September 19, 2024, 4-5:30 PM ET
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The ultimate success of the movement to stop the war in Vietnam was due to the mobilization of multiple segments of society, such as students, academics,businesspeople, lawyers, religious activists, unions, veterans, and humanitarians. Not least of these were traditional women's peace organizations such as the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace that redirected their efforts toward stopping the war, and newer Vietnam War specific groups such as Another Mother for Peace and Gold Star Mothers for Peace. This webinar features the experiences of women peace activists who helped to transform the movement into a broad coalition that reached into a majority of American households and influenced the movement for women's liberation.
Moderator:
Linda J. Yarr is a Research Affiliate of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the journal Critical Asian Studies, successor to the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars published by The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Previously she was a research professor of international affairs at George Washington University and served as director of Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia. She has authored articles, book chapters and reviews on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. As a student in France during the war in Vietnam, she was a member of the Paris American Committee to Stop the War. She holds a master’s degree from Cornell University, an advanced degree in international relations from Sciences Po in Paris, and a B.A. from D’Youville College (now University).
Speakers:
Her organizing began in the early-1960’s at NYU in the student wing of the movement against the US war in Vietnam. She served on the Coordinating Committee of the National Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam and was part of the NYC Fifth Ave. Peace Parade Committee. Her antiwar work continued in St. Louis and Cambridge.
Leslie was the National Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 1,400 groups central to the movement against the war in Iraq. Her coalition-building and organizing skills have mobilized millions of people in many of the nation’s largest demonstrations, including the 1982-million-person Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in NYC; the1987 lesbian/gay rights march on Washington; massive mobilizations against the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007; the 2014 People’s Climate March in NYC; and the 2019 Queer Liberation March in NYC on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.
Her writings appear in ten anthologies and in scores of print and online outlets; she has done more workshops, conference presentations, and speeches at rallies than she can count.
Le Anh Tu Packard's first significant antiwar talk was to a group of skeptical U.S. naval officers in 1969 at an Episcopal church in Wickford, Rhode Island. They were surprised to learn that their “enemy” Ho Chi Minh was allied with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) toward the end of World War II. While a student, Tu participated in demonstrations organized by Asians Against the Vietnam War and encouraged the student body at her college to support the People’s Peace Treaty. In 1971 she joined the National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), a project of the American Friends Service Committee. She spoke at peace actions that included the Womens March Against the Presidio and the Winter Solder Investigation at Faneuil Hall. In 1972 Tu and Marilyn McNabb co-authored “Aid to Thieu”, a NARMIC report on the use of U.S. military and economic aid to prop up the Thieu government. Tu also worked closely with Peggy Duff, Gabriel Kolko and Richard Falk in a successful campaign to oppose secretive efforts by the U.S. government to use World Bank funds to aid the Thieu administration.
Vivian Rothstein was introduced to activism through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She was a Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteer in 1965 and later a community organizer in Chicago working to build “an interracial movement of the poor”.
In 1967 Vivian
participated in a conference in Bratislava,
Czechoslovakia co-sponsored by Liberation Magazine which brought 45
diverse American peace activists together with representatives of North Vietnam
and the insurgents in South Vietnam, represented by the Provisional
Revolutionary Government (PRG), to build understanding of the American war in
Vietnam. Following the conference, she and 6 other participants
travelled to North Vietnam to witness the impact of U.S. bombing on the country
and people of North Vietnam. The delegation, headed by Tom Hayden, spent 17
days visiting bombed sites including schools, villages and hospitals, reviewing
the American weaponry used against the Vietnamese people, and learning how
the North Vietnamese mobilized to survive the onslaught. They also met
with American POWs being held in Hanoi and brought back letters from them for
their families.
Upon returning to the
U.S. Vivian spoke widely to audiences in the Midwest to share what she had
learned in North Vietnam about our country's intentions. She helped
organize the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in January 1968, the first national
women's march in Washington D.C. against the Vietnam War, as well as subsequent
meetings between American and Vietnamese women in Toronto, Canada.
In 1994 Vivian returned
to Vietnam on a women’s delegation, coordinated with the Vietnamese Women’s
Union, to highlight the need for normalized relations between the U.S. and
Vietnam. Vivian donated her anti-Vietnam War posters to the Women’s Museum
in Hanoi.
Cora Weiss has spent her life in the movements
for human rights, civil rights, women’s equality and peace. She was the UN
Representative of the International Peace Bureau (Nobel Peace laureate 1910),
which she led as President, 2000-2006; is among the founders of the Global
Campaign for Peace Education and was a civil society drafter of what became UN
Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security unanimously
adopted in 2000. Her dedication to peace and peace education has garnered
several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Adelphi University awarded her
the Honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
During the
war in Vietnam, she represented Women Strike for Peace (WSP) as the only woman
of 4 co-chairs of the National Mobilization which organized the Nov. 15, 1969
demonstration in DC against the war in Vietnam. With Rev. Richard Fernandez she
tried to bridge the Mobilization with
the Moratorium. She was co-Director with David Dellinger of the Committee of
Liaison which arranged for the monthly exchange of mail with prisoners of war
and their families, increased the number of packages POWs could receive,
returned with the first list in Dec. 69 of those alive, and brought home 3
pilots in 1972. The Committee arranged for 3 Americans to travel to NVN every
month carrying mail and who returned with eyewitness accounts of the war. She
was a leader of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, linking WSP with the religious
and African American communities which called for Ending the War in Vietnam and
Poverty and Racism at Home. She was a
director of Friendshipment, which helped to rebuild Bach Mai Hospital; served
as Consultant to Church World Service organizing a shipment of 10,000 tons of
wheat and was a member of the delegation which delivered it to reunified VN
(1978).
Resources
The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973, Clara Bingham, One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2024 includes interview with Marilyn Webb
Revolutionary Feminism: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke U Press, 2023) by Barbara Winslow
I have an entire chapter about feminist anti Vietnam and anti imperialist organizing. I think it is one of the only academic/popular discussion of this topic. Using mainly primary sources, I write about the involvement of women in the anti-draft and anti-war movement; how we brought a gendered analysis of war and imperialism into the anti war movement, how we fought and won to get more women's speakers at anti-war rallies. We brought a gendered analysis into the anti‚ draft movement; we worked in the GI coffee The Shelter Half in Tacoma and worked with Jane Fonda when she brought her FTA show to Tacoma, close to an airforce and army base. - Sea Tac airport was then the second largest disembarkation‚ point to Vietnam; women regularly leafleted at the airport.We were involved in meetings with Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian women in Canada many times.
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