatment center for children's cancer.

In an interview this summer Petra said: "In the non-nuclear future we envision, we take the soft energy alternative as a necessity. We know that you can't just reject nuclear power plants with nothing to replace them, even here where nuclear power is less than five per cent of our power supply- If you reject the nuclear society, then you must establish something that is renewable, something that doesn't rape the earth. And we're moving toward it ... the politics we envision cannot be a different kind of politics without a spiritual change. I see a very hig revival of the spirit in what's happening now. To me exploitation can be a communist issue, a humanist issue, a socialist issue, a religious issue, or even an environmental issue. But any way you view it, it must ultimately mean an end to exploitation." Nearly one million people voted for Die Gruenen (''The Greens") in the June Parliamentary vote. Nationwide, they polled 3.2% of the vote. Still a very small minority, but certainly enough to make the larger parties aware of this "new" constituency.

In Amsterdam, in the busy and productive offices of the new World Information Service on Energy (WISE), sits Lin Pugh, who was a leading force in the formation of a strong women's movement against uranium mining in Australia. I asked Lin how she got involved in the nuclear power issue:

"I was a bicycle freak for a small time in Australia, and we had these trips to Canberra, which is the capital, from the various state capitals every year, every May, and that  was called "The Ride Against Uranium Mining'. And we'd go with our bicycles from Melbourne or Sydney or Perth or Adelaide to Canberra, make a tent embassy on the parliament lawns, and demand an end to uranium mining. I went in 1976 and 1977 And then something like, June-July 1977, there was a yellow cake (uranium ore) shipment that arrived at the docks at Melbourne, and we decided to have a spontaneous action. Over night we gathered a crowd of 200 people to block the wharf and to stop the uranium getting out. At that point I realized, we've really got to get much more involved, and really completely stop. It's not enough to wander off to Canberra, it's not enough to occupy myself trying to get signatures, now we're really going to get a campaign organized. At that stage I was teaching and wandering around schools, various other schools and taking classes in my school about uranium mining. Then I decided to leave teaching altogether and take on the uranium mining and fight against uranium mining in Australia as a full-time occupation which I did until December, 1977. At that point I felt, as many Australians do, our complete isolation in the southern hemisphere. We hear vague stories about what goes on in the rest of the world and it's really time there was a much better communication between Australia and the European and the American struggles. So I came to Europe, and many Australians come to Europe exactly on this quest. And in Europe in February 1978, I arrived in Amsterdam, because I was told that there was a meeting of the WISE (World Information Service on Energy), the founding meeting, and would I like to go as an Australian person. And I went to this meeting and thought ·· Hello! this is exactly what Australians are looking for. We're looking for an information somewhere it can be directed out and back again, and can reach a maximum number of people. This is exactly what's necessary. So I stayed here and I started working last May for WISE."

One thing Lin does at WISE is keep an up-to-date archive of materials relating to women and energy that have been printed all over the world. (If you are part of a women's energy group or know of material for Lin, please contact her at: WISE, 2e Weteringplatsoen 9, 1017 ZD Amsterdam, Netherlands.)

These women and their stories offer us just a glimpse of the extent and diversity of women's energy action worldwide. What we are witnessing is a growing awareness that if changes are to be made, those who are most affected by modern society are going to have to take the lead in righting wrongs. Clearly women are realizing not only their role as victims of technological "progress" but more importantly our own power in achieving meaningful change. For ourselves and for future generations.

For more information on women's ·· and all people's ··action against nuclear power and for safe energy, subscribe to WISE. US subscriptions to this bi-monthly journal of international news are$ 7.50/yr. Contact WISE/USA, c/o 520 Butternut St., Washington, D.C., 20012. For more information on what women can do, drop a line to "Women and Life on Earth: A Conference on Eco-Feminism in the 1980s", P.O. Box 580, Amherst, Ma. 01002.

anna gyorgy, box 30 montague, mass 01351.

The four moons,

four seasons,

all reaches of the earth,

all cultures of women ..